Kathan Brown is an artist, writer, printer, and entrepreneur who founded Crown Point Press, publishers of artists' etchings, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1962. On the Press's twenty-fifth anniversary, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition of its work, and its thirty-fifth anniversary was celebrated by an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington D. C. Archives of its work are owned by The National Gallery and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Brown's initial publishing program focused on local artists—etchings by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud were the first two projects she published. Artists began coming to Crown Point from New York in the early 1970s, and by the end of the decade Brown was inviting artists from around the world. The Crown Point artist-list includes Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, John Cage, Shahzia Sikander, Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Peter Doig, Pat Steir, Laura Owens, Fred Wilson, and many others. In the 1980s Brown added Asian woodcut techniques to Crown Point's etching program, and took American artists to Japan and China to work with printers in those countries. The Press has two active websites (www.crownpoint.com and www.magical-secrets.com) and in San Francisco, with a staff of ten, operates a public gallery and two large private etching studios. Each year, five or six invited artists work at the Press for two weeks at a time with the technical assistance of Brown's printers. Kathan Brown is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life (Crown Point/Prestel 2006). It deals with ideas about creativity that she has learned from working closely over four decades with some of the most influential visual artists of our time.

Enrique Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. His father, a bank employee by day and artist by night, encouraged his interest in art by teaching Chagoya to sketch at a very early age. As a young adult, Chagoya enrolled in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he studied political economy and contributed political cartoons to union newsletters. He relocated to Veracruz and directed a team focused on rural-development projects, a time he describes in Steven Nash's “Borders of the Spirit,” Triptych (October/November/December 1994), as “an incredible growing experience…[that] made me form strong views on what was happening outside in the world.” This growing political awareness would later surface in Chagoya's art. At age 24, he immigrated to the United States and settled in McAllen, Texas. After eight months working as a union organizer for farm workers, Chagoya moved to Berkeley, California and began working as a free-lance illustrator and graphic designer. Disheartened by what he considered to be the narrow political scope of economics programs in local colleges, Chagoya turned his interests to art. He enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a BFA in printmaking in 1984. He then pursued his MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1987.

He is currently Full Professor at Stanford University's Department of Art and Art History and his work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others. He has been recipient of numerous awards such as two NEA artists fellowships, residencies at Giverny and Cite Internationale des Arts in France, and a Tiffany Fellowship to mention a few.

He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, George Adams Gallery in New York, and Lisa Sette in Scottsdale, AZ. His prints are published by Shark's Ink in Lyons, CO, Segura Publishing in Pueblo, AZ, Trillium Press in Brisbane, CA, Made in California in Oakland, CA, and Smith Andersen editions in Palo Alto, CA.

photographer: Linda Cicero

Anne Coffin
Location: Hilton Hotel, Continental Ballroom, 720 S. Michigan Ave
Date: Friday, March 27
Time: 8:45 - 10 am

Anne Coffin is the Founder and Director of International Print Center New York. Since its opening in 2000, she has spearheaded the development of IPCNY's exhibitions, programs and informational services, and overseen the organization of over 50 print exhibitions presented in IPCNY's Chelsea gallery, and two major historic loan shows, Hard Pressed: Six Hundred Years of Prints and Process, in 2000, and Imagined Worlds: Willful Invention and the Printed Image 1470-2005, in 2005.  A former journalist, she is active in many non-profit cultural organizations in New York.

International Print Center New York is a non-profit institution founded to promote the greater appreciation of the fine art print by fostering a climate for the enjoyment, examination and serious study of artists' prints—from the old master to the contemporary.  The New Prints Program is the cornerstone of IPCNY's innovative exhibition programming, and brings current prints of the highest quality to public attention in a series of four juried exhibitions in its Chelsea space each year.  Submissions to the New Prints Program are encouraged from presses, publishers, and individual printers worldwide.  To date, over 900 artists and 200 presses have been represented through the New Prints Program. A touring program for regional museums was initiated in 2006, and New Prints 2009/Winter - the 30th presentation of New Prints - is being exhibited as part of Global Impressions.  Interspersed with these juried shows of contemporary work, IPCNY presents two curated or themed exhibitions each season. Past curated exhibitions include: Propagating Eden: Uses and Techniques of Nature Printing in Botany and Art, The Future Must Be Sweet: Lower East Side Printshop Celebrates 40 Years, and upcoming, Seeing God in Prints: Indian Lithographs from the Collection of Mark Baron and Elise Boisanté.

