Carl Pope’s strongest artistic influence continues to be his high school photography teacher, Donna Hostettler, who endorsed the notion that art is an effective tool for positive change. His multi media investigations of the socio-economic landscape of Indianapolis were shown at prestigious venues including the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, receiving generous support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lilly Endowment and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pope’s work gained international exposure in “Black Male” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1996, Pope enrolled in the MFA program at Indiana University and expanded his conceptual concerns to include an investigation of the Self. The initial excursions into his internal landscape produced the video/text installation “Palimpsest” commissioned by the Wadsworth Anthnaeum with funds from the Warhol and Lannan Foundations. “Palimpsest” was also included in the Whitney Biennial 2000. Pope’s latest installation of letterpress posters, “The Bad Air Smelled of Roses” continues his ongoing exploration into inner space. “I am navigating my interiority to find ways to create epiphany within myself and the imagination of my audience.” Pope was an Assistant Professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently he is working on an extensive project which will be exhibited as part of the Philagrafika 2010 exhibition at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University.

Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is curator for the exhibition Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns, selections a collection of more than 1700 proofs the National Gallery is acquiring from the artist, on view at the Gallery from 11 October 2009 through 4 April 2010. Fine is the lead author of Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper, a multi-volume catalogue raisonné projected for publication by the National Gallery in 2011; and the coordinator for The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the institute of Museum and Library Services.

As the curator of modern prints and drawings at the National Gallery from 1988 through 2002, Fine organized exhibitions of work by American artists including Romare Bearden, Helen Frankenthaler, Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe; contemporary print-publishing workshops Crown Point Press, Gemini G.E.L., and Graphicstudio, U.S.F. Fine was coordinator of the 1994 catalogue raisonné of Roy Lichtenstein’s prints (revised 2002) and co-coordinator of the 1999 Georgia O'Keeffe catalogue raisonné, a project undertaken by the Gallery in concert with the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. She has written about the art of Mel Bochner, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and James McNeill Whistler, and about Tyler Graphics, Ltd. and The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, among others. From 1972 to 1980, Fine served as curator of Lessing J. Rosenwald's collection of prints and drawings, a major gift to the National Gallery that was housed at Rosenwald’s home in Jenkintown, PA, until his death in 1979.

Fine has illustrated several limited-edition books, and has taught studio art at the Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts), Beaver College (Arcadia University), and the University of Vermont. She was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (M.F.A., 1964) and the Philadelphia College of Art (B.A., 1962), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1961).

Co-author of Water-based Inks: A Manual for the Studio and Classroom
Solo shows exhibitions include The Print Club, Philadelphia PA, North Dakota's Museum of Art, Grand Forks ND. Group exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum 18th National Print Exhibition, International Graphic Arts Exhibition, India, National Academy of Design in New York, Contemporary Issues by Women on Paper, Los Angeles, Offset Lithography as Fine Art, World Print Council Gallery, San Fransisco. Public Collections include Fogg Museum, Boston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wilfredo Lam Museum, Havana Cuba, The National Museum of American Art, and the Library of Congress.

Professor at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia College of Art and Design from 1967-2008
Visiting artist and Lecturer throughout the United States and Canada including Haystack, Penland, Carnegie Mellon University, University of North Dakota, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Rockie Toner was born on November 7, 1940 in Des Moines, Iowa. She received a BA degree in Art and Art Education from the University of Northern Iowa in 1962, a MA degree in Art and Art Education from the University of Illinois in 1967, and a MFA degree in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Illinois in 1970. She taught in the Dubuque Iowa public schools, Clark College, the University of Illinois and finally at Tyler School of Art/Temple University from 1972 to 2002. The last 13 years at Tyler she also served as Dean of the School.

Toner’s work has been widely exhibited in group and solo shows and is held in approximately thirty public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the recipient of numerous awards, honors and residencies, most recently in September and October 2009 at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland.

Over the past forty years Toner’s work has been loosely focused around the theme of Nature, Pleasure and Innuendo. She was a featured artist in the book Printmaking: A Primary Form of Expression, Eldon L. (E.C.) Cunningham, University Press of Colorado, 1992. Her work can be seen at the web site www.rochelletoner.com.

Judy Pfaff was born in London, England in 1946. She received a BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis (1971) and an MFA from Yale University (1973). Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Pfaff’s site-specific installations pierce through walls and careen through the air, achieving lightness and explosive energy. Pfaff’s work is a complex ordering of visual information composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions. In 2009 Pfaff was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received many awards, including the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Fellowship (2006); a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004); Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2003); a Bessie (1984); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). She has had major exhibitions at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2002); Denver Art Museum (1994); St. Louis Art Museum (1989); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1982). Pfaff represented the United States in the 1998 São Paolo Bienal. Pfaff lives and works in Kingston and Tivoli, New York.

Camilla Taylor grew up in a conservative religious community cradled between two mountain ranges--fourth in a series of six children born to her parents. In high school, she was introduced to printmaking and pulled prints off of a much abused letterpress.

A BFA with an emphasis in printmaking was procured from the University of Utah after a lengthy procedure of starts and stops financed by a disparate series of jobs. Having a BFA but without a press, Taylor began working with sculpture and textiles. Eventually an uneasy marriage was made between her artistic interest in sculpture and printmaking after she received a baby blue press with a 12” bed width.

Camilla is currently an MFA graduate student attending California State University in Long Beach, rapidly filling up all available storage space with prints which are steadily increasing in size and unwieldiness.

Benjamin Love lives and works in Boise Idaho. He divides his time between writing loveletters, walking in the foothills, and making work. He enjoys taking his friends to the hot springs and his work has been shown and collected regionally, nationally, and internationally. He settled in Boise four years ago and began studying at Boise State University. He will begin his senior year of study next fall, and will graduate in the spring of 2011 with a BFA emphasizing in printmaking and sculpture.Love plans to attend graduate school upon completion of his degree to pursue an MFA.

John Ittmann · Honorary Member of the SGC Council
Date: Saturday March 27, 2010
Time: 9:45-11:30 am
Location: Loews Hotel, Regency Ballroom. (1200 Market Street)

John Ittmann, is Curator of Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a position he has held since 1992. He began his career as an art historian specializing in the history of prints as undergraduate at the University of Kansas in the late-1960s. During this same period he spent four summers working in New York in the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he mounted three exhibitions of prints from their collections. From 1972-1988, he served as Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Among his many exhibitions and publications are: 100 Years of Print Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1970); James J. Tissot: The Complete Prints (co-organizer 1978); From Regency to Empire: French Printmaking 1714-1815 (co-organizer 1984); Post-Impressionist Prints: Paris in the 1890s (1992); Dox Thrash: An African-American Master Printmaker Rediscovered (2001). His most recent exhibition, Mexico & Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts 1920–1950 (co-organizer 2006) was presented at four museums in the United States, as well at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. For his work on the catalogue for the Mexican print exhibition he received the International Fine Print Dealers Association’s Book Award for 2007. He is currently preparing an exhibition and scholarly catalogue devoted to early 19th-century German Romantic prints.

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