Rodolfo Abulrach Etel Adnan Malika Agueznay Robert Blackburn Farid Belkhaia Kamal Boutaleb Simone Fattal Mohammad Omar Khalil Mohamed Melehi Richard Nelson Mary Lovelace O'Neal Abderrahmane Rahoule Krishna Reddy Molly Renda & Abbès Saladi Michael Kelly Williams Zarina
Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco curated by Imani Congdon, with support from Teiger Foundation, mobilizes firsthand accounts and never-before-exhibited private collections of prints, photographs and ephemera from the first decade of the Asilah Cultural Moussem. Established in 1978, this international festival brought together printmakers, musicians, intellectuals, and poets from around the globe to create, as participant Camille Billops described it, “a permanent centre for cultural diffusion, rich in authenticity and steeped in heritage.”1
The exhibition illuminates how Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop served as a conduit in connecting the Moussem’s international artists: from the creative and technical experiments facilitated within the budding print atelier to the cultural exchange reflected in the work produced therein. Asilah Oui celebrates the mutual growth between the two workshops and their intertwined communities.
Together, this presentation reflects the Workshop’s critical history, its contributions to the development of printmaking as both form and practice, and the active evolution of a printmaking community who in Blackburn’s guiding vision of access, equity, and collaboration has made this America’s oldest, continuously operating cooperative printshop.
1 Katherine Blood, “A Printmaking Workshop in Morocco: Artist Camille Billops on Her Work with Robert Blackburn”, Library of Congress Information Bulletin 62, no. 7 (July/August 2003), https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0307-8/morocco.html
Programming will include a series of print workshops, poetry & music, and discussions. More details to follow.
Programs at the Blackburn Study Center, a space dedicated to the history and legacy of Robert Blackburn, are made possible with major support from the Teiger Foundation. Over the next three years, the Workshop will foreground its international connections through Global Impressions, a programming initiative that builds on Blackburn’s legacy of solidarity with artists from the Global South, showing how print has functioned as both cultural resistance and diasporic exchange.
Learn more about the first iteration of the Global Impressions series Mohammad Omer Khalil, Common Ground curated by Amina Ahmed and Jenna Hamed.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank the following for their contributions, and loans to make this exhibition possible: Hisham Aidi, Mujah Maraini-Melehi, Noor Melehi, Amina Agueznay, Shafiah Bennaissa, Luis Cancel, Ernestine White-Mifetu, Tarek Elhaik, Ryan Lee Gallery, LUHRING AUGUSTINE, Galerie Lelong, Estate of Rodolfo Abulrach and David Nolan Gallery, Judy Blum Reddy, Mohammad Omer Khalil, Jenna Hamed, Amina Ahmad, Simone Fattal, Rose Viggiano, Michael Kelly Williams, and finally, Richard Nelson.
