Licensing

Lithography

Narrator: Daniell Cornell, Curator and Director of Contemporary Arts Projects, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

Transcription

In 1965, through the support and recommendation of Joseph Albers, Ruth was able to attend the Tamarind Lithography workshop through a fellowship that she attained as the artist in residency there. The workshop usually employed seven printers at a time, who artists then produced work that the printers could experiment with. This was a situation, of course, that Ruth was totally at home with a loved, the notion of experimentation, because her whole life had been about working with materials and experimenting with how they might be transformed, especially if they moved from one medium to another. And, so here was a chance for her to work with lithography. She said that lithography is most like drawing, because you actually do draw on stone plates. Often times today, lithographers use metal plates, but the Tamarind workshop uses the more traditional stone plates, in which an image is drawn on the plate, and then manipulated, and then put through a press. This interesting experimentation and transformation, and the collaborative nature of this project really appealed to every sensibility of Ruth’s. She ended up creating these images, which primarily experiment with the notion of reversal; reversing the image, reversing black and white as tonalities in the images, experimenting with the notion of foreground and background and reversing the sense of the viewer of gestalt in that relationship.