Finding a Voice Through Printmaking, Works by Curlee Raven Holton

January 24–March 2, 2025

Artist Talk: Saturday, January 25, 3-4pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 25, 4-6pm

In-Person Gallery Hours begin Friday, January 24
Online Gallery Hours begin Saturday, January 25

Image credit: Cycles of Life, Relief wood cut, 2000 by Curlee Raven Holton

Finding a Voice Through Printmaking is a retrospective of print work by internationally renowned artist Curlee Raven Holton. The exhibition shares over 50 works and represents variety of print techniques and subjects.

Holton’s work is powerful, tapping into the quiet, subliminal idea of Art as a mighty oracle and artists as sages. Many of Holton’s works ponder flashing visions wrapped up in a single image. Brimming with irony, sadness, and humor, Holton’s titles play narrator to mythological-like action. His compositions are broad and searching; images to lean on, and to lean into. Each grants a great view of all that lies beyond here and often offers answers that bring on more questions. The works assembled encompass nearly 40 years of Holton’s artistic career.

Of the exhibition Holton remarks: “Robert Blackburn the renowned master printmaker would often say ‘that each of us have a log to bring to the woodpile.’ It was his way of acknowledging the validity of each artist’s perspective and contribution to the whole. The Printmaking medium and its diverse forms has allowed me a constant potential for change and alteration. The art of printmaking and its dynamic variations provide a creative medium allowing for the intersections of studio based art practices and new technologies. This intersection has the capacity to generate visual awareness in new and distinct ways. This matrix has offered me as an artist the freedom to produce creative mutations and alterations that generate singular or multiple images that speak most effectively to my intellectual, creative and aesthetic concerns.”

An artist-scholar, Curlee Raven Holton is an internationally renowned printmaker and painter whose work has been exhibited professionally for over 30 years in more than 60 one-person shows and over 100 group shows in such prestigious national and international venues as the 7th International Biennale in Cairo, Egypt; Taller de Artes Plasticás Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca, Mexico; the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Allentown Art Museum, Philadelphia Art Museum, National Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, The Library of Congress, and Yale University Art Gallery. Holton established the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in 1996 after having studied with Robert Blackburn of the Printmaking Workshop in New York City. In 2006 he founded Raven Fine Art Editions. In 2010 he became the director of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland until retiring in 2023.