Current and Recent Showings
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Luce Foundation Center for American Art - Washington, D.C.
Discover America's Stories Through Its Art
Abstract Man
Black and White
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth TX
The Allure of Paper
July 9 - October 9, 2011
Hofstra University Museum
1930's: Art in America
February 28 - May 27, 2011
Children's Museum of the Arts, New York City
Artists of the WPA: Louis Schanker
April 24, 2011
Asheville Art Museum, Asheville NC
Artists at Work: American Printmakers and the WPA
April 29-September, 2011
Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum - Ithaca, NY
Splendor of Dynamic Structure:
Celebrating 75 Years of the American Abstract Artists
January 22–March 20, 2011
The Huntington Art Collection - San Marino, CA
Evolving Ideas - October 2, 2010 - January 3, 2011
Louis Schanker..benefited from the creative environment that the
WPA and Atelier 17 made possible. Schanker began creating
boldly colored prints that abstracted nature, such as The Skaters
(1941), with its three biomorphic humanoid figures, while
working for the WPA and continued at Atelier 17.
Art Students League - New York, NY
Selected Prints by Louis Schanker
September 8 - October 8, 2009
An exhibition of selected prints by Louis Schanker on loan from
the Susan Teller Gallery, New York. Louis Schanker (1903 -
1981) began his art studies at the League in the 1920s. By the
1930s he had taken up printmaking and became a graphic arts
supervisor for the WPA. As a member of The Ten, Schanker
advocated for experimentation and tolerance in art. His own
graphic work established his reputation as an innovator in the
field.
Treetops CMS at the Schanker Studio, Stamford CT
Lyrical Abstraction
September 14-21, 2008
University of Kentucky Art Museum
Breaking Tradition, Forging Ahead
WPA Prints from the Collection
May 10 - September 15, 2008
Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane WA
Sports of All Sorts,
December 1, 2006 - March 10, 2007
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
"For the People, American Mural Drawings of the 30's and 40's"
January 12th - March 11, 2007
New York Public Library, New York NY
Prints with/out Pressure:
American Relief Prints from the 1940's through the 1960's
October 28, 2005 through January 29, 2006
From the catalog.......
Louis Schanker was a key figure in the resurgence of interest in the color relief print. As a technically innovative
printmaker and as a teacher, he influenced many of the artists in this exhibition. Trained at Cooper Union,
the Education Alliance, and the Art Students League, he made his first woodcut in 1935, a challenging
seven-color print, which already reflected his appreciation for the School of Paris (he traveled abroad from
1931 to 1933), German Expressionism, and the Japanese woodcut. Though his early imagery was figurative,
his work became increasingly abstract, concerned with Cubist distortions of form and space, realized with
bright colors and tactile surfaces. While a member of the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project,
and later the supervisor of color woodblock printing there, he developed new printing techniques. He layered
oil-based inks on top of each other, often before the previous layer had dried, to realize dense, inky surfaces;
he also printed colors over black ink, giving the colors a special luminosity. For a time Schanker shared a
teaching studio at the New School with Stanley William Hayter, another passionate experimenter, though with
intaglio processes. Schanker believed that
“The possibility of invention … is one of the most intriguing aspects of the woodcut.”