The Morven Museum & Garden’s current exhibition, Voices in Print, is part of a project by the Princeton Humanities Initiative called Re-Visioning America: 1776-2026. The Princeton-wide series of programming has been celebrating this anniversary year by highlighting “how artists from a range of backgrounds grapple with the complexity of America and its histories.”

Voices in Print focuses on Black women printmakers who have relationships with New Jersey. The exhibition features iconic artists, two of whom have been featured on State of the Arts: Janet Taylor Pickett and Nell Painter.

“Beauty can be subversive. You can tell a story that’s difficult through beauty.”

– Janet Taylor Pickett

In 2016, we paid a visit to Janet Taylor Pickett‘s exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, where she entered a conversation with the work of Henri Matisse, spanning art history. She asked herself, “Why Matisse?” and answered, “He’s this multifaceted artist that worked with color, worked with textile—that also followed his own voice. He was having this conversation with Picasso, so I thought I’d join in. Why not?”

“Sojourner Truth taught me to heed and love visual images.”

– Nell Painter

The historian, writer, and visual artist Nell Irvin Painter has been on State of the Arts more than once, most notably in 2006 with Old in Art School and in 2024, with her collection of artwork and essays, I Just Keep Talking. A true icon in New Jersey’s art and academic world, Painter is constantly open to the act of learning and growing in her artmaking. As she puts it, “I just kept talking. I just kept writing… And finally, I’m getting through.”

Voices in Print curators Judith K. Brodsky and Rhinold L. Ponder have also been featured on State of the Arts. In 2022, their exhibition at the Arts Council of Princeton brought together Lewis Tanner Moore’s collection of work by Black artists, including luminaries James Wilson Edwards, Wendell T. Brooks, Hughie Lee-Smith, Rex Goreleigh, and Selma Hortense Burke—all artists from the Princeton area.

“We hope that others also take the mantle of capturing regional artists—particularly regional artists of color and regional women artists—and bring them to the fore so that people have a better understanding of these communities,” Rhinold Ponder noted at the time. This curatorial goal is definitely echoed in their current exhibition at Morven, Voices in Print.

Judith Brodsky appears often in our archives as both an artist and a curator, including in this 2023 profile by producer Eric Schultz.

As co-curator Judith Brodsky notes in Voices in Print‘s exhibition page, the very act of printmaking ensures that stories can be told and shared: “These artists use printmaking to create multiple copies of their work, enabling their stories and perspectives, which express the vibrant culture of New Jersey’s diverse communities, to reach far and wide.” Poetically, that sharing of experience is the whole point of art, after all.

You can see Voices in Print at the Morven Museum & Garden through Feb 28, 2027. Free programming for Re-Visioning America includes a panel discussion at Princeton University Art Museum on Sep 17 and a gallery crawl on Sep 24.