Octagon Center for the Arts

Twenty Years: APRIL KATZ + 29 former printmaking students
2019-05-25 - 2019-08-17 | Octagon Center for the Arts, 427 Douglas Avenue, Ames, IA, 50010, United States
LOCATED IN THE MAIN GALLERY
Print Retrospective

Artist Bio: April Katz
April Katz received her M.F.A. degree from Arizona State University. She is Morrill Professor at Iowa State University where she has taught printmaking since 1999. For nineteen years she organized the university’s annual international postcard print exchange. From 2004 – 2006 Katz served as president of the Southern Graphics Council. Her prints, which synthesize digital and traditional printmaking processes, are in numerous collections and have been exhibited throughout the US and recently in Portugal, Spain and China. She has presented papers for print, photographic and visual literacy professional national and international conferences.
Katz’s primary language and tool is the print whose vocabulary includes transfers, layers, seriality and variations on a theme. Death of loved ones, serious illness and political discord are the forces that have shaken Katz to the core and led her to ask fundamental human questions about herself and her relationship to the world. She searches for connections between disparate elements to understand and convey their impact on current personal and cultural identity.
20 Years: April Katz and the Expanded ISU Printmaking Community
This 20-year retrospective includes examples from a variety of print series I made while teaching printmaking at Iowa State University. The community I share with my students, past and present; in my collaborations with JoAnn Boehmer as a member of BOKA; and as a regular participant in national and international dialogues at print conferences nurtures my artistic growth and stimulates my passion for creative inquiry. I am so pleased that former and current ISU printmaking students are willing to share their work with each other and with the Ames community for this exhibition.
Retrospection, the action of reviewing the past, encapsulates the primary focus of my prints. My work asks viewers to consider the role the past plays in shaping current identity. This initially involved personal memory and the recording of the day-to-day details that make up our lives. However, my investigation expanded to include historical, cultural and biological factors that shape us as individuals.
