Tamarind Touchstones: Fabulous at Fifty Celebrating Excellence in Fine Art Lithography

For The Past Fifty Years, Tamarind Has Breathed Life into the once-underappreciated art of lithography. From Josef Albers and Philip Guston in the 1960s to Ed Ruscha and KiKi Smith in recent decades, contemporary artists have teamed up with professional printmakers at Tamarind to create an archive of exceptional lithographs

In 1960s, in an effort to generate interest in lithography and make it accessible to artists, June Wayne founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Inc. Fifty years and many thousands of prints later, it is difficult to imagine what lithography in the United States would be without the influence of the renowned Tamarind. Showcasing the broad aesthetic capabilities of lithography, Tamarind Touchstones demonstrates the diversity of the artists who have embraced lithography and their increased facaility and comfort with the medium.

With its trademark passion, Tamarind enters the next fifty years committed to its original goals to invigorate and fortify lithography and to expand its reach throughout the world

Hands are almost living beings. Only servants? Possibly. Servants, then, endowed with a vigorous free spirit, with a physiognomy. Eyeless and voiceless faces which nonetheless see and speak. Through his hands man establishes contact with the austerity of thought. They quarry its rough mass. Upon it they impose form, outline, and ...style---Henri Focillon

"Henri Focillon's In Praise of Hands is an apt citation when thinking about the hundreds of pairs of hands that have formed the renowned legacy of the Tamarind Institute of lithography. At this workshop's core is the art of drawing by hand. And as a site for collaboration between artist and printer. Tamarind belongs in the ranks with the great printing ateliers of Paris---Maeght, Mourlot, Desjobert, and Clot---where masters Miro. Picasso, Matisse, Tapies, and Chagall, among numerous others, applied vanguard styles to the wide potential of the lithographic process. At Tamarind, Albers, Dine, Guston, Nevelson, Ruscha, and Smith (Kiki and Jaune Quick-to-See) conjoin, among hundreds of artists, with their European counterparts in the art of modern lithography

"The University New Mexico Art Museum is the archival repository for Tamarind, housing and caring for two impressions of every lithograph created since the inception of the workshop in June Wayne's Los Angeles studio in 1960, to those made at UNM in Albuquerque, off old Route 66 (Central Avenue), from 1970 to the present. As a teaching museum, visits by scholars, collegiate classes, and the public are a primary focus of the print collection's usage, and to that end prints from the archive are available for study in the Beaumont Newhall Study Room. To date, over six thousand lithographs have been produced. This fact alone gives unquestionable cause to laud Tamarind's history made whole by the commitments from master printers, artists, artist-fellows, apprentices, and administrative staffs, all of whom have ensured an excellence in fine art lithography for five decades. That artists, who may primarily be sculptors or painters, find in lithography an equally satisfying and compelling medium is testimony to the workshop's commitment to artists and to experimental agility. Spanning the stylistic shifts in postwar twentieth-century American art, including various forms of figuration, abstract expressionist gestures, geometric abstraction, color field explorations, feminist narratives, new realism, and multifarious hybridizations brought about by postmodernism, and twenty-first century practices, the golden anniversary exhibition `Tamarind Touchstones: Fabulous at Fifty' is an extravagant sampler of just what the studio has been up to all these years."---From The Preface By E. Luanne Mckinnon