Landfall Press Santa Fe, NM
For forty years, Landfall Press has collaborated with artists to produce printed multiples in a broad range of techniques and media. Editions published by Landfall Press, which number more than 650, represent the diversity of trends in contemporary art; yet, at their inception, many of these works challenged the boundaries of traditional printmaking.
Founded in 1970 by Jack Lemon, Landfall Press has served as a unique space for artists. Devoted to traditional methods of printmaking such as lithography, as well as more innovative processes, editions published at Landfall Press often transcend the conventional format of two-dimensional works on paper. For instance, Landfall Press was the first publisher to add wrapped three-dimensional collage elements to Christo's prints.
In addition to purely visual images, Landfall Press has published poetry, music, and fiction, as well as formats which combine these oeuvres, such as the hand-printed artist's book. Among the more unique editions published by Landfall Press are Robert Arneson's Brick Suite—accompanied by a cast ceramic brick embossed with the artist's name—and Terry Allen's Juarez Suite, a boxed set which includes a record album of music and narration related to the printed images.
Printmaking at Landfall Press is a collaborative process. Whether the concerns of an individual artist involve abstraction, narrative, obsessive realism, political satire, conceptual practices, or site-specific performances, the process of printmaking demands technical execution and flexibility from both artist and printer. Long-standing relationships with artists such as Christo, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Cottingham, and Vernon Fisher testify to the rewards of such collaborations, while in the past decade relationships have formed with artists such as Leslie Dill, Kara Walker, and James Drake.
The accomplishments of Landfall Press's thirty year history have been celebrated nationally. In 1995, the Art Institute of Chicago held a highly successful retrospective exhibition. In 1993, the Milwaukee Art Museum established the Landfall Press Archives, and opened a major Landfall Press retrospective in September 1996, with an accompanying catalog. More recently, in 1997, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened A Singular Vision: Prints from Landfall Press, celebrating the unique vision of the press and its founder, Jack Lemon.
