Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA), is named for the influential African American artist and master printer Robert Blackburn (b.1920, Summit, NJ; d.2003, New York), who founded the workshop in 1947. RBPMW’s archive includes work by artists from over sixty countries who participated in Robert Blackburn’s open-access cooperative model. Essye Klempner and Jazmine Catasús’s curatorial program for the RBPMW aims to ensure the archive remains relevant for future generations. They prioritize working with contemporary artists whose practices align with Blackburn’s ethos of embracing diverse and intergenerational perspectives in the graphic arts community. 

Robert Blackburn at a teach-in for N***** Drawing Protest, 105 Hudson Street, New York, 1979. Courtesy Hatch-Billops Collection

Over the next three years, RBPMW will foreground its international connections through “Global Impressions,” a programming initiative that builds on Blackburn’s legacy of solidarity with artists from the Global South, showing how print has functioned as both cultural resistance and diasporic exchange. Emerging and established curators and scholars—including Amina Ahmed, Imani Congdon, Shameekia Shantel Johnson, Jenna Hamed, Ethel Renia, Key Jo Lee and Stefanie Jason—will be invited to work with the archive and link it to contemporary print practices. 

Artist Michael Kelly Williams in Asilah, Morocco, where Robert Blackburn was invited along with fellow workshop artists to help establish a printshop, ca.1981. Courtesy Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW)

In fall 2025, RBPMW will present Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, a twenty-year survey of the workshop’s history and legacy, at the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery. The 2026 season features a retrospective of Sudanese printmaker Mohammad Omer Khalil (b.1936), showcasing seven decades of Khalil’s prints as well as collaborations with contemporaries including Romare Bearden, Louise Nevelson, and Al Held. In 1978, Blackburn and Khalil co-founded a printshop and residency in the coastal town of Asilah, Morocco, and participated in the Moussem of Asilah, an annual summer festival that has become one of the most important cultural events in North Africa. A subsequent project, Oui Asilah: Robert Blackburn in Morocco, will reconstruct RBPMW’s presence at the Moussem through prints, posters, and photographs from 1978–90. 

Later exhibitions will revisit RBPMW’s Third World Fellowship Awards (1983–84) and its ties to anti-apartheid organizing and transnational solidarity movements, culminating in new programming with contemporary artists including Shadi Harouni, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Baseera Khan, and Nyugen E. Smith.

Baseera Khan, ACT UP, 2020. Screen print. Courtesy Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW)

Jazmine Catasús is Artistic Director and one of the Master Printers of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW) at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA). She has been involved with EFA RBPMW since 2013. Catasús works with community members and the public within the printshop facilities and the archive. She has collaborated on printmaking projects with artists such as Lizanina Cruz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Dindga McCannon. Catasús has led printmaking workshops at several institutions, including the Center for Contemporary Printmaking (Norwalk, CT), Print Center New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. 

Essye Klempner is Director of Programming and Partnerships at EFA and RBPMW. For nearly a decade, she has led their residency and educational programs, partnerships with colleges, museums, and institutions, and has activated their archive of over 10,000 prints through exhibitions and public programming. Most recently, Klempner initiated the Blackburn Oral History Project, funded by Hauser & Wirth Institute; an online educational platform for the project, supported by the Dedalus Foundation, is in development.

Evan Garza, Ade Omotosho, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA)