Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Raab, Jennifer

Abstract

The studio, the land, the camp, and the home are vital locations of print production. Yet scholars have overwhelmingly focused on prints made in the workshop, or an institutional facility stocked with specialized equipment and overseen by “master printers.” This dissertation investigates how women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional site of the workshop from 1935 to 1977 in the United States. Each spatially organized chapter centers on one artist: David Hammons, Sari Dienes, Matsusaburo “George” Hibi, and Ruth Asawa. All four artists practiced what I call emplaced printmaking: an engagement with the material, sociohistorical, and political conditions of the space in which one is situated. Uniting two methods rarely employed in tandem—the materiality and siting of printmaking—I argue that these artists used a contact-based medium to negotiate and redefine their relationships to gendered, racialized, and colonized environments. In the face of structural barriers, they developed radical ways to make prints with the tools and materials at their disposal. Hammons impressed bodies in a former dance hall, Dienes employed brayers as mobile presses along the Columbia River, Hibi transformed flooring material into printing blocks in army-style barracks, and Asawa reclaimed stamps from the laundry room. By reframing printmaking as an embodied activity that occurred in a wide range of settings, this dissertation illuminates how artists contended with the dynamics of place, access, and exclusion across the prewar and postwar eras.

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