FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 27, 2001

Contact: Lisa Cordes (M-AAA) 816.421.1388

The Prairie Print Makers Exhibition Begins National Tour

Kansas City, Mo. -- ExhibitsUSA, Mid-America Arts Alliance's national museum service division, has announced a national tour of The Prairie Print Makers exhibition to begin on May 31, 2001, at the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Phillips Petroleum Company, headquartered in Bartlesville, is the official sponsor of the exhibition and its four-year national tour, organized to span from New York to Alaska and Minnesota to Texas. After its opening in Oklahoma, the first leg of the exhibition tour includes venues in New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

The Prairie Print Makers, a Kansas-based print organization founded in 1930 to promote the interest of printmakers and print collectors, was composed of the foremost printmakers in America during the middle part of the 20th century including John Steuart Curry, Birger Sandzen, John Taylor Arms, Gustave Baumann, Peter Hurd, Clare Leighton, Maynard Dixon, and Stow Wengenroth. During the Depression, the Prairie Print Makers sponsored inexpensive traveling sales exhibitions of new work by its active members. In addition, every year the organization commissioned a print to be created by one of its members. The Prairie Print Makers brings together a complete set of the gift prints issued by this pioneering graphics society and presents a distinguished chapter in the history of art making in the Midwest to museum visitors nationwide.

The 34 gift prints in ExhibitsUSA's The Prairie Print Makers exhibition were issued during the life of the organization (1931-1965) and run the gamut of traditional printmaking techniques: lithographs, etchings, drypoints, aquatints, wood engravings, and color woodblocks. This exhibition of representational prints reveals the richness and variety of printmaking in the Midwest and makes accessible the printing innovations of artists such as Maurice Bebb, Lloyd C. Foltz, Doel Reed, and Levon West.

Thanks to a generous gift from a Mid-America Arts Alliance director, ExhibitsUSA has been able to purchase a complete set of these prints and, in association with Phillips Petroleum Company, can now provide the public an opportunity to see all of the group's gift prints exclusively. In addition to providing vital underwriting support for the development of the exhibition and related educational materials, including programming guides and teacher/docent packets, Mid-America Arts Alliance's relationship with Phillips Petroleum Company provides ExhibitsUSA the opportunity to reduce exhibition costs and subsidize outreach activities for local organizations in underserved communities throughout the Midwest. Additionally, ExhibitsUSA has produced an accompanying color exhibition catalogue which includes essays by Karal Ann Marling, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Bill North, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art; and Elizabeth Seaton, Art Institute of Chicago.

The Prairie Print Makers is organized and toured by ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance. ExhibitsUSA was founded in 1988 to create access to an array of arts and humanities exhibitions, nurture the development and understanding of diverse art forms and cultures, and encourage the expanding depth and breadth of cultural life in local communities. Over the past twelve years, more than 12 million visitors in 786 communities in all 50 states and abroad have viewed an ExhibitsUSA exhibition. ExhibitsUSA is generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, Phillips Petroleum Company, the Louis and Elizabeth Flarsheim Trust, Sprint, The William T. Kemper Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the H&R Block Foundation, the Cooper Foundation, the Richard Florsheim Art Fund, the Embassy of Australia, Washington, D.C., and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Mid-America Arts Alliance, founded in 1972, is a private, nonprofit arts organization. Today, its activities encompass regional, national, and international performing arts touring programs, traveling exhibitions, and related services.

For more information on The Prairie Print Makers, visit the ExhibitsUSA web site at www.eusa.org.