At IFPDA’s October Prints & Drawings Month, Museums Are Quietly Rethinking Where Works on Paper Belong
Attend print and drawing-focused sessions in person and online with LACMA, The Met, and more throughout the month of October.
For most of museum history, prints and drawings have lived in a kind of curatorial basement: light-sensitive, rotated sparingly, and confined to dedicated study rooms and print cabinets while paintings and sculpture hold the main galleries. That hierarchy, baked into museum architecture for over a century, is being interrogated in Drawn Together: Collections in Conversation, presented October 19 as part of the International Fine Prints & Drawings Association's Prints & Drawings Month.
Drawn Together brings together curators from three institutions who are rethinking that arrangement: Claire Spadafora Baes of LACMA, Jun Nakamura of the Princeton University Art Museum, and James Wehn of the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All three museums have recently completed renovations or collection rehangs, and all three have used the occasion to ask where prints and drawings actually belong: siloed by medium, as convention has long dictated, or integrated into galleries organized by period, geography, or theme alongside painting and sculpture.
It's a fitting question for an organization redefining itself. IFPDA, founded in 1987, spent more than three decades as an association exclusively for print dealers and publishers before formally expanding its mandate to include drawings this year, the first change to that mandate in the organization's history. The expanded mandate extends to its flagship public program, renamed from Print Month to Prints & Drawings Month, with drawings-focused sessions now folded in alongside the prints scholarship that has anchored the series for seven years.
Elsewhere in the October lineup, that same tension between hierarchy and integration surfaces repeatedly. A Metropolitan Museum session on Marie Bracquemond, one of only three women who exhibited with the Impressionists under her own name, examines drawings that were long overshadowed by her more prolific etcher husband, Félix. A study day on Southern Netherlandish workshop practice, 1570 to 1670, digs into the print publisher Volcxken Diericx, a woman running a major publishing operation in a field usually narrated through its male masters. Even the season's marquee Rembrandt pairing, splitting attention between the Morgan and Florida's Naples Art Institute, frames his printmaking as inseparable from, rather than secondary to, his painted output.
Taken together, the line up at IFPDA’s Prints & Drawings Month offers a charged polemic not to be missed on hierarchy, both on art history and the presentation of art itself.
Learn more at ifpda.org/programs/print-month.
