March 22 – April 9, 2016
White Box at the University of Oregon in Portland School of Architecture and Allied Arts is pleased to present three new exhibitions: two solo exhibitions featuring printmaking work of professors emeriti in the Art Department at the University of Oregon, Margaret Prentice and Ken Paul, and Animation + Printmaking.
Both Prentice and Paul will be receiving the Outstanding Educator of Printmaking Award by the Southern Graphics Council International. The awards will be presented by SGCI at an awards ceremony on April 2, 2016, during their annual conference, Flux, being held in Portland, Oregon, at the Marriott Downtown Waterfront.
Margaret Prentice | With an emphasis on abstraction and realism found in nature and landscape, Prentice creates prints that explore the aesthetics of magical realism. The resulting imagery orchestrates a colorful and visually soothing collection of recent work.
Ken Paul | Influenced by now-celebrated EC Comics and their explorations of fantasy, crime and horror, Paul’s printmaking resonates with a (uncharacteristic to him) darker side. Mirroring cinema noir and referencing Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Carl Jung, the work in this exhibition spans a 50-year retrospective of powerful and engulfing imagery.
Animation + Printmaking | The processes and matrices intrinsic to printmaking are ideally suited for animation. In order to encourage and highlight experimentation in this area, a call for entries went out in connection with the Southern Graphics Council International conference “Flux”, which comes to Portland this spring. The results of this call will be screened at White Box, March 22 – April 8, 2016. Thirty animations ranging from 1-7 minutes in duration from artists across the US, Europe and Canada will be presented in White Box’s media specific gallery, Gray Box. This exhibition was organized by Marilyn Zornado, independent animator and instructor, Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft; and Barbara Tetenbaum, artist, printer and head of the department of Book and Print, Oregon College of Art and Craft; with assistance from Cris Moss, director and curator of White Box.
Margaret Prentice is currently professor emerita in the Art Department at the University of Oregon where she taught for 26 years. Prentice taught drawing, intaglio and relief printmaking, papermaking and artists’ books. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona and her MFA from the University of Colorado. Prentice received a Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship in 1994 visiting papermakers and printmakers in Japan for 4 months. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Kyoto Seika University and at the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo in woodcut printmaking. Prentice visited famous hand papermakers in 6 prefectures, learning their sheet forming techniques. She received a UO Faculty Research Grant to document the primitive amate papermaking of the Otomi Indians in San Pablito, Mexico. In 2001, she was also an Artist-in-Residence at the Glasgow School of Art, making limited edition etchings. Her original prints are included in the book “Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest” published by Craftsman House. Prentice has exhibited her work in over 250 exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work may be found in over 55 public collections including the Houghton Library and Harvard University, Dartmouth University, Northwestern University, the National Library of New Zealand and the Getty Museum Collection, among others.
After teaching printmaking at the South Australian School of Art, Ken Paul became an integral part of the faculty at the University of Oregon in 1970. At UO, he taught courses in intaglio and relief printing. Paul was awarded a residential fellowship in 1985 at the Ucross Foundation in Clermont, WY, where he created a portfolio of prints. His studio work may be found in numerous public collections including: Cheney Cowles Museum in Spokane, WA; Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, OR; Oregon Health and Sciences University, Portland Art Museum, and Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, all in Portland, OR; University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; and Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA. Paul is past president of the Northwest Print Council, which is a professional organization of printmakers from seven states in the northwest.