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Lafayette Alumni News, May 1997 – Master printmaker Curlee Holton is looking forward to the Experimental Printmaking Institute to be held this summer.
“Juan Sanchez, one of the nation’s foremost emerging Latino artists, will work on site with current students and recent graduates,” says Holton. Plans include creating bound volumes of his signed prints. The institute is supported by the family foundation of Alan D. Pesky ’56.
Holton is currently producing prints for a limited edition of his work being bound this summer at Buffalo State University. He is assisted by Megan Palmer ’00 and Chad Everhart ’97.
Since Holton joined the faculty in 1991, he has involved students in the studio and his own work. Paula Randazzo ’94, working on her master’s in art therapy at Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, says, “I was majoring in psychology and took a drawing course with him. He noticed my talent and encouraged me to explore printmaking. That turned out to be my medium.”
Randazzo did an honors thesis in printmaking; her current research is on printmaking as a therapeutic technique. “I was thinking about social work as a career,” she says, “and through conversations with Professor Holton about the psychology of art, I realized that I could bring my interests together. He was a major influence in my decision to go to graduate school.”
Holton’s works have been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. “As an African American art maker, I have been located in a community by birth, experience, and symbolic meaning,” he says. “As a maker of what I believe to be cultural artifacts, I hope to aid my community by defining and distilling its activities through art.”
This summer Holton will travel to Taller De Artes Plasticas Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca, Mexico, to exhibit works produced in the print studio and to Vera Cruz to do research. He is also working on a collabortion between Lafayette and Tamayo in which each institution will select 10 poems from its country’s poets and send them to the other country for interpretation by artists there. A simultaneous opening of the work is scheduled for 1998.