Layered Language: Printmaking as Process and New Classes at WPG Art School!
Two exhibitions currently on view in Washington, D.C.— Adam Pendleton’s Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Cut + Paste: Experimental Japanese Prints & Photographs at the National Museum of Asian Art—offer radically different yet equally compelling approaches to printmaking. Both challenge traditional boundaries of the medium, but they do so through distinct technical and conceptual strategies.
Museum Perspectives: Gesture and Materiality
Adam Pendleton’s Screen-printing: Gesture Meets Concept
Pendleton’s process begins with gestural compositions—drips, sprays, and fragmented text—that are photographed and transferred to canvas via screen-printing. This layering of photographic and hand-drawn elements results in dense, textured surfaces that blur the lines between painting, drawing, and photography. His minimalist palette and conceptual rigor echo traditions of concrete poetry and performance art.
Cut + Paste: Material Experimentation in Japanese Printmaking
This exhibition showcases seventeen Japanese artists who combine traditional techniques with unconventional materials—plastic, foam, glue, tape, and even black tea—to create tactile, sculptural prints. These works expand outward, challenging the flatness of the medium and inviting viewers to engage with them from multiple angles.
In the Gallery: Collage and Monotype at WPG
At Washington Printmakers Gallery, artists similarly explore layering and materiality through collage and monotype techniques: Rosemary Cooley’s Niçoise Memory, blends fragments of visual recollection into a richly layered monoprint collage. The painterly softness of monotype meets the rhythmic contrast of collage, evoking travel, taste, and time. Iguana on Rocks II by Leslie Rose uses monotype collage to enhance the tactile quality of the iguana’s scales and volcanic terrain, creating a dynamic interplay of texture and form. These works resonate with the works at the Hirshhorn and the Museum of Asian Art exhibitions in their use of layering—not just of ink and paper, but of meaning and memory.
Black Dada (D/D), Adam Pendleton, silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas, 2024
At the Art Studio: Workshops That Build Layers of Meaning
The Washington Printmakers Art Studio Fall 2025 programs, curated and coordinated by photographer and WPG President, Marie-B Cilia De Amicis invite artists of all levels to explore printmaking as a layered process:
Looking at Photography with WPG member and award-winning photographer, Bob Burgess is a two-part workshop that uses iPhones to explore composition and visual storytelling.
WPG Artist Book Club, taught by Adele Ross, is an eight-week hands-on course in bookmaking fundamentals—perfect for those interested in sequencing, layering, and narrative structure.
Both offerings encourage experimentation with collage and mixed media, echoing the material play seen in Cut + Paste.
When the Two Became Waterbirds, Kimura Hideki, 1983, ink on paper
A Shared Language of Process
Whether in the museum or the gallery, artists are using printmaking to layer gesture, material, and meaning. Pendleton’s conceptual screen prints and the tactile excess of Cut + Paste find echoes in WPG’s monotype collages and community workshops. Together, these spaces affirm that printmaking is not just a technique—it is a language of transformation.
Cut + Paste: Experimental Japanese Prints and Photographs (through November 30, 2025) at the Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery and Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen (through January 3, 2027) at the Hirshhorn Museum
Photos by Barbara Bitondo