Threaded Tensions: Chakaia Booker, Raque Ford, Tomashi Jackson, and Mavis Pusey: Selections from Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
Upcoming event:
In anticipation of Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson at the MFA Boston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, LaiSun Keane is pleased to welcome the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), the longest-running community printshop in the U.S. While the Blackburn Print Archive documents Wilson’s frequent collaborations with RBPMW, it is less widely known that Robert Blackburn was Wilson’s best man at his wedding.
Blackburn pioneered experimentation in color lithography, once using up to 17 colors with multiple stones. Many of his works exist as unique variations rather than traditional editions, with subtle shifts in color and composition. Threaded Tensions reflects Blackburn’s ethos of experimentation, featuring artists rooted in textiles and printmaking.
Mavis Pusey (1928 - 2019) arrived at the Workshop by way of Jamaica, the homeland of Robert Blackburn’s parents. Initially trained in fashion—sewing was a common skill of women of her generation—she ultimately pursued painting and printmaking at The Art Students League under Blackburn’s mentor, Will Barnet. After working in Europe at Atelier 17, she returned to New York and became involved with RBPMW. Her compositions often reference urban life through abstraction from dilapidated architecture, invented mechanical gears, and musical notations.
Like Pusey, Raque Ford initially pursued fashion before shifting her focus to fine art. Music and pop culture deeply influence her work—evident in her large-scale installations of dance floors and fan fiction. Ford’s printmaking process transforms plexiglass into ready-made matrices for monotypes, combining drypoint, chine-collé, and layered text. Her work frequently incorporates personal history, such as references to names of segregated cemeteries –”Hollywood” and “Friendship”– in her mother’s Arkansas hometown. She also blurs digital and analog spaces, integrating robotic text, such as automated messages that read, Reply ‘STOP’ to stop.
Tomashi Jackson combines practices of painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure and policy. Considering color as both chromatic and social, her work embraces compositional abstraction to investigate the interaction of color and its impact on the perceived value of human life in public space. The works presented are two framed color portraits, one of Nia K. Evans from the 2022 body of work titled "The Great Society" and the other of Michi Meko from the 2017 body of work titled "Interstate Lovesong".
Chakaia Booker’s engagement with textiles informs both her sculptural and printmaking practices. While living in New York’s East Village, she salvaged her first tire from a burnt-out car, setting the foundation for her signature sculptural style.
Much like piecing together fabric, Booker assembles discarded tires into intricate, abstract forms. This instinctive process extends into her printmaking, where she slices, layers, and collages reliefs, lithographs, and chine-collé works, introducing gesture and improvisation. Her tradition of abstraction was influenced by her teacher, Al Loving and others such as Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards and Martin Puryeur.
- Text by Essye Klempner, Director of Programming and Partnerships, EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
Special thanks to Mark Brock, LaiSun Keane, the artists and their galleries: Chakaia Booker is represented by David Nolan Gallery; Tomashi Jackson is represented by Tilton Gallery; Raque Ford is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery.
EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (EFA RBPMW) is the oldest and longest-running community print shop in the United States. Not only a co-operative printmaking workspace that provides professional-quality printmaking facilities to artists and printmakers of every skill level, EFA RBPMW is committed to inspiring and fostering its diverse artistic community. Dedicated to the making of fine art prints in an environment that embraces technical and aesthetic exploration, innovation, and collaboration, EFA RBPMW seeks to improve the overall quality of fine art printmaking by providing low cost, unfettered access to printers, equipment, and education. It is with this spirit of openness and inclusion that Robert Blackburn's vision of sustaining this welcoming, creative environment continues to serve as the backbone of the workshop today.
Chakaia Booker (b.1953 Newark, New Jersey) is an internationally renowned and widely collected American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works from recycled tires and stainless steel for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the US, in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago (2016-2018), Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY (2014), and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington DC.
Raque Ford (b.1986, Columbia, Maryland) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A public artwork by Ford commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art is now on view through March of 2025, and her work is currently on view at Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna through March 15, 2025. A forthcoming solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit opens in 2025. Recent solo presentations include The Print Center, Philadelphia (2023); Good Weather, Chicago (2023); Greene Naftali, New York (2022, 2020); 321 Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); CAPITAL, San Francisco (2017); and Shoot the Lobster, New York (2017). Significant group shows include Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2022); MoMA PS1, New York (2021); Morán Morán, Mexico City (2021); Kai Matsumiya, New York (2019); Roberta Pelan, Toronto (2017); SculptureCenter, Queens (2016); and Division Gallery, Montreal (2016). Ford’s work is in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Tomashi Jackson (b.1980, Houston, Texas) is a multimedia artist whose works span across painting, textile, video and sculpture. Jackson earned her BFA from The Cooper Union of the Advancement of Science and Art, her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Her vast educational experiences manifest in an expansive oeuvre that explores the historical, contemporary, political, and aesthetic. Jackson was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and her works can be found in public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Jackson is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, such as the 24th Rappaport Prize from the de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2023, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2020, and the Blair Dickinson Memorial Scholarship from the Yale University School of Art in 2016. Along with her artistic practice, Jackson has taught at Harvard University as a visiting lecturer and has held positions as an adjunct professor at both the Rhode Island School of Design and the Cooper Union School of Art. She is currently based in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
Mavis Pusey (1928 - 2019) was born in Retreat, Jamaica and moved to New York City at the age of 18 to study fashion design at the Traphagen School of Fashion. She later enrolled in courses at the Art Students League of New York, where she earned a Ford Foundation scholarship and studied under artists such as Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. Following her studies at the Art Students League, Pusey moved to London and worked as a pattern maker for the Singer Corporation and had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1968 before returning to NYC in 1969, where she began printmaking with Robert Blackburn. In 1971, Pusey was featured in a group exhibition at the Whitney entitled Contemporary Black Artists in America and in 2024, Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than The Real Thing. In addition to her own art-making, Pusey taught at The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Rutgers University. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of institutions including the MFA Boston, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her works are abstract, geometric, and non-representational, in conversation with the sociopolitical context in which she was working, but remaining true to her own practice.
