Ten Lithographs by Ten Artists

Skowhegan, Maine: Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1971

Edition of 120

Printed by Shorewood-Bank Street Atelier

Gift of Samuel Dorsky

This most unusual "school," which was started by New York artists in 1946, is a nine-week summer residency program in rural Maine for emerging artists. Each participant has a personal studio but mingles for meals and programs with the other residents and the annually appointed faculty members and guest artists. Still governed by artists, the program has included a phenomenal cross-section of 20th and 21st century American artists who form a dense, multi-generational network that supports Skowhegan's mission to provide scholarships as needed to all those accepted into the program. In 1970, Skowhegan started publishing prints individually and in portfolios to help support the scholarship fund. "Ten Lithographs by Ten Artists" appears to have been the first portfolio in the series that continues today. As always, the artists were either alumni or faculty of the program and contributed their work. The prints included in "Ten Lithographs by Ten Artists" signal the first stage of a major change in American visual art. The decade of the 1970s, with its social, political and generational upheavals, opened the door to a buffet of styles and sensibilities. The diverse work in this portfolio includes images that would not have fit comfortably into the late modernist concepts of "Ten Works x Ten Artists." With the exception of James Brooks, the artists of these lithographs are engaged with subject matter in addition to abstract concerns with color, form and shape. Here we see landscape, figure studies, political satire, psychosexual parody, noisy urban comedy, and domestic genre scenes. Most of these artists had achieved successful careers outside the modernist mainstream, but during the 1970s the mainstream became much wider and more inclusive. The term that encompassed these and the vibrant inventions to come during the 1970s and 1980s was "postmodern pluralism."