The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has received a $134,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to offer a traveling seminar on contemporary prints for early-career curators, organized by the Brodsky Center. The Getty funding is provided through The Paper Project: Prints and Drawings Curatorship in the 21st Century. This initiative’s primary focus is on training and professional development for early- to mid-career curators of prints and drawings.

The Getty Foundation seminar, to be held April 6–12, 2020 in both Philadelphia and New York, will help establish the Brodsky Center at PAFA—a collaborative paper and printmaking center devoted to the creation of new work—as a leading resource in contemporary prints and works on paper for print curators, said Center Director Paola Morsiani.

“The seminar will provide valuable professional development opportunities for curators early in their careers to work with master printmakers and papermakers, as well as exposing them to a wide variety of collections, paper conservators and experts in Philadelphia, New York, and the surrounding areas,” said Clint Jukkala, Dean of the School of Fine Arts at PAFA.

The seminar’s goal is to offer a focused learning experience that will significantly enhance awareness among early-career curators of contemporary art, of the special creative processes, and historical and contemporary contexts that characterize prints. The seminar will enable curators to learn how prints are made and to care for works on paper and in handmade paper.

The Brodsky Center at PAFA provides internship and professional opportunities for PAFA students to learn about the process of editioning, marketing, and selling artists’ prints. Students learn from artists-in-residence, who make prints alongside them in the print shop. A new papermaking facility at PAFA provides papermaking opportunities for both the Center’s editions and PAFA students.

Since its founding in 1986 under director Judith K. Brodsky, the Center has completed over 300 editions with a diverse range of emerging and established artists, including Barkley L. Hendricks, Melvin Edwards, Joan Semmel, Richard Tuttle, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Chitra Ganesh and Sharon Hayes, who currently has a new print edition published by the Center.

“This (Getty Foundation) grant is a validation of PAFA’s distinguished collection of prints and a result of the significant effort PAFA has invested within its renowned printmaking department and the recent addition of the Brodsky Center,” Morsiani said.

The seminar will be open to both national and international curators. Selected participants are young curators actively engaged with exhibiting and collecting contemporary art prints and extending to works on paper. Participants will be selected through an open call posted in the art historical, curatorial and print world fields. PAFA plans to hire a part-time, temporary project coordinator for the traveling seminar.

The seminar week will coincide with the closing week of two exhibitions at PAFA dedicated to prints, comprising an exhibition of nearly 100 works selected from recently acquired prints made from three distinct print workshops—Paulson Fontaine Press (Berkley, CA), Brandywine Workshop and Archives (Philadelphia, PA), and PAFA’s Brodsky Center—curated by Morsiani, as well as an exhibition of about 20 prints by American artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), recently donated by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to PAFA.

About the Getty Foundation

The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.