Across the Spectrum: Selections from the ColorPrint USA Collection

Color clamors for attention, draws us in or repels us. It can make us happy or sad. Each color is a reflection of a point on the visible light spectrum. This exhibition presents fourteen late 20th century art works in which color reigns. From explosions of saturated reds to subdued greys, the artist's use of color directs our eyes, seeks our attention, and might even make us look twice.

For many centuries black ink on white paper dominated printmaking. On occasion highlights of color (often watercolor) were added by individually coloring each print, a time consuming undertaking. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, technical changes in printing processes encouraged production of colorful prints...and they increased in numbers at an extraordinary pace.

Between 1968 and 2006 Lynwood Kreneck, a professor in the Texas Tech University School of Art, organized and curated a series of eighteen exhibitions called ColorPrint USA. The exhibitions featured wide-ranging selections of contemporary American fine art printmaking, quite literally from every state in the Union.

The exhibition that Kreneck organized in 1998 was Spanning the States in '98. This show featured prints by artists from each of the fifty States. A rather daunting administrative and curatorial effort, the organization of the exhibition included cross-country car trips to meet artists and co-ordinate (with the help of his wife, Eleanor Kreneck) the paperwork, shipping, field research, and cataloging that accompanied this ambition. Perhaps even more amazing, each participating artist not only received a set of all of the prints but organized local exhibitions at a local museum or art center. On one weekend in November of 1998, all fifty exhibitions opened on the same day in each State...certainly a colorful accomplishment.

During the three decades that Kreneck organized ColorPrint USA, prints from the exhibitions were collected. This collection of some 300 works of art, originally part of the TTU School of Art, was transferred to the Museum of Texas Tech University in 2005 and has served as a nexus for the development of the Museum's world renowned, globally unparalleled, and nationally incomparable Artist Printmaker Research Collection. All of the works in this exhibit are from the Museum's collection.