Prints

The University of New Mexico Art Museum’s permanent collection of prints and rare printed books, numbering over ten thousand, spans the history of the graphic arts from 1493 to the present, and constitutes, along with the photography collection, the heart of the museum’s permanent collection. Within the museum’s extensive holdings it is possible to trace the critical, intellectual and aesthetic breadth of the history of the printed image through a myriad of historical and contemporary processes and techniques.

Among the significant works in the collection are folio leaves from the Weltchronik also known as the Nuremburg Chronicles, Old Master prints by Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi; lithographs by Honoré Daumier, Eugéne Delacroix, Paul Gavarni, George Grosz, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Al Bengston and two volumes from the nineteenth-century French publication Voyages Pittoresques et Romantique dans l’Ancienne France.

The collection also contains relief and intaglio images by Ferdinand Bol, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, Wassily Kandinsky, Milton Avery, Rockwell Kent, William Kentridge and screenprints by Andy Warhol, Matthew Barney and Richard Prince. The Latin American holdings include an important set of prints from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) founded in Mexico City in 1937 by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins and Luis Arenal.

The UNM Art Museum is also the archive for Tamarind Institute, founded in the 1960s by June Wayne (1918-2011) in Los Angeles, and accordingly collects and preserves multiple impressions of all lithographs executed at Tamarind from its early days in California to the present in Albuquerque. In addition, the museum holds and maintains the estate of Clinton Adams (1920-2002), which includes paintings and his graphic œuvre. Adams, who worked closely with June Wayne during the early genesis of Tamarind, eventually brought the lithography workshop to New Mexico under the umbrella of the university in 1969.