Unshackled Ink is an exhibition organized by the Schomburg Center’s Teen Curators Program, an afterschool art history program for high school students. Drawing from prints in the Art and Artifacts Division, the Teen Curators focused on the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Collection featuring works by African-American artist Robert “Bob” Blackburn, as well as artists he taught, mentored and inspired.
A master printmaker, Blackburn founded the renowned Printmaking Workshop in New York in 1948 as a cooperative open to artists of all ethnicities and nationalities for little or no cost. The Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Collection at the Schomburg is comprised largely of black artists from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Unshackled Ink is a tribute to Blackburn and the diverse community of black artists he empowered. In the title, “Ink” refers to printmaking ink and the melanin in black peoples’ skin, while “unshackled” refers to breaking the chains that historically and figuratively bound black people in search of freedom. For the many artists Blackburn inspired, printmaking can be seen as a liberatory medium and artmaking a revolutionary act.
Organized in three sections -- Roots, Struggle, and Vignette -- this exhibition celebrates unapologetic blackness and printmaking as means to liberate, uplift, and empower.
This exhibition took place in the American Negro Theatre in 2017.
