Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting @ Philadelphia Art Museum

Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting

Philadelphia Art Museum 

Through November 16, 2025 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

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 

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984)

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

Chuck Close 

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.

Emmanuel Taku

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

Emmanuel Taku

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.”

Deborah Kass

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

Deborah Kass (b. 1952)

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.

Troy Michie 

Doubling, 2019 

Screenprint, Framed: 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm) 

Gift of Brand X Editions, New York, 2023, x22005(6)

Emily Mae Smith 

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.”

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

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

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990)

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

Rashid Johnson 

Seascape, 2023 

Screenprint, printed in nine colors, with hand, 

applied navy acrylic mixture 

Gift of Brand X  Editions, New York, 2023, 105-2024-9

Rashid Johnson 

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

www.visitpham.org

Clare Woods @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - The Great Unknown

Clare Woods: The Great Unknown 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

21 May - 19 June 2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of new collages and prints by British artist CLARE WOODS (b. 1972) . The Great Unknown explores the themes of fragility, transience and otherness, the delicate borders that exist between sickness and health, cruelty and humanity, and the cycle of life. Having initially trained as a sculptor, Woods’ understanding of sculptural forms underpin her pictorial work. New collages and prints depicting interiors, still life and portraiture encourage an understanding of what it means to live in a time of mass image consumption and in a world that treats banality and disaster in the same way.

Drawing inspiration from photographs found from diverse sources such as books, magazines, the internet and her own lexicon of images, Clare Woods is preoccupied with the human body and its environment. She reinterprets the found imagery, cropping or repositioning the subjects so that they hover on the edge of legibility and figuration. Though her work cannot exist without photography, it is not the origin of the image that is important to Clare Woods. She is concerned with the emotional response the imagery triggers within her and its potential for reinterpretation or translation by the viewer.

By creating new content and context through the physical act of making, Clare Woods challenges the viewer’s experiences of fear, anxiety and the destructive impulses of humankind. This is seen in the fragility of rotting fruit in Dead Already, 2019, or the vulnerability of the human figure in Collage for Jargon, 2020, which depicts a close up cropped detail of an open mouth, in Collage for the Cook, 2020, an image of a bandaged hand, and in Rest Cure, 2019, which shows a resting head, seemingly detached from its body.

Flowers are a recent addition to Clare Woods’ repertoire of subjects and are seen in several works including Collage for It’s the End of the World as We Know It, 2020, and a series of four large-scale screenprints with woodblock collectively entitled The Difference Between Now and Then, 2020. Clare Woods comments; “For me, the idea of a vase of flowers represents a life span, in a tiny little environment. You’ve got the youth of the buds and the flowers are in full bloom, before they droop and discolour, and then the petals fall off and they die. It’s the whole life cycle that I am interested in.”

The disjunction between figuration and abstraction lies at the heart of ClareWoods’ works and during the translation into collage or print a space is created. There is no direct ‘touch’ between the artist and the collage and print in the same way as there is in her painting. When Woods has finished with a colour, she applies the leftover paint to sheets of paper. She then uses these coloured sheets to make collages. Although these collaged papers are a by-product of the painting process they themselves go through a tracing, drawing, cutting and sticking production line where a gap is formed by process. Happy accidents and a loss of control arising from the various mechanical printing processes contribute to the physical breakdown of the image and allow for a deceleration and fragmentation of the subject.

The Great Unknown is the first showing of a major body of prints and collages by the artist. Clare Woods comments: 

“This exploration of the screenprinting, monoprinting and collage processes has afforded me the opportunity to deconstruct, reimagine and reassemble imagery in a completely new way. While adhering to the composition and colour palette of recent paintings I have relished being able to occupy a compelling space between paint and print. There is a magic that happens in that space that you do not get in painting. And that, for me, is what felt fundamentally different about print. I wanted to capture that with the title. Because it is ‘the great unknown’ – the idea of lifting the paper and not knowing what you are going to get. I had no idea when I named the show, back in February 2020, how significant the title could be seen in terms of the world we are now experiencing.”

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY 

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

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