Printing Beyond Borders: Contemporary Indian Prints at Kansas State University

August 13, 2024–May 31, 2025

This exhibition features work by Indian printmakers active in the second half of the 20th century. It demonstrates that innovative arts research and cultural exchanges were taking place at K-State more than thirty years ago. Professor of Printmaking Charles Stroh (1943–2022) acquired the artwork for the university. Stroh was art department head between 1980 and 1989. He traveled to India to conduct research on the state of printmaking in 1984–1985 and returned for a second time in 1989–1990. During the second trip, Stroh delivered lectures and workshops at universities at the invitation of local artists. Several artists from India later visited K-State.

Stroh’s interest in Indian printmaking was unusual. He noted in records held by the Beach Museum of Art that during the 1980s US art institutions did not actively collect prints by Indian artists and rarely featured them in exhibitions and publications. Stroh was one of the earliest American scholars to recognize the significance of Indian printmakers and their international influence and connections. He left an unpublished manuscript for a book that would have been the first survey of contemporary Indian printmaking in English.

In 1987 Stroh organized a traveling exhibition of K-State's Indian print collection with the university’s first professional curator, Jessica Reichman. In this 2024 exhibition guest curators Vidhita Raina and Michael Jordan Vanhartingsveldt , doctoral students in the Kress Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, take a new look at the collection. Longtime museum patron Margo Kren has provided support for their work.

The exhibition has two phases. A fall display of works investigates the artists, institutions, and printmaking networks in India when Stroh first traveled there. A spring 2025 installation will look at the global scope of Indian printmaking in the 1970s and 1980s.

Major Sponsor: Greater Manhattan Community Foundation’s Lincoln & Dorothy I. Deihl Community Grants Program

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