Robert Kushner, 2013 – 2014

Robert Kushner
Peter Pettengill, printer
2014 – 2015

Workshop: October 15–17, 2014

Widely recognized as a leading figure in the Pattern and Decoration style of painting that emerged in American art in the 1960s and 1970s. Kushner’s work often features botanical subjects placed against abstract or geometric backgrounds. According to the artist: “Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me. … The eye can wander, the mind think unencumbered through visual realms that are expansively and emotionally rich. Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.”

Kushner’s project for the Smith College Print Workshop was a natural outgrowth of his most recent project, Scriptorium:Devout Exercises of the Heat. This installation consists of over 1,000 drawings of plants and flowers on antique book pages. The print series O Aloe takes a similar form—a bold drawing of an aloe plant rendered in lift-ground aquatint is juxtaposed against a collage of printed elements from newspapers, books, and magazines that span cultures and decades.

Robert Kushner. American, 1949 –