New Ground: Selections from Wingate Studio: Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery, Providence College Galleries, RI

About the Exhibition

Providence College Galleries is pleased to present a selection of contemporary prints from the Wingate Studio. Over its more than thirty-five-year history, Wingate Studio’s print workshop in New Hampshire has printed work for artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Rauschenberg. Founded by Peter Pettengill in 1985, Wingate Studio began publishing its own prints in the mid-’90s by New England-based artists and has since expanded its publishing program to include artists of international acclaim, including Ambreen Butt, Josephine Halverson, Mira Dancy, and Sascha Braunig, many of whom are included in this exhibition. Wingate Studio continues to work in both modalities of printing editions for other publishers and galleries and publishing its own prints in collaboration with contemporary artists.

The press is renowned for its specialization and technical expertise in the age-old process of multiple plate aquatint etching. By invitation, artists work with Wingate Studio’s master printers to produce original artworks in the form of limited-edition etchings. Artists direct the projects while master printers enable and facilitate. While the world has been drastically altered by technology since Wingate Studio’s inception, the mode of production has remained much the same. Artists still scratch into copper plates with tools and paint onto plates with solutions made of sugar, asphalt, and soap in the same way artists did in the 1600s. Wingate Studio’s printers ink up the plates, wipe them, and print them by hand.

Each artist in the exhibition has produced work that expands their own practice through the process of etching, which ranges from abstract to figurative. Pakistani-American artist Ambreen Butt’s Daughter of the East series contains autobiographical elements through her use of self-portraiture and themes that refer both to her childhood in Pakistan as well as her relationship to her home country as an American citizen, while Josephine Halverson’s Fire is a life-size depiction of the wood stove at Wingate Studio. The artist began her project in the fall of 2018, continuing through the winter, spring, and summer. As her first etching, she tried many processes before finding her hand in the medium. As the project progressed, the artist came to understand that it was impossible to fix light and flame, especially through this deliberate medium that was slower and less direct than painting. She asked, “How does one take something that’s changing and transforming before them and give it form through process?”

Included artists: Meghan Brady (b. Connecticut 1975), Sascha Braunig (b. British Columbia 1983), Ambreen Butt (b. Pakistan 1969), Mira Dancy (b. New Hampshire 1979), Dana Frankfurt (b. Texas 1971), Josephine Halverson (Massachusetts 1981), Xylor Jane (b. California 1963), Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. Illinois 1978), and Marie Watt (b. Washington 1967).

Organized by PCG Interim Director Kate McNamara with James Pettengill of Wingate Studio.