Lifetime Achievements in Printmaking Award Recipient
Leonard Lehrer

Leonard Lehrer is a painter and printmaker whose work has been shown internationally for three decades.  He has had more than forty solo exhibitions in the United States, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain.  His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Sprengel Museum of Art, Hannover, Germany; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris and some ninety other public collections in the US and abroad. His work has been critically noted in a variety of journals, catalogs, and anthologies, and he has authored catalog introductions and several articles in The Tamarind Papers, The Art Journal, College Board Review, and Art Multiple Dusseldorf.

Professor Emeritus of Art at New York University, Lehrer has held faculty and administrative positions at the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Arizona State University, New York University, and served for six years as Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago where he is presently Associate Provost for External Affairs. He received his BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. A member of the original College Art Association Committee charged with developing national guidelines for the MFA and the BFA, Lehrer also served as President of the MidAmerica College Art Association.  A Founding Trustee of the International Print Center New York (IPCNY) and Trustee of Apexart, NYC, and for more than ten years has served as Chair of the Arts Advisory Committee to The College Board, NYC. Lehrer was recently invited to chair the newly created College Board’s National Task Force on the Arts charged to examine the state of the arts in education in the U.S. 

Further, he was invited to present the keynote address at the 2007 Fulbright Alumni Association Conference in Marrakech, Morocco and presently serves as Co-Chair of Fulbright’s Arts Task Force which planned the cultural component of the first Fulbright Alumni Conference to be held in Beijing, China in October, 2008.  In addition, he has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Grand Prize of the Heitland Foundation, Celle, Germany and a USIA Specialist Grant to the arts graduate programs of la Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.  Lehrer was awarded an Artist-in-Residence Fulbright Scholar Program Grant to Greece and a Fulbright Senior Scholar AIA Grant also to Greece, both in printmaking (2001 and 2003–2005).

Excellence in Teaching Printmaking Award Recipient
Virginia Myers

Virginia Myers is an American artist, professor, and inventor. She was born in 1927 in Greencastle, Indiana, and grew up with her parents and younger sister mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father taught at various colleges and schools. She studied at George Washington University and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and received her B.A. in drawing and painting in 1949. Then, in 1951 she went on to earn an M.F.A. in Painting from The California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Myers completed post-graduate work at the University of Illinois (Urbana) and in 1955 came to the University of Iowa to study printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky. From 1961-1962, Myers studied in Paris at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter under a Fulbright Scholarship.

In 1962 Myers became a University of Iowa faculty member, where she teaches printmaking in the School of Art and Art History. Myers teaches intaglio printmaking and foil imaging, an offering unique among fine arts schools around the world that was made possible by her invention of the Iowa Foil Printer, which makes use of the commercial foil stamping process. In 1983 Myers began researching the use of gold leaf and foil in the printmaking process. She discovered that foil was not being used by artisans in the fine arts because the foiling process was strictly commercial. Her dissatisfaction with foiling options available to printmakers led her to invent the Iowa Foil Press, a device that allows individual artists to incorporate foil stamping into their work. After the invention of the press, she worked in conjunction with community members and students to improve and document the printmaking process of foil stamping using the Iowa Foil Press, collectively produced a book, "Foil Imaging...A New Art Form," in 2001.

As of 2007, Professor Virginia A. Myers continues to teach printmaking at the University of Iowa printmaking studios, where she and her students are developing and perfecting hot-stamped foil techniques to create both editionable and un-editionable original prints. Myers has presented in more than 100 one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and has participated in more than 150 juried exhibitions and traveling shows nationally and internationally. Virginia Myers work is included in collections at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; and the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, among others.

Printmaker Emeritus Award Recipient
Raymond Martin

Raymond Martin was born on May 29, 1930 in Chicago. He received a B.S. in Visual Design from the Institute of Design, Chicago, in 1954 and is currently professor of printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Paris, and several Society for Typographic Arts awards for design and illustration. Ray Martin's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the US and overseas including in France, Korea, and Mexico. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Musée d'art moderne de Saint Etienne, France; and the Art Institute of Chicago along with many others.

Ray Martin's recent work has focused on the artist's book. His books are small, intimate, and introspective, combining a passion for drawing and the written word. With special attention to the craft of book making, Ray Martin carries out the whole process from idea to printing to endpapers to assembling and binding.

