Brandon Graving

 Brandon Graving has created the largest embossed colographic monoprint and sculpture installation ever made by a single artist. Her decades of experimentation with textures and ink viscosities combined with the use of  her custom platen presses allows an utterly unique sculptural print not experienced before in the world of printmaking. Exemplified in the work, "Ephemera: River with Flowers", Graving uses her expertise to examine issues of mortality, the power of water, and the human connection we all feel with the passage of time.

This large work, which includes sculptures of polychromed sticks from the Mississippi river mouth and the Hoosac river was on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art when hurricane Katrina devastated her home city. The result of these losses spurned the explosive propagation of new sculptures cast with paper over felled trees, allowing expressions of resilience as these new works interact with the nature of their site specific installation.​​​​​

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Over the past thirty years, Graving has won many prestigious awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for her monoprint, "Acorn II" and her monumental monoprint, "Ephemera: River with Flowers" (10.5' x 32' accompanied by polychromed branches embedded in sand).

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In 2023, a "SPARK" Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred upon Ms. Graving by her alma mater continuing a tradition enjoyed by these former awardees and many more: renowned water-feature architect James A. Garland in 2021, American Public Media radio host / music historian, Nick Spitzer in 2016, post minimalist sculptor Keith Sonnier in 2014 as well as music luminaries "Dickie" Landry and Michael Doucet in 2014 & 2011 respectively. 

Graving credits an influential  apprenticeship with sculptor Lin Emery as a lifelong inspiration.

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Although best known for her highly textural monoprints and kinetic sculptures, Graving also owns and works as Master Printmaker at "Gravity Press Experimental Printshop" where she notably created exclusive woodblock prints for music legend, STING (exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City).

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Her work as an independent artist and as master printmaker can be found in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, The Library of Congress, The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Malibu, Ca., The New Orleans Museum of Art, The University of Massachusetts Amherst Collection and the rare book libraries at Bodleian-Oxford University, Stanford University, Yale University, Smith College, and Williams College among many others. ​

 

"Every print she makes is about inventing a new world from scratch.The experience of looking at these prints is a bit like floating over new terrain. While they are abstract, they're strangely familiar."

- David S. Areford, Art Historian, Author / Sol Lewitt scholar

 

"She's not only pioneering printmaking as a woman but she's also reinventing printmaking. Everything she does is so amazing because of the relief, there's texture; I would almost say there's, a topography! That's Brandons work, she embraces all of that".

- Jen Dragon, Director of Exhibitions, Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY

 

"She uses paper ink pressure and turns it into something that's quite spiritual and beautiful. I realized that she was much more than just a print maker, she's an alchemist!"

Otis Tamasauskas, Professor of Printmaking, Emeritus, Queens University