‘A Microcosm of Society’? Workshops of the American Print Renaissance

This paper investigates intersections of space, gender and collaboration in workshops of American Print Renaissance from late 1950s to 1980s. The transformation of printmaking during this period was inextricably linked to the emergence of new specialist workshops including Tatyana Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions and Ken Tyler’s Tyler Graphics. These workshops championed collaboration between artist and artisan, technical innovation, and experimental modes of making. Taking up Ken Tyler’s utopian description of the workshop as “microcosm of society,” my paper considers how these spaces simultaneously reproduced and subverted gendered and class-based divisions of labor.

I frame the workshop as a site of both collaboration and contradiction, using Helen Frankenthaler’s practice as a case study. While Frankenthaler described painting as a “solo endeavour” and printmaking as reliant on “the tools and the craftsman of a workshop,” her practice reveals a fluid negotiation between individual and collective modes of production. I argue that the space of the workshop and medium of printmaking provided women artists alternate possibilities away from the hierarchic rhetoric of painting and the studio. Concomitantly, I consider how hierarchies of making were maintained within the workshop – such as in the division of physical and intellectual labour [Fig. 2]. Meanwhile, archival photographs of Frankenthaler in workshops contest the staged femininity associated with her studio portraits and paintings [Fig. 3]. Drawing extensively on archival material, I argue that Frankenthaler’s work with printmaking workshops, renders indeterminate divisions of art and craft, the individual and collaborative, haptic and mechanical.