L.A. Style: Printmaking at Gemini G.E.L., 1966–1976

The revolution in American printmaking began in the late 1950s with the founding of professional print shops, reaching a new apex of productivity and innovation in the 1960s and 1970s. When Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) was founded in Los Angeles in 1966, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race were in full swing, and social and cultural revolutions were gaining momentum worldwide. Andy Warhol was producing the Velvet Underground’s debut album, and the Minimalist movement gained its first widespread recognition, distilling avant-garde sculpture into simple, mechanically produced shapes. At the end of the first ten formative years of Gemini, the war was over, having left an indelible mark on American society. Second-wave feminism had emerged as a potent political force, and the founding of Microsoft and Apple signaled the beginning of the digital age.

Modernism, the dominant mode in art for almost a century, had exhausted itself and given way to radical explorations that pushed the boundaries of art into the uncharted territory of the post-Modern. The same critical eyes of a generation that revolutionized the social structures and cultural values of mid-century America turned on the assumptions of the art world, rethinking previously unquestioned aspects of its practices. It was a decade of fundamental changes that have continued to define contemporary art today.