Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting
Philadelphia Art Museum
Through November 16, 2025
Untitled (Who is Queen), 2020
Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment
Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-19
Untitled (Figure and Malcolm X), 2020
Enamel screenprint and graphite pigment
Sheet: 64 × 49 inches (162.6 × 124.5 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 105-2024-20
Self Portrait, 2017
Screenprint in ninety-one colors
Sheet: 69 × 57 3/4 inches (175.3 × 146.7 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x21994(10)
The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting, the first exhibition to spotlight four decades of collaborations between the Brand X printmaking workshop and a diverse roster of contemporary artists. On view through November 16, 2025, the exhibition features more than 80 screenprints by Helen Frankenthaler, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Tschabalala Self, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others.
The exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Brand X Editions Archive to the Philadelphia Art Museum, presenting a selection from the over 400 screenprints given by master printer and founder Robert Blanton. Since establishing the workshop in 1979, Blanton and his team of skilled printers, chromists, and specialists have worked in collaboration with an impressive list of artists to push screenprinting techniques to meet the artists’ varied styles and expressive ambitions. The body of work from Brooklyn-based Brand X builds significantly on the museum’s extensive holdings of historical screenprints, adding major contemporary examples of traditional and experimental techniques. The Philadelphia Art Museum now holds one of the most comprehensive collections of screenprints along with essential archives related to the medium’s history and evolution from commercial tool to vibrant fine-art technique.
Entanglement, 2022
Screenprint, printed in twenty-three colors
with collage elements
Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches (152.4 × 102.2 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-32
Got You, 2022
Screenprint, printed in twenty-seven colors
with collage elements
Sheet: 60 × 40 1/4 inches (152.4 × 102.2 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 2023- 191-33
“It is an honor to be the chosen home for Brand X’s magnificent collection of prints, said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “As expert printmakers, internationally renowned for their craft, Brand X are the true leaders in this field. For a museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with such a rich and dedicated history in printmaking, it is a privilege for us to have this opportunity to welcome our visitors to experience and enjoy this generous gift.”
OY/YO, 2011
Two screenprints, printed in three colors on paper board
Framed: 21 1/2 × 20 inches (54.6 × 50.8 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22034a,b
Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, 2022
Silkscreen, printed in seven colors on Coventry Rag paper
Sheet: 57 × 57 inches (144.8 × 144.8 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-4
On view throughout the galleries are the results of Brand X’s dynamic collaborations across four decades of work. Together, the prints reveal the remarkable versatility of screenprinting. In the first gallery, for instance, works by Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Adam Pendleton, and Mickalene Thomas demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic the richness of paint layers, render a photographic precision, and produce variegated textures and surfaces. These artists expand the technical boundaries of screenprint in their exploration of themes relating to belonging, memory, and self-definition. From the dense, painterly urgency of Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Red to the layered intricacy of Mickalene Thomas’s November 1977, each work here shows how, at the Brand X workshop, screenprinting can be stretched, challenged, and transformed in response to an artist’s creative impulses.
Doubling, 2019
Screenprint, Framed: 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22005(6)
Poetry (Toy in Blood), 2022
Screenprint, printed in forty-seven colors
Sheet: 60 × 45 1/2 inches (152.4 × 115.6 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2024, 105- 2024-30(11)
The exhibition also addresses themes relating to text and language, pattern and decoration, graphic illusion, and landscape and figuration. Eight progressive proofs of Vija Celmins’s Ocean Surface offer a rare view onto the screenprinting process. From print to print, visitors can see how the image was formed cumulatively—by the sequential printing of individual screens, each bearing a single layer of ink. In final form, Celmins’s image materializes through sixteen applications of nuanced grays—an additive and subtle process apt for rendering the depth and detail of the ocean. Throughout the exhibition, equal emphasis is given to the pictorial and the material. Brand X Editions shines light on the technical procedures and the many roles—beyond that of the artist—that are vital to the production of screenprints.
“Just like the work that happens at Brand X, this exhibition and its catalogue were thoroughly collaborative endeavors, said Louis Marchesano, curator of the exhibition and the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation. “The addition of the Brand X Editions Archive, which will continue to grow as the studio produces more editions, goes a long way toward building an authoritative resource on screenprinting at the museum.”
Homebodies – All American 1, 2022
Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash,
hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen
Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b
Homebodies – All American 1, 2022
Monoprint, fabric collage, pigment wash,
hand coloring, and enamel silkscreen
Sheet (each): 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023-191-29a,b
Seascape, 2023
Screenprint, printed in nine colors, with hand,
applied navy acrylic mixture
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, 105-2024-9
Untitled Large Mosaic, 2025
Screenprint, framed: 61 X 105 inches (1 154.9x 266.7 cm)
Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x 22005(5)
Extending the exhibition beyond the gallery space, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic), 2025, is displayed in the museum’s Forum Balcony. For over three years, Rashid Johnson and his collaborators at Brand X developed this spectacular 293-color print, combining traditional screenprinting techniques—visible in the flat passages of bold color—with unconventional materials, including wood veneer, mirrored mylar, and cast paper oyster shells. Inspired by Johnson’s low-relief wall mosaics composed of innumerable tile fragments and other bits of material, this project captures Brand X’s enduring commitment to pursuing new levels of technical innovation and experimentation.
Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Philadelphia Art Museum curators and paper conservators, an interview with Robert Blanton and David DeSanctis of Brand X, a technical glossary related to the history and technique of screenprint, and an inventory of the archive held by Philadelphia Art Museum.
The exhibition is curated by Louis Marchesano, the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director of Cultural Affairs and Conservation, with Em Dombrovskaya, the Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow; Laurel Garber, the Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Emily Friedman, the Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Dallas Museum of Art.
A series of exhibitions by Brand X collaborators including Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler will be shown at the Philadelphia Art Museum through 2028.
PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM
Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
