Allan L. Edmunds is an African American printmaker and educator born in 1949 in Philadelphia. He attended Saturday-morning art classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia from sixth through twelfth grade and earned a BFA in art with a minor in education from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Edmunds also earned an MFA from the same program as well as a certificate in education. He worked for the Print Club (now Print Center) in Philadelphia in the Prints in Progress educational outreach program and he was also mentored by African American artist Samuel Joseph Brown. Edmunds founded the Brandywine Workshop in 1972 as a space to encourage diversity within fine art and printmaking and later extended it as a nonprofit educational institution to advance artists’ expertise in print media. He was inspired by African American artist Robert Blackburn to explore experimental screenprinting and light-sensitive processes, and he was encouraged by African American printmaker John E. Dowell Jr. to begin making offset prints in 1981. Regarding his interest in novel and experimental printmaking techniques, Edmunds explained, “This continuous interchange between traditional print techniques and the innovative use of current technology provides cost-effective benefits to producers of print editions. It also gives many artists the chance to realize their prints as extensions of aesthetic investigations in other media.”[1]
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Notes
[1] Edmunds quoted in Taha 2004, 32.
References
Taha, Halima. 2004. “Romance and Ritual: An Introduction.” In Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection. Edited by Allan L. Edmunds. New York: Hudson Hills Press.
Fine, Ruth. 2012. “Education as Activism: Conversation in Print.” In Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop. Organized by Shelley R. Langdale. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Further Reading
Woodmere Art Museum. 2015. “Allan Edmunds.” In We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s. Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum.
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