This installation celebrates prints by Black artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including many recent acquisitions shown for the first time at the Portland Art Museum. The work offers stories of the Black experience in the United States, allowing visitors to trace serious issues as brutal labor practices, as in Kara Walker’s Cotton, and lynching, in Hale Woodruff’s harrowing By Parties Unknown, as well as leisure and joy, evident in the bathers of Emma Amos and Derrick Adams.
Artistic production is another throughline. Viewers can trace the broad influence of Robert Blackburn, the founder of the influential Blackburn Print Workshop, who taught Romare Bearden, among others. Ron Adams honors Blackburn with a portrait. Although working across printmaking media, including etching, lithography, and screenprint, the artists share a commitment to graphic expression and bearing witness to the breadth of Black representation in America.