The Print Center is pleased to present ULAE: Prints for a New Generation. While Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) is well known for its central role in reviving lithography in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, this exhibition extols its enduring importance as a site of conceptually adventurous and technically ambitious printmaking during the 1980s and 90s. Works by nine leading contemporary masters made at ULAE - Carroll Dunham, Jane Hammond, Bill Jensen, Julian Lethbridge, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith, and Terry Winters - demonstrate this vital pulse.

Spotlight on Kiki Smith

The thirty-five-year collaboration between multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith and ULAE has been especially fruitful, allowing her to explore many printmaking processes. Collaborations with the studio's master printers have materialized into creatively ambitious prints at a large scale and with technical ingenuity. This is the first solo installation of Smith's work in Philadelphia since an exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2002-03.

Smith's earliest prints at ULAE aligned with her shift in artistic concerns from the corporeality of women's bodies to subject matter that also accounted for their social, cultural and political experiences. For example, her first project, the landmark lithograph Hair, 1990, suggests an Abstract Expressionist painting as well as the potency of women's sexuality. Over time, her work became increasingly personal as interests evolved to include self-portraiture, the construction of female gender roles in life and literature, the give-and-take between people and nature, and the folklore that illustrates society's values.