Hippies in Tit Heaven, 2015

Lisa Yuskavage broke new ground with Hippies in Tit Heaven, published in 2015. Up until that time, the artist had turned to hand-coloring additions in pastel and gouache to bring color to her prints.

No stranger to printmaking, Yuskavage took courses in a variety of techniques throughout her education, and she has been collaborating with master printers at ULAE since 2001. Interested in exploring new territory in her editions, she worked with Master Printer Brian Berry to develop a process in which she could manipulate color separations by adding and subtracting from the individual layers while abandoning and replacing the traditional principles of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). To build the image, she added layers of drawing and color to the image by utilizing intaglio and lithography, as well as digital drawing.

The whole process was calibrated to permit her to preview the image on a computer before anything was physically printed on paper. Once finalized, the layers were exported from digital files and used to print the final image from 12 offset lithographic plates. In over 60 years of publishing, the studio had never done anything quite like that.

Between her eye for color and these inventive techniques, Lisa Yuskavage has pushed the boundaries of contemporary printmaking. She describes printmaking as "the perfect medium" to experiment with material, and she finds inspiration in looking at other artists' prints and their progressive states as she constantly questions and considers every component of the print. She continues to challenge the studio and explore imagery in a myriad of technical processes as she approaches her 20th year of collaborating with ULAE.

B. 1962 Lisa Yuskavage received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1984 and her MFA from Yale University in 1986. Ten years later she was awarded the prestigious Tiffany Foundation Grant. Exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (2000) with accompanying catalogue; the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2002); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions around the world; including 2000 Whitney Biennial, Greater New York at P.S. 1/MoMA, 46th Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Saatchi Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Royal Hibernian Academy for Dublin Contemporary (2011).

The permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Whitney Museum of American Art, have all acquired Lisa’s ULAE publications.