Career
In 1947, Robert Blackburn established the Printmaking Workshop, an 8,000-square-foot (740 m2) loft at 114 West 17th Street in New York City. When it first opened, the workshop's program included evening classes, an open studio working area, and print shops where artists could carry out their own experimentation. In the early 1950s, Blackburn and Barnet produced a suite of Barnet's lithographs that were a technical tour de force, requiring up to seventeen colors and multiple stones in the printing process. During 1953 and 1954, Blackburn traveled throughout Europe.
Blackburn was famously generous to other artists who came through the Workshop and fostered an atmosphere of openness to diversity. Among the many artists who have worked with Blackburn at the Printmaking Workshop are Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Nadine M. DeLawrence, Vivian Browne, Emma Amos, Otto Neals, Felipe Molina Mejia, Ernest Crichlow, Samella Lewis, John Biggers, Ed Clark, Mavis Pusey, Vincent Dacosta Smith, Camille Billops, Melvin Edwards, Mildred Thompson, Benny Andrews, Betty Blayton, Aminah Robinson, Romare Bearden, Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, Leonora Carrington, Roy DeCarava, Sue Fuller, Eldzier Cortor, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Faith Wilding and Jack Whitten. He was especially close with Romare Bearden, and is credited with introducing him to the collagraph process. The two met at meetings of the artist group 306. His commitment to sponsoring minority and third-world students and developing community programs profoundly influenced younger printmakers, who seeded similar workshops around the United States and internationally.
In 1956, when the Printmaking Workshop struggled financially and faced the threat of closing, fellow artist and printmaker Chaim Koppelman devised a means to save the studio by transforming it into a cooperative with annual dues. Blackburn credited Koppelman with saving the Workshop, and in 1992, Blackburn, Barnet, and Koppelman received a New York Artists Equity Award for their "dedicated service to the printmaking community."
Blackburn's most productive period as an artist and printmaker was between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. During this period he produced a large body of abstract still lifes and color compositions, mostly in lithography. In the 1970s, Blackburn turned away from lithography and began producing woodcuts, as well as some monotypes and intaglios.
Blackburn also served between 1957 and 1963 as the first master printer for Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), where he produced editions for such artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers. He returned to primarily working at the Printmaking Workshop on a full-time basis after a printing accident in 1962, in which a stone by Robert Rauschenberg was broken, shaking Blackburn's confidence.
In 1971, Blackburn put in place a board of trustees to help run the Printmaking Workshop
and incorporated it as a nonprofit. Over the years the Workshop had accumulated a large collection of artists' prints, and efforts to find a permanent home for them were led by Deborah Cullen, who met Blackburn while a student at the School of Visual Arts in 1985 and was the collection's curator between 1993 and 1996. By 1997, over 2,500 of these works had been deposited with the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Smaller selections of the Workshop's prints have been placed with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and El Museo Del Barrio, New York.
During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY. Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and he exhibited there.
Over the years, Blackburn taught at the National Academy of Design (1949), the New School for Social Research (1950-1968), Cooper Union, New York University (1965-1971), School of Visual Arts (1967-1971), Pratt Institute (1974-1975), Columbia University (beginning in 1970), and Rutgers University (1977-1979). He founded the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College in 1996, to work innovatively and experimentally with students. In 1981, Blackburn was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and he became a full member in 1994. In 1987, he received the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Award for having "contributed significantly to the cultural life of New York City." In 1988, Blackburn and the nonprofit Printmaking Workshop received a Governor's Art Award from the New York State Council on the Arts. He also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. Blackburn was a long time member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel later in life, and died in New York City.
On September 18, 2003, the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City held an exhibition and memorial to honor Blackburn's work. Blackburn's early work at DeWitt Clinton High School, where classmates included artists Burton Hasen, David Finn and Harold Altman, was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009.
