About the artist:

Printmaker and educator Romas Viesulas (1918-1986) holds a preeminent place in the history of American printmaking. Beginning his artistic career in the late 1940s as an exile from war, he ultimately radicalized the medium by emphasizing the print as an abstract form of expression and printmaking as both a craft and an aesthetic end in itself. Viesulas taught at Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania and in Rome for 25 years while pioneering graphic techniques and becoming recognized as one of the foremost American printmakers of his generation. Exploring associations between image and sound, testing the medium’s limits through inkless reliefs and monumental prints on fabric, Viesulas created a unique oeuvre that forms part of the permanent collections of the world’s most prestigious museums. His vision and methods continue to inspire and instruct present and future generations of printmakers.

He was born in Lasai, Lithuania (current Latvia, near Daugavpils). In 1949, he attended the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, Freiburg and then the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1950. Throughout the the next 20 years, he was featured in several group and solo exhibitions in the US and Europe, including at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, the 1966 Whitney Biennial, and "Thirty Years of American Printmaking" at the Brooklyn Museum in 1976. He spent his last 10 years living and working in Rome, where he died in 1986.