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“Art chooses you; you do not choose it,” says Curlee Holton.
And art has chosen Holton in a big way. Decades into his career, he continues to pursue his art with innovation and integrity while mentoring future generations of artists.
Professor Curlee Holton works with students at the Experimental Printmaking Institute.
“EPI has been described as an ‘ink think tank,’” says Holton, Roth Professor of Art and founding director of Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI). “[It encourages] the collaboration between artists and students in the pursuit of new ideas and advancing ideas that have been percolating, especially within the artists.”
EPI is producing two print editions of visiting artist Alison Saar’s work. Cody Hunsicker ’18 (Myerstown, Pa.), a chemistry major and field hockey player, hand colored one of Saar’s etchings and is adding rice paper collage elements to the body of a large multimedia print.
The opportunity to work with professional artists at EPI is an invaluable experience for students, says Holton.
“Mentorship of a student by a teacher/artist is perhaps the most effective way to develop a young scholar for the personal and professional challenges they might face,” he explains.
Art and chemistry double major Genna Asselin ’15 (Mendham, N.J.) worked on The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa by painter Audrey Flack with Holton and Jase Clark, master printer in training and shop manager at EPI. The print was created over a six-month period in which Flack was intimately involved. Asselin assisted in all phases of the printing and was responsible for the final curatorial process that checked the prints and trimmed them for final presentation. The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa is now part of Yale Art Gallery’s permanent collection.
Professor Holton speaks with students during the opening of his exhibit at the Williams Center Gallery last year.
Holton made presentations this fall to accompany several of his exhibits. He discussed his work on display at the Bates Art Museum at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, including the print Blues State of Mind, part of the Convergence: Jazz, Films, and the Visual Arts show running through Dec. 13, and his portfolio Re-imagining Othello in Sepia.
Holton is the executive director of the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center, which is the centerpiece of the African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center exhibit running at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, through Jan. 4. He discussed the Driskell Center and exhibition as they pertain to the larger scope of African American art and the American art canon at the exhibit’s opening.
Earlier this fall, Holton showed 20 of his pieces created between 1997 and 2013 for the individual exhibit In the Shadow of Contemplation at the Cochran Gallery in LaGrange, Georgia.
The U.S. Art in Embassies Program selected his piece New World Nubian for display in the American Embassy in Singapore. Produced at EPI in 1993, it is a mixed media print created with relief and mono print printing techniques and was inspired by his travels to the West Indies to research African aesthetic retention such as rituals, dress, and customs.
Holton and EPI were featured in th(ink)ing: The Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in the Lehigh University Main Gallery. He also has an individual retrospective, Curlee Raven Holton: Prints 1987-2013, in Lehigh’s Dubois Gallery through Dec. 13.