Opening June 25, The Collaborative Print: Works from SOLO Impression promises to engage viewers of every stripe. More than 40 lithographs and embroidered works represent the close relationship between printer and artist and span a range of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Maya Lin, Jean Shin, and Nancy Spero.
Founder and Master Printer Judith Solodkin established the New York print shop, SOLO Impression Inc., in 1975. Without intending to, she has become a great supporter of women in the arts. Instead of standard “the old boys network,” she has the “old girls network.” Joyce Kozloff, for example, was her roommate in graduate school at Columbia University and Solodkin has been working with Bougeois and Francoise Gilot among others for more than two decades. “Since I started working with a lot of women they are still my friends and I still continue printing with them,” she said. Her goal, though, has always been to work as a printmaker. “I never thought that I couldn’t do certain things for any reason pertaining to my gender,” she recalled. “If I couldn’t do it, then it’s because I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but I knew that I could do just about everything.”
That same attitude has carried over to her collaborations with women artists. She strictly avoids gender essentialism, locating her female clients in the same theoretical and aesthetic realm as their male counterparts. “The difference is the work,” she explained in response to a question regarding the difference between working with men and women artists. “Everyone is different. I don’t think it’s their gender that makes them different. It’s their art that makes them different.”
Solodkin also shares ties with another artist whose work will on view at NMWA starting this Friday: June Wayne. As founder of the Tamarind Lithography workshop in Los Angeles (later the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque where Solodkin studied), Wayne blazed a trail for women printmakers. Though the two never worked together at Tamarind, they later collaborated in the 1990s on a series of Wayne’s science-inspired prints Near Miss, Nacelle, and Knockout.
Be sure to visit NMWA to see The Collaborative Print and continue to check in with “Broad Strokes” later this summer for SOLO artist profiles!
