Widow: Peregrine Honig, Landfall Press and a Print Disguised as a Magazine

The object that the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas catalogues as accession number 2011.0051.a-d comes in four parts. There is a bound volume of 167 pages printed in commercial offset lithography. There is an audio CD. There is a glove, and there is a case to keep the glove in. The museum bought the set with its Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund and lists four names against it: the artist Peregrine Honig, the designer Peggy Noland, the musician Jimmy Carl Black, and Landfall Press, credited as printer.

The work is called Widow, and it is dated 2010. Honig’s own description is blunt about what the thing pretends to be. It is, in her words, “an editioned print masquerading as an editorial fashion magazine”, and it was produced and published by Landfall Press. That a press built on stone lithography would put its name to something that looks like a glossy periodical says a good deal about how that workshop has thought about printmaking for more than half a century.

A workshop moves to the middle of the country

Landfall Press began in Chicago in 1970. Its founder, Jack Lemon, had studied lithography at the Kansas City Art Institute, and before opening his own shop he set up and directed lithography workshops at that school in 1965 and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1968. The Knoxville Museum of Art credits the press with playing a key role in widening the geography of the American postwar print revival. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art puts it more directly: Lemon carried that revival from the coasts to the Midwest.

Lithography was always the house specialty, but the press also produced etchings, woodcuts, books and multiples. It stayed in Chicago for 35 years and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2004. Fort Wayne notes that after Lemon retired, the studio continued under the name Black Rock Editions.

The list of artists who worked there is long and unusually mixed. The Milwaukee Art Museum names Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Christo, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Nancy Graves, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg and Kara Walker. It also names Chicago Imagists Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi and Karl Wirsum, alongside regional artists such as T.L. Solien and Tom Uttech. Knoxville adds Judy Chicago, Jiha Moon, Nicky Nodjoumi and Martin Puryear. Fort Wayne adds Robert Indiana, together with Nusra Latif Qureshi and Fatima Ronquillo, whom it describes as emerging international artists.

That range matters. A workshop that prints for a conceptual artist one month and a Chicago Imagist the next has to stay flexible about what a print is for. The Fort Wayne exhibition text says the press made books and multiples that often redefined what a print can be. Widow sits squarely in that habit.

What Widow is made of

According to Honig’s account, the volume gathers her paintings, writings, collaborations and photography into grouped collections. The project took two years. It was curated by Jack Lemon himself, working as master printer, designed by Bob Fei, and assembled with what Honig calls an international team of artists. The idea, as stated, was to make it hard to tell where luxury goods end and fine art begins.

The bound CD carries the final studio recording of Jimmy Carl Black, whom Honig identifies as a member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. The glove is a reading glove, patterned to order, covering the thumb and pointer finger so that a reader can turn pages without marking them.

That glove is the sharpest joke in the piece and also its most serious claim. Fashion magazines are made to be handled, creased and thrown away. Fine prints are handled with cotton gloves, if at all. By supplying the glove, Widow tells its owner which category it belongs to, while looking at every turn like the other one. The choice of commercial offset lithography, rather than hand pulled stone or plate printing, makes the same point from the other direction. The process is the one that prints actual magazines. The edition, the publisher and the curatorial hand are those of a fine art press.

The two sources differ slightly on the page count: Honig gives 168 pages and the Spencer Museum records 167. Honig’s listing gives the dimensions as 13 by 10.25 by half an inch; the museum records 26.03 by 32.38 centimetres.

Honig and Landfall before Widow

Widow was not Honig’s first appearance in the Landfall story. When the Kansas City Art Institute mounted Landfall Press: 1970 to 2000 in its gallery from November 9 to December 19, 2001, the show drew on 23 artists represented in the school’s permanent collection, and Honig was among them. She hung in company with Kara Walker, Vito Acconci, Roger Brown, Lesley Dill, Claes Oldenburg, Christo, Chuck Close, Pat Steir, William Wiley, Terry Allen, Sol LeWitt, Tony Fitzpatrick, Dennis Oppenheim and Philip Pearlstein, among others. The school presented the exhibition as an overview of prints and suites published by the press, which it ranked among the leading print workshops in the country.

The Kansas City link runs both ways. Lemon was an alumnus of the Art Institute, and the school held enough Landfall material in its own collection to build a 30 year survey from it.

Where the record lives

Much of Landfall’s own record sits in one place. Conversations between Lemon and the Milwaukee Art Museum began in the spring of 1989. Lemon gave part of the press archive as a gift, and the museum bought the rest in 1992 with support from private donors; the physical transfer took place in April of that year.

What arrived in Milwaukee was more than a set of finished sheets. The museum describes more than six hundred prints published by Landfall since 1970, plus related material that brings the archive close to five thousand items. That material includes proofs at various stages, etching plates, woodblocks, lithographic stones, mylar sheets, photographic negatives, colour separations, stencils, studies, collages and drawings. For anyone trying to understand how a print was actually made, the stones and separations are often more revealing than the edition itself. The museum calls the archive a unique resource for studying a significant chapter in American printmaking.

The press has also been the subject of touring attention more recently. The Knoxville Museum of Art showed Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking from December 16, 2022, to April 30, 2023, with 50 prints. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art presented an exhibition under the same title from August 19 to November 12, 2023, with funding from the Edward D. and Ione Auer Foundation.

A press that kept testing the edges

Seen against that history, Widow looks less like an outlier and more like a late statement of the press’s working method. Landfall made its name on exacting lithography, the kind of technical standard Knoxville singles out. It also published objects that stretched what a print could be. A 167 page volume in offset, bound with a CD and a glove, published as an edition by a master printer who spent decades on stones and plates, belongs to both traditions at once.

It also dates from the Santa Fe period, the years from 2004 that the Spencer Museum’s record assigns to the press as printer. The workshop that once brought the print revival to Chicago was, by 2010, using the language of a fashion magazine to ask an old question about value: what makes an image on paper a thing to keep, and who gets to decide.