Alan Shields (1944-2005): Selections from the Jones Road Print Shop

From October 5 through November 11, 2007, The Drawing Room is pleased to present "Alan Shields (1944-2005): Selections from the Jones Road Print Shop, 1971-1978", an exhibition of ten distinctive prints that Shields produced in collaboration with the master printer, William Weege, at the experimental print shop Weege founded in rural Wisconsin in 1971.

Upon arriving in New York in 1968 after attending college at Kansas State University, Shields quickly found his place in the vibrant New York art community at a time when the traditional divisions between painting, sculpture and printmaking were being called into question. As a college student, Shields had already begun integrating stitching into his paintings, one of many idiosyncratic techniques that characterized his lifelong approach to art making. Shortly after his inclusion in the first of many shows at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968, the grid became a dominant form in both his paintings and his prints. By 1970, his canvas works incorporated colored strips of industrial cotton webbing stitched into open grids and other structures that were often suspended from the ceiling to permit viewing from both sides. Just as his monumental works gained notoriety for defying conventional parameters of painting or sculpture, Shields’ expansive use of materials and techniques in his prints earned him high praise. The ten prints assembled for this exhibition offer viewers insight into the broad range of innovative printing methods that he embraced during the 1970s and beyond.

See below for full press release and selected works.