NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ.- The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey offers a diverse winter line-up that includes The Color of Night: How Artists Work With Darkness, an exhibition of forty-two American prints drawn entirely from the Zimmerli’s collection. The exhibition runs through July 31 in the museum’s Eisenberg Gallery for American Prints. Art historians often celebrate the use of light in art, but in The Color of Night: How Artists Work with Darkness, we celebrate techniques that convey darkness. Each work has been carefully selected to encourage visitors to look into the shadows and relish the variations we find inside rich areas of darkness. Edward Hopper, for instance, often lengthens the shadows in his compositions to heighten the drama and isolation of the people we find there. His 1921 masterpiece Night Shadows is a wonderful example of this expert rendering of not only light but also darkness.

In Untitled (Galaxy), the contemporary artist Vija Celmins fills her picture planes with deep, starlit skies until the viewer falls helplessly into this dark depiction of infinity. It is through the darkness that these artists reveal the subject and emotion of their works of art. Rarely do these artists limit themselves to pure black and white. The turn-of-the-century artist Joseph Pennell mixed his blacks with reds and greens to warm or cool a scene, while Sarah Brayer, working today, discards black ink entirely in favor of blues and browns to portrait the softness of a summer evening. Different printing processes offer variations in tonal range. The drypoint of Martin Lewis casts a soft prism of shadows across his urban nightscape. The rich, black layers of mezzotint in Robert Kipness’s work persuade our eyes to burrow into the scene. The crisp, flat areas of blackness in Helen Gerardia’s stencil print offer a geometric rhythm to the falling moonlight. These and other printing techniques are explained in a free gallery guide.