Marisol to Warhol: Printmaking and Creative Collaboration

Marisol to Warhol brings together more than a dozen portfolios and suites from the Delaware Art Museum’s collection. The exhibition presents a who’s who of American artists working in the second half of the 20th century, including Marisol, William T. Williams, Jacob Lawrence, Lowell Nesbitt, and Andy Warhol. The featured prints showcase the ingenuity of artists new to the medium and those who have mastered their chosen technique. Creative collaboration is often at the heart of these projects, representing the cooperative efforts of artists, printers, and publishers often necessary to complete a portfolio. Produced by individuals and print shops, these groups of prints functioned as tools for commemoration, fundraising, and political awareness in a range of techniques, styles, and intentions.

The period from the 1960s through the early 1990s witnessed an expansion of printmaking as artists promoted the accessibility of the medium. With increased availability came a chorus of creative voices showcasing diverse identities, stories, and styles. Artists working in print were able to expand their creative output while those new to printmaking, such as painters and sculptors, were introduced to the medium.

Pop artist Marisol received wide acclaim for her work in the 1960s, when she was a friend and frequent collaborator of Andy Warhol. Many of her best-known works take identifiable public individuals as their subjects, but the figures in these prints are anonymous. Instead, Marisol suggests intimate physical touch and mimics the mechanism of printmaking through the accumulation of handprints. In her suite, Marisol isolates the individual stages of a seven-color lithograph into six distinct prints. The artist’s delicate gestural shading evokes the contours of two bodies and activates the negative spaces between them. Each print in the series adds one color to the composition, first in primary, then secondary colors.  

Known for his dynamic abstract paintings, artist William T. Williams collaborated with the print workshop HKL Ltd. to translate his interests in form and color into the screen print process. They used more than ten colors and precise registration to capture his signature palette and exacting geometry. The same ten screens were used to create each print, so the same shapes appear—in different colors and orientations—in all four. 

The tobacco company Lorillard, then a subsidiary of hotel conglomerate Loews Corporation, commissioned the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio: Spirit of Independence to commemorate the United States’ Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. The artists, selected as a cross-section of the art world, worked independently and with printers of their choice. Each made their prints in response to a shared prompt: “What does independence mean to me?” Jacob Lawrence’s contribution to this portfolio revisits his Migration Series, a series of sixty paintings produced between 1940 and 1941. In accompanying text, the artist identifies the ‘spirit of independence’ in the enfranchisement of Black Americans, who moved to Northern cities from the rural South in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Lowell Nesbitt produced his suite of prints, published by the Palley Gallery, following his participation in NASA’s Artist Cooperation Program. Artists working for NASA had behind-the-scenes access to witness events like launches and splashdowns up close and in person. For this series, though, Nesbitt reproduces photographs of the one place NASA can’t let him go: the Moon. Nesbitt is often associated with Photorealism, but these prints take evocative liberties with their approach to depicting the Moon. The cratered surface appears in shimmering gestural whorls against the black paper—an appropriate stand-in for the unpigmented vacuum of outer space.  Nesbitt’s portfolio considers space exploration alongside his printmaking process. One lithograph showing the footprint of an astronaut’s boot pressed into the lunar soil seems to reference the lithographic process itself. 

The first in a series of fundraisers, the Merce Cunningham Portfolio celebrates the rich collaborations between the dancer and choreographer and some of the best-known artists of the 20th century. Cunningham invited musicians and visual artists to create the scores, sets, and costumes to accompany his performances. For his print, Andy Warhol used an early photograph of Cunningham in a costume—designed by Robert Rauschenberg—and featuring a Thonet bistro chair. The photographs and prints included in the portfolio document the vibrant history of these collaborations that expanded possibilities for choreographers, composers, and visual artists.

Curator of American Art, Heather Campbell Coyle
Lynn Herrick Sharp Curatorial Fellow, Dorothy Fisher
Head Curator/Curator of Contemporary, Art Margaret Winslow

Lotto: The American Dream, 1992. Luis Cruz Azaceta (born 1942). Nine color screen print, composition: 14 1/2 × 23 inches, sheet: 26 x 26 inches. Delaware Art Museum, F. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 1993. © Luis Cruz Azaceta. Courtesy George Adams Gallery.