FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 2, 2021
CONTACT: Mikaela Hawk, mhawk@printcenter.org
Spring Exhibition & Program Preview
PHILADELPHIA, PA (February 2, 2021) The Print Center announces a full spring season – and offers this preview of our upcoming exhibitions and public programs. With our galleries closed since March 2020, programming has been moved online and into our street-facing window. After successful presentation of our first virtual exhibition, (Un)Making Monuments in fall 2020, we are pleased to offer three online solo exhibitions awarded from the 95th ANNUAL International Competition – Kevin Claiborne: Before I Died I Was Invisible, Dawn Kim: Half Rest and David Rothenberg: Landing Lights Park beginning February 1, 2021. Following these shows, we will present Fit to Print, a thematic group exhibition exploring the use of newsprint in contemporary art, opening online May 1, 2021.

The Print Center will continue its successful site-specific installations Windows on Latimer. Launched in August 2020, this series features a new artwork each month, specifically commissioned for our iconic bay window on the 1600 block of Latimer Street in Center City Philadelphia.
95th ANNUAL International Competition Solo Exhibitions
Kevin Claiborne: Before I Died I Was Invisible
Dawn Kim: Half Rest
David Rothenberg: Landing Lights Park

February 1 – April 30, 2021
(left to right) Kevin Claiborne, QUANTIFIABLE, 2020, from the series “BLACKNESS IS,” screenprinting ink on pigment print mounted on Dibond, 36 ¼" x 30 ¼"; Dawn Kim, Pretty Good Shepherd, 2019, inkjet print, 8” x 6”; David Rothenberg, 82nd Street (Alleyway), 2018, from the series “Landing Lights Park,” inkjet print, 30” x 20”. All works courtesy of the Artists.
Kevin Claiborne’s work addresses the Black experience in America today. Before I Died I Was Invisible includes pieces from two ongoing series: “BLACKNESS IS,” begun in 2019, landscape photographs with screenprinted text, and “Great Unconformity,” begun in 2020, an exploration of words and photographic image through digital collage. Both bluntly question the role of Black people, specifically Black men, in contemporary American society. Claiborne plays with legibility, juxtaposing text and image. Deliberately fragmented, the works contemplate a multiplicity of meanings.

Kevin Claiborne (born Camp Springs, MD; lives New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice crisscrosses photography and printmaking. Read Claiborne's full biography here.
Dawn Kim: Half Rest is an exhibition of black-and-white photographs taken across the United States and abroad over the course of 2019. On the heels of her previous work, which included the appropriation of images and the making of artist photobooks, Kim turned to creating constructed scenes loosely about a faith, whether religious or secular: the ruins of an old monastery, young Halloween revelers, nomadic shepherds in the remote mountainsides of the country Georgia. A kaleidoscope of oblique views of everyday realities, Kim’s presentation draws no conclusion, inviting the viewer to piece together meaning. 

Dawn Kim (born Seoul, South Korea; lives Austin, TX) examines invisible systems of power through text and image. Read Kim's full biography here.
David Rothenberg: Landing Lights Park includes works from the eponymous ongoing series of color photographs highlighting the intricate relationship between New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and its surrounding residential neighborhood in the borough of Queens. The neighborhoods of Astoria and East Elmhurst, which are directly under the airport’s flight path, are home to many vibrant immigrant communities. These neighborhoods have been some of the hardest hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, when, at the same time, they also have experienced a significant slowing of airplane travel. The series “Landing Lights Park” pits the humble neighborhood against the behemoth airline industry. From the sidewalk, Rothenberg uses a telephoto lens and fast shutter speed to capture the airplanes’ ascents and descents at various angles, slyly distorting proportion and scale in a series that evokes as much fascination and amazement as genuine concern.

David Rothenberg (born Mission Viejo, CA; lives Queens, NY) is a photographer and educator. Read Rothenberg's full biography here.
Solo exhibition winners Kevin Claiborne, Dawn Kim and David Rothenberg were among the 10 Finalists selected from the 635 international artists who submitted to the 95th ANNUAL International Competition juried by David Campany, International Center of Photography and Larissa Goldston, Universal Limited Art Editions. Online portfolios of all the Finalists’ and Semifinalists’ works will be available on the 95th ANNUAL website launching in February 2021. 

