Warrington Colescott 

Links to examples of Warrington Colescott 's work:

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Biography:

Warrington Colescott was born in Oakland, California, in 1921. His parents had moved from New Orleans to California when Warrington Sr. had returned from France after World War I.

Colescott studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, and was active on student publications: the student newspaper, where he was art editor, and the campus humor magazine, which he also edited. Graduating in l942 he was inducted into the wartime army, securing a commission in the artillery. In 1946 he returned to Berkeley and took a Master of Arts degree in painting.

He first made prints while teaching at Long Beach City College in Southern California. In 1949 he was invited to join the art faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His print interests were stimulated by the attention given printmaking in that region, and by the work of his colleagues, Dean Meeker and Alfred Sessler. Colescott’s serigraphs of this period were widely exhibited and reproduced in catalogues and books. As a member of the National Serigraph Society he exhibited regularly in group and solo shows at the Serigraph Gallery in New York during the sixties.

A Fulbright Fellowship took him to London in 1957 where he worked at the Slade School of Art (University of London) with Anthony Gross, a distinguished English etcher. Caught up by the attraction of the intaglio medium he began to explore ways to join traditional etching methods with silk screen color printing. This research continued at Wisconsin and in 1960, as the print curriculum expanded, he opened a teaching studio in etching/intaglio printmaking, with a concentration in color work.

A Guggenheim fellowship returned Colescott to London in 1967, where he leased a studio in Whitechapel with Frances Myers. He was a member of the Charlotte Street Basement group, founded by his friend Birgit Skiold, where he met many artists with print involvement, including David Hockney, Michael Rothenstein and Bartolomeu Dos Santos.

His etchings have maintained an international reputation since the sixties and are seen regularly in surveys of American printmaking. He has been invited to participate in important European and Oriental biennials ( Republic of China international biennial; Ljubljana Moderna Galerija bienale, Slovenia; Bharat Bhavan International Biennial, Bhopal, India; Intergrafik, Germany; the International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland; among others) and has shown in commercial galleries in New York (Associated American Artists, Sylvan Cole Gallery), Chicago, Perimeter Gallery (approximately every two years a solo show), Milwaukee (Peltz Gallery), Washington (Jane Haslem gallery) and others.

He received artist grants from the National Endowment in the Arts in 1975, 1979, 1983, and 1993. At the University of Wisconsin he was the Leo Steppat chair professor in the arts from 1979 through 1984 and since his retirement he is Leo Steppat Chair Professor Emeritus. His work is represented in most major public collections of prints, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New York Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum; the Chicago Art Institute; the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City; the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington,D.C., to name a few.

In 1988 the Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin organized a retrospective exhibition of Colescott’s prints, Forty Years of Printmaking, which toured to five other museums, with a catalogue raisonne. A smaller retrospective was organized by the University of South Dakota Galleries in 1990 (with catalogue) which traveled to university galleries for five years. He had a major exhibition of paintings and prints in 1996 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, with catalogue (essay by Pat Gilmour).

He is a consistent exhibitor and award winner at juried and invitational print shows nationally, and has often functioned as a juror. Recent purchase prizes have been awarded at the Bradley National, Peoria; the Print Club of Philadelphia; the North Shore Art League Midwest Prints, Chicago; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Wustum Museum of Art, Racine, Wisconsin; the International Print Triennial 1997, Krakow, Poland (major cash award), and the Florida Printmakers, Miami, 2000.

Colescott is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy, an Academician of the National Academy of Design, and has won prizes in five of their annual exhibits and has juried their graphic entries three times. He was appointed Printmaker Emeritus by the Southern Graphics Council in 1992, a special honor. His work has been selected for purchase by the American Academy of Art and in 1994 he was designated Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts by the Hartford School of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

Colescott is co-author, with Arthur Hove, of Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Printmaking Renaissance, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

SOME RECENT EXHIBITS AND PROJECTS INCLUDE:

State University of New York at Albany Galleries. Retrospective. 1995.

Perimeter Gallery, Chicago. Solo show. 1999.

International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland, 1997.

Major award, catalogue, review in Graphion magazine, Prague, Czech Republic.

Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois. Solo show. 1997.

Bradley University Galleries, Peoria, Illinois. 1997. Solo show.

Colorprint USA portfolio. Organized by Lynwood Kreneck, Texas Tech University, Lubbock. One print (with Frances Myers)
representing Wisconsin. 1998.

Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Print Portfolio. One of fifteen artists invited. 1998.

Prairie Music Portfolio, published by Wake Forest University, 1998.

Two prints. World Print Invitational, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. 1998. (Purchase award)

Watercolor Wisconsin, Wustum Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin. l999. (First award)

University of Dallas, 16th National Print Invitational, 2000. (Purchase award.)

Wisconsin Triennial, Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin. Catalogue.

Anchor Graphics, Chicago, Illinois. History of Printmaking portfolio, solo show. 2000.

Etched in Acid, the Prints of Warrington Colescott. Video for Channel 10, PBS, Milwaukee. 1999.

Video award, Washington, DC.2000.