Marking its 20th year, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art launches Print Focus—a series spotlighting the publishers, workshops, and master printers behind the medium.
For two decades, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art has mounted exhibitions in dialogue with art history. While examining the weight of the Western canon, the gallery’s program illustrates that art history can, and should, accommodate a wider and deeper ambit.
For the 2013 exhibition Native Vanguard, N. Scott Momaday wrote about hozhoni, Navajo for the essence of beauty “past and present: indeed for all times.” Five years later, seventy-five of Armond Lara’s winged blue buffalo took flight to tell the story of the “lost bluebirds”—the children who never came home in three centuries of Native American slavery. To expand the possibilities of printmaking, the gallery installed Enrique Figueredo’s fifteen-foot-diameter zoetrope that, when spun, animates a storm rolling over Caracas, Venezuela.
Upon celebrating their 20th anniversary last year, the gallery has revitalized its focus on prints while continuing a program of exhibitions for emerging and midcareer artists. This year, they launch Print Focus, a series of exhibitions featuring work produced by print publishers and workshops across the country.
This series opened with Josef Albers’s 1972 Formulation: Articulation, including all 127 screen prints gracing the gallery’s catwalk and second floor. Up next are offerings from Tamarind Institute this summer and from Gemini G.E.L. this fall. Exhibitions in collaboration with Mixografia, ULAE, and independent print studios will follow in 2027. As they embark on this series of partnership exhibitions, the gallery will highlight the innovation, collaboration, and labor that coalesce into evocative and beautiful visual stories conceptualized and fleshed out by artists and master printers. Zane Bennett contributes to a cultural forum where the public can engage with these ideas, processes, technical challenges, and philosophical inquiries.
Last year, the gallery published the inaugural ZB Editions portfolio, Celebesstraat, featuring prints of drawings by renowned curator, writer, educator, and artist Robert Storr and printed by Santa Fe-based master printer James Bourland. The drawings are diaristic entries that illustrate the infinite possibilities of mark-making. In parallel, ZB Editions aims to explore the infinite possibilities that may arise from collaborating with artists in fresh ways.
As Zane Bennett heads into the future, they reconsider the past to discover new avenues of inquiry. Their forthcoming exhibition with China Marks this spring, bustling with the artist’s phantasmagoric sewn drawings and books, builds on a history of showcasing typically unsung media, while exhibitions in the fall focus on the engaged regionalism of the late architect Judith Chafee and work by artist and preservation architect Jorge Otero-Pailos. The gallery offers these exhibitions as stories, because without viewers to receive them, our shared history, wisdom, and belonging risk being lost.
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