“Detritus: Dried Lace,” an intaglio print by Tusculum College art professor Dr. Deborah Bryan, received the Atlantic Paper Award at the North American Print Biennial. Dr. Bryan has upcoming exhibitions in Colorado and Virginia.
Dr. Deborah Bryan, assistant professor of art at Tusculum College, spends her fall and spring semesters teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and art history classes, but during her summers, she shifts gears and works in her studio in rural Carter County.
The output form those summers has been exhibited at several national and international juried exhibitions, most recently the prestigious North American Print Biennial at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Mass., and the Bradley International Works on Paper Exhibition at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
The North American Print Biennial features virtually every kind of print made including woodcut and linocut prints, etchings, aquatints, engravings, drypoint, mezzotint, collagraph, lithographs, monotypes, monoprints, screen prints and digital prints. This year there were a record number of entries, with 811 artists submitting 2,064 works. From those submissions, 149 prints by 120 artists were accepted. Bryan exhibited two works from her recent “Detritus” series, and received the Atlantic Paper Award for one, “Detritus: Dried Lace.”
“Dried Lace” is a type of intaglio print. In this case the copper plate was etched several times to produce the final product, which was then printed with standard printmaking papers and specially-prepared colored Asian papers, in a process called chine colle.
Bryan’s work in the Bradley International Exhibition was an artist’s book titled “Favorite Dead Birds.” The covers of this book were constructed from sycamore, sheet mica, acrylic sheet, two very old bird wings, and linen thread. The content consisted of original inkjet prints in an accordion format. The Bradley is the second-longest running juried print and drawing competition in the country.
In addition to these two exhibitions, Bryan has an upcoming solo exhibition planned at the Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Co., from October 7-29. According to Bryan, “the work for this exhibition consists of 26 artist’s books and a small selection of prints from the ‘Detritus’ series.”
In 2012, Bryan has a solo exhibition scheduled for January at the William King Museum in Abingdon, Va. All of the work in this exhibition will be from the “Detritus” series, including approximately 30 framed prints, intaglio and wood engravings.