Overview

Gallery 8 - Tamarind Lithography Workshop, 1965 is a medium sized square room with 2D artworks on all four walls.

We enter Gallery 8 in the back left corner of the room. In this gallery there are three described lithographs prints. On the back wall to our right, halfway along the left wall, and on the front wall in the left corner.

The exit to Gallery 9 is halfway along the front wall.

Wall Text

Tamarind Lithography Workshop, 1965

The Tamarind Lithography Workshop, established in 1960 on Tamarind Avenue in Los Angeles, vastly expanded the possibilities of fine art lithography in the US. At the suggestion of her former teacher Josef Albers, who had previously printed there himself, Asawa was invited to serve as artist in residence in September and October 1965. When the second artist slated for the same term never arrived, Asawa had the full attention of seven master printers, affording her the opportunity to explore a wide array of lithographic techniques toward an ambitious group of single and multicolor prints.

Over the course of two months Asawa made a remarkable fifty-four unique prints featuring family members, flowers, plane trees, birds, and chairs, as well as abstractions. Asawa drew or painted directly on slabs of limestone or aluminum plates with a waxy pencil, crayon, or liquid ink, after which the printers would fix the image, ink the stone or plate, and pass the sheets of paper through the press. After a day’s work Asawa often cooked for her collaborators at her apartment before returning to the press. While never again focusing as intensively on printmaking as she did during her summer at Tamarind, Asawa remained convinced of the merits of the medium, resisting “the myth that the crafts and printmaking are less important than painting and sculpture. A good piece is important regardless of category.”

Image

Caption

Asawa at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, 1965
Tamarind Institute Pictorial Collection, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries.
Photograph by Hank Baum

Description

A black and white photograph of Asawa, a Japanese American woman, bent over a table painting. Her black straight hair is tied back and she's wearing glasses and a dark shirt with overalls. She leans close to her work holding a thick brush in mid stroke with her ink-stained right hand, her left hand resting on her hip, a stone ring visible on her ring finger. Several glass containers are lined up on the table next to her work. In the background stands a painting with swirling abstract patterns.

Objects

Aiko (TAM.1473)

Label Text

1965
Lithograph
Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles
Printed with Kinji Akagawa
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967

The first print Asawa created at Tamarind was a portrait of Aiko, her oldest daughter, in profile. Before traveling to Los Angeles for her residency, Asawa packed a group of drawings to use as source material. This lithograph, based on one such drawing, shows Asawa’s facility with tonal range and shadow, and the delight she took in rendering the decorative pompon fringe of her daughter’s patterned head scarf.

Visual Description

A grey toned lithograph print of Aiko Lanier's profile facing our left. Her facial features are in shadow with not many visible details and a soft wash of grey across her entire depiction. She is wearing a light-colored headscarf tied under her chin adorned with small pom-poms around the edge. The background is a flat off white in high contrast to the dark appearance of the figure.

Untitled (TAM.1571, Title Page from the portfolio Flowers)

Label Text

1965
Lithographs
Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles
Printed with Ernest de Soto and Walter Gabrielson
Private collection

Visual Description

A lithograph print of a line drawing of a cluster of flowers, the size of a piece of paper. The entire composition is rendered in thin brown, continuous lines with the word "flowers" written in a stylized lowercase font overlaying the cluster. Surrounding and intertwining with the letters are simple line drawings of flower petals and leaves. The background is a plain off-white color.

Poppy (TAM.1479)

Label Text

1965
Lithograph
Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles
Printed with Walter Gabrielson
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967

One of the most iconic among Asawa’s lithographs is Poppy, a virtuoso depiction of California’s delicate state flower—presented much larger than life—that fully embraces the lithographic medium’s capacity to capture fluidity. On top of an overall layer of yellow, the petals were printed in red. The last pass through the press resulted in the washy field of dark green-blue, interrupted at the bottom to create the fuzzy stem in negative space, and coming close to but not touching the petals to set them off with a halo.

Visual Description

A lithograph print of a single red poppy on a blue-grey marbled background, about the size of a large baking tray. The flower takes up much of the composition with four large, round and rippled petals. Its center is darker, almost black. The thin slightly curved stem is created by white negative space with small little spikes along its length. The texture of the petals and background resemble a watercolor with swirling shapes and tones.

Getting to the Next Gallery

The exit to Gallery 9 is halfway along the front wall.