Delta National Exhibit juror
to present lecture on screenprints

Shelley R. Langdale, curator of prints and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a public lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 30, at Arkansas State University's Fine Arts Center Recital Hall.  Langdale will serve as the juror for the 2004 Delta National Small Prints Exhibition which will open Thursday, Oct. 21, at the Bradbury Gallery in the Fowler Center. 

In her lecture titled “Popular, Pop & Post-Pop: Screenprints 1930s -- Now,” Langdale will give an overview of the development of the screenprint as an artistic medium.

Ed Ruscha, American, born 1937 Standard Station, 1966 Color screenprint

Langdale states, ”Silkscreen printing was a popular medium in American and British "Pop Art" of the 1960s.  Less well known is the history of the artistic screen print from its birth in the federally funded print and poster workshops of the Works Progress Administration of 1930s through the Abstract Expressionist-dominated 1950s.

"The invention of the screenprinting method grew out of European pochoir (watercolor stencil-print) techniques popular in the 1920s.  However, 20th-century American artists were primarily responsible for the development of screenprint as a prominent artistic medium.

"This lecture will provide an overview of that development from its "popular" commercial origins in the mass-production techniques of the early decades of the 1900s, through its depression-era struggle for artistic legitimacy and continued associations with commerce, to the coming of age of artistic screenprint production in the Pop Art '60s and absorption into the multi-media orientation of printmaking today.”

Langdale has been a curator of works on paper for 14 years.  She received her MA in Art History from Williams College and has worked at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

She has organized a wide range of exhibitions, including shows of Renaissance prints and drawings, American Folk Art on paper, modern Japanese prints, and contemporary prints and drawings by African American artists John Wilson and Joseph Norman (for which she co-authored the catalogue).

In 2002 she published a catalogue on Antonio Pollaiuolo’s 15th-century master engraving, Battle of the Nudes for an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and she organized an exhibition of screenprints, Popular, Pop & Post-Pop: Color Screenprints from the 1930s to Now, which was on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall of 2003 and is the subject of her public lecture at Arkansas State University.

While in Boston, she taught a college seminar on American Folk Art at the MFA and a history of printmaking course at the Massachusetts College of Art, and spent several years as co-organizer of the MFA’s World AIDS Day art installations and observances, working with contemporary artists.

She has lectured on topics ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings to the history of printmaking in Boston, to the watercolors of modernist American artist Arthur Dove. 

Langdale continues to pursue her interest in contemporary works on paper as an active participant in the Philadelphia Print Collaborative organization in Philadelphia.  She is also on the board of the Print Council of America and has served as a juror for numerous exhibitions around the country.

The lecture is free and open to the public.  For more information please contact the Bradbury Gallery at 870-910-8115.

--Information Contact: Les Christensen, 910-8115, lchristensen@astate.edu

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