NEW BRUNSWICK.- Since Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup can images first appeared in the 1960s, Pop Art has remained a pervasive force in contemporary art. Numerous artists have created bold, colorful pictures inspired by every day reality and the American Dream: advertising, comics, food, mass-produced consumer goods, the media, political turmoil, and sexy nudes. Pop artists revolutionized printmaking by incorporating photography and commercial processes. Ranging from humorous to arrestingly serious, or ordinary to glamorous, this exhibition of sixty prints explores the interaction of popular culture and printmaking across four decades.
The artists represented in this exhibition include: Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Selected primarily from the collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the exhibition also features a special loan from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Co-curated by Marilyn Symmes, the Zimmerli Art Museum’s curator in charge of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts, and Joan Marter, a Rutgers University art history professor, this exhibition was realized with the participation of eight Rutgers art history graduate students who took the 2008 exhibition seminar.