UNIVERSITY PARK, PA.- The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State opened Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint. This remarkable exhibition brings together forty-seven works on loan from public and private collections that reveal the experimental printmaking process, known as the carborundum mezzotint, pioneered by the Philadelphia-based artist Dox Thrash (1893–1965), who was also a noted participant in the New Negro movement of the 1930s and ’40s.

“This exhibition sheds important light one of the great figures in the history of American printmaking, and how he used the carborundum mezzotint process, along with other media, to chronicle aspects of the African American experience well before the dawn of the Civil Rights era,” stated Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art.

A veteran of World War I as well as the minstrel stage, Thrash trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before making his way to Philadelphia, where he ultimately forged a career as both a painter and a graphic artist.

In 1937, Thrash signed on for employment with the Federal Art Project’s Fine Print Workshop. There, while working with fellow artists Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher, he began to experiment with a new approach to printmaking, which today is known as the carborundum mezzotint process. By thoroughly abrading a plate with particles of carborundum, or silicon carbide, the artists created a design on its surface by burnishing and scraping. When inked and printed, the plate yielded an image that was remarkably rich in darks and lights. With its broad tonal range, the new process was ideally suited to the sensitive portrayals of Black life for which Thrash would become known.

"Thrash has long been recognized as an innovative printmaker,” said Palmer Museum curator Joyce Robinson, “but it’s important to note that his subject matter, drawn deep from within African American culture, played a key role in his artistic output.”

The exhibition brings together numerous examples of the experimental process by Thrash and other colleagues working in the Fine Print Workshop. It also features works by Thrash in other print mediums, as well as watercolors and drawings, all of which powerfully document the artist’s intimate, invested engagement with African American culture in the 1930s and 1940s.

The exhibition was organized by Palmer Museum of Art Charles V. Hallman Curator, Patrick McGrady with Dolan/Maxwell of Philadelphia. “The exhibition celebrates the many artistic achievements of Dox Thrash, an important but still underappreciated African-American artist,” stated McGrady. “The show concentrates on Thrash’s role in the development of the carborundum mezzotint, a new printmaking technique that brought him national recognition in the years leading up to the Second World War.”

Also on view at the Palmer Museum of Art this spring are Pop at the Palmer, January 9 through May 13; and Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials, February 13 through June 17.