The Print Center’s ANNUAL is one of the oldest and most prestigious competitions in the United States. It highlights local, national and international artists who utilize photography and printmaking in intriguing ways, both in content and in process.
The 95th ANNUAL solo exhibitions highlight new and recent work from artists active in the fields of contemporary photography and printmaking. The nature of this competition – an open call – always produces incredible results. As a curator, I look forward to these exhibitions every year because they are a chance to really take the pulse of art today. This year’s exhibiting artists are thoughtful when it comes to addressing timely topics, whether it be race or gentrification, and are consummate in their use of materiality and the mechanics of their mediums. At this critical time, The Print Center is excited to share their work virtually with audiences around the world.

– Ksenia Nouril, Jensen Bryan Curator
Windows on Latimer
Previous installations (left to right): Shawn Theodore, I See You Not Seeing Me, September 2020, Krista Svalbonas, What Remains, November 2020, Jaime Alvarez, El Yunque, December 2020 - January 2021.
The highly successful series Windows on Latimer features a new artwork each month in The Print Center’s iconic bay window on Latimer Street in Center City Philadelphia. Windows on Latimer has been recognized by WHYY and 6ABC News for providing a safe and thoughtful way to access art during the pandemic. New commissions for February, March and April will showcase the winners of the 95th ANNUAL solo exhibitions.
(left to right) Kevin Claiborne, ONE DROP, 2020, from the series “BLACKNESS IS;” David Rothenberg, nine works from the series "Roosevelt Station," 2019-2020. Works courtesy of the Artists.
In February, Kevin Claiborne: ONE DROP will be installed. The title is drawn from Claiborne's 2020 poem, referring to the system of racial classification in which anyone with even a single Black ancestor, i.e. “one drop” of Black blood, is considered to be Black. In March, David Rothenberg’s Window on Latimer will include images from “Roosevelt Station,” his series of portraits taken inside the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street subway station in Queens. For April, Dawn Kim will create a site-responsive installation incorporating her recent photographs.
Fit to Print
May 1 – June 30, 2021
Lisa Blas, Enter Stage Left (Monday’s image, v. 1), 2018, dye-sublimation print on silk, 55" x 41 ½". Courtesy of the Artist.
The group exhibition Fit to Print will explore the use of newspapers in contemporary art from the post-war era to today. This show addresses how artists work with the medium of newsprint as a nexus where the studio, everyday life and current events perennially merge and collide. This exploration is particularly timely in an age when truth in news is fractured and suspect, due to the proliferation of sensationalist stories, pitted against traditional sources of journalism.

Fit to Print will feature a select group of historical artworks alongside those by an international group of contemporary artists. The artworks exhibited reveal slippages between everyday life and what is depicted and recounted on the printed page. The exhibition is presented in three thematic sections: Circuits of Print, Print as Transposition and Print Interventions.

Fit to Print is organized by Dr. Ksenia Nouril, The Print Center’s Jensen Bryan Curator in conjunction with Lisa Blas, a New York-based artist, who conceived the idea for the exhibition and serves as an advisor. A number of public programs are planned in conjunction with the exhibition. Read more about Fit to Print here.
Public Programs
Artist Talk with Kevin Claiborne
Wednesday, February 17, 6:00pm (ET) – presented on Zoom

Artist Talk with David Rothenberg
Wednesday, March 10, 6:00pm (ET) – presented on Zoom

Artist Talk with Dawn Kim
Wednesday, April 21, 6:00pm (ET) – presented on Zoom

Virtual “Walkthrough” of Fit to Print with Ksenia Nouril and Lisa Blas
Wednesday, May 5, 6:00pm (ET) – presented on Zoom 

Programs are free and open to the public. To register, email mhawk@printcenter.org.
About The Print Center
Mission
For more than a century, The Print Center has encouraged the growth and understanding of photography and printmaking as vital contemporary arts through exhibitions, publications and educational programs. The Print Center has an international voice and a strong sense of local purpose. Free and open to the public, it presents changing exhibitions, which highlight established and emerging, local, national and international contemporary artists. It mounts one of the oldest art competitions in the country, now in its 95th year and the Gallery Store offers the largest selection of contemporary prints and photographs available for sale in Philadelphia, as well as being available online.
Funders
Support for The Print Center is offered by Bryn Mawr Trust; COVID-19 Arts Aid PHL Fund; Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation; Forman Family Fund; Sheila Fortune Foundation; Fund for Children; Allen Hilles Fund;, Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation; Christopher Ludwick Foundation; Manko, Gold, Katcher & Fox; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; William Penn Foundation; Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage; Philadelphia Cultural Fund; The Philadelphia Foundation; Rosenlund Family Foundation; Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial; and our Board of Governors, Luminaries, members and friends.
The Print Center
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