Michelle Donnelly

The home, the studio, the outdoor environment, the incarceration camp, and the science lab are vital locations of print production. Yet, scholars have overwhelmingly focused on prints made in the workshop or in institutional facilities stocked with specialized equipment and overseen by “master printers.” This dissertation investigates how American women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional site of the workshop from 1935 to 1975. Each spatially organized chapter centers on one individual artist: Ruth Asawa, David Hammons, Sari Dienes, Matsusaburo “George” Hibi, and Caroline Durieux. All five artists directly engaged with the physical, ideological, and sociopolitical conditions of the spaces in which they were 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 reimagine their relationships to gendered, racialized, and colonized spaces. In dialogue with critical craft studies, gender studies, critical race art history, and cultural geography, I reveal how sites of creative production were not neutral but actively generated meaning in these five artists’ works. 

This project demonstrates how artists challenged prevailing definitions of “print” in the face of structural barriers. Without access to conventional presses or supplies, they developed radical printing methods that pulled from their environments. Asawa reclaimed stamps from the laundry room, Hammons impressed bodies in a former dance hall, Dienes rolled brayers against the surfaces of cliffs, Hibi transformed flooring material into printing blocks in army-style barracks, and Durieux invented radioactive ink in a nuclear research center. By reframing printmaking as an embodied activity that occurred in a wide range of settings, my dissertation illuminates how systemically excluded artists grappled with issues of place and belonging across the pre- and post-war United States.