An Art of Changes:
Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018

Surveying six decades of the seminal artist’s printmaking practice, the exhibition is organized by Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts, for the Walker Art Center, drawn from the Walker’s collection. Highlighting Jasper Johns’s (American, b. 1930) experiments with familiar, abstract, and personal imagery, the works that play with memory and visual perception in endlessly original ways. Structured in four thematic sections, this survey features some 90 pieces in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screen printing, and lead relief. The exhibition follows Johns through the years as he revises and recycles key motifs, including the American flag, numerals, and the English alphabet—all of which Johns describes as “things the mind already knows.”

As part of ongoing nation-wide recognition of Johns’s 90^th birthday, An Art of Changes joins a moment of critical reflection on his decades-long career and celebrates his stature today as one the 20th century’s greatest American artists.

UPCOMING  RELATED PROGRAMS

Thursday, June 30 | Stars & Stripes
Conversation 3/3 of Lunch talk series by Alicia Longwell on Jasper Johns
Register →

ABOUT JASPER JOHNS

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has been a central figure in the contemporary art world since the 1950s. Born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina, he moved to New York in 1948 and began his extensive career as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. At his first solo exhibition in 1958, Johns dazzled the art world with his paintings of targets, numerals, and flags. Their unprecedented combination of textured surfaces and easily recognizable images established him as a fresh new voice in American art. Although best known for his early paintings, Johns has also produced hundreds of prints since 1960. Using a wide range of printmaking techniques, including lithography, intaglio, and screenprinting, he explores the process of repeating, editing, and varying his source material and motifs. For the artist, images are always open to reconsideration, and he often returns to favorite subjects to rework them in a different scale, color, technique, or arrangement. Through these seemingly simple gestures of revisiting different signs and symbols with slight variations, Johns has spent a lifetime exploring the relationship between memory and visual perception.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT

An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960 – 2018 is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Major support is provided by Judy Dayton and the Prospect Creek Foundation. Additional support is provided by Robert and Rebecca Pohlad and Annette and John Whaley.