Honorary Member of the Council Award Recipient
Bernie Solomon

At this year’s conference, the Southern Graphics Council pays special tribute to one of our own who was taken from us too soon.  Bernie Solomon, a founding member of the Council, died in his home on July 10, 2008.  He is survived by his wife, Paula Rosenberg Solomon, and their two children, Tanya and Peter.  A Chicago native, Bernie studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology before taking a faculty position at Georgia Southern College (now Georgia Southern University), where he spent his entire academic career.  Bernie’s passing leaves an irreplaceable void in the world of prints and artist’s books.  The example of his life and work, as well as his simple philosophy of giving more of himself than he took, will serve as his extraordinary legacy.

Honorary Member of the Council Award Recipient
Tom Dewey

Dr. Thomas Dewey joined the Southeastern Graphics Council in late 1976. He was granted permission to develop an SGC Archives as a repository for SGC members' prints. He served as SGC president 1978 - 1980 and with professor John Winters, hosted the sixth SGC Conference in 1979 at Ole Miss inaugurating the Open Portfolio to the SGC Conference program. He has authored and co-authored catalog essays for several traveling print exhibitions including The First National Invitation Color Blend Print Exhibition, Comparisons and Contrasts: Exchange Exhibitions of Contemporary Prints, Prints Today: Holland and USA, and Printmakers and the South: 1860 to the Present. Recently he has continued to expand the roll of the SGC Archives initiating the Annual SGC Archives Summer Intern program and co-creating the  sgcarchives.org website.

Honorary Member of the Council Award Recipient
Roger Steele

Roger L. Steele, after receiving his MFA from Texas Christian University in 1974, moved to Beaufort, South Carolina, to take a position with the University of SC at Beaufort as the printmaking professor. It was during that time that he became acquainted with Boyd Saunders at USC in Columbia and Bernie Solomon at Georgia Southern in Statesboro. While contemporary printmakers were a rare commodity in the South, they were not unheard of and tended to actively seek each other out. It was fortunate to find these two men and become an active member of their fledgling band of fellow artists, joining the organization in 1975. One of his first duties was to create a logo for the Southeastern Graphics Council. Since that time, Roger has served the group in numerous capacities including being the first treasurer. He assisted Bernie in organizing the first international SGC exhibition, with Russia: Comparisons and Contrasts—Exchange Exhibition of Comtemporary Prints, 1980-1984. He has been a panelist and given print demonstrations at several of the conferences. Bernie and Roger were the SGC representatives at WashArt in DC  twice and at the Boston Printmaking Exposition. He has served on the Executive Board, has represented South Carolina on the board as Member at Large four times, and was Vice President of Internal Affairs—responsible for the curation, scheduling, and overseeing  of the SGC Traveling Show.

Graduate Student Fellowship Recipient
Tate Foley

I was born two weeks late. I grew up on my maternal grandfather's farmland outside of a small town in Northcentral Pennsylvania. I spent my entire life there, disconnected from urban-living, surrounded by family. 

Daily life involved antagonizing cows with my older brother, building snow forts, and swimming in my grandfather's figure-eight pool. My earliest connections to art were drawing pads and colored pencils my parents bought for me. My father is a carpenter, which gave me an early sense of clean design and rugged construction. Four of the five wooden pieces of furniture in our living room were built by my father's hands. My mother is a quilt maker, which started me off loving design and pattern. I've slept under her quilts my entire life. 

My schooling seemed to go swiftly, as I fell under the radar for a majority of my high school career at parochial school. I was always interested in art, but I was only interested in making art my career when I reached Lycoming College, where I earned a Bachelors of Art in Studio Art (focused in printmaking and ceramics) with a certification in education. Printmaking struck my fancy because of its identity as an extremely hands-on form of graphic design. I found an outlet through printmaking that was a perfect mesh of graphic design, and physical labor. I am excited by the ability to work quickly after ground rules have been laid. It is also at Lycoming College where I heard the most beautiful sound of my life: the quiet click of a shutter. I started collecting cameras and taking pictures whenever and wherever it was inappropriate to do so. 

At risk of being bored, I migrated directly from my undergraduate studies, to a wedding, to grad school at the University of Georgia where I am currently an MFA candidate in my second year. I have quickly realized that the choice of the University of Georgia for my education was a great one, as I feel I am now creating the strongest work of my life.

Undergraduate Student Fellowship Recipient
Carlos Cazares