Image: Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC
Davidson College Art Galleries will present ‘50 Years Later: Davidson National Print and Drawing Competition’ from August 24 through September 27, 2026, at Van Every Gallery in Davidson, North Carolina. The exhibition revisits a competition that brought contemporary drawings and prints from across the United States to Davidson between 1972 and 1976, while reshaping its format around a smaller group of artists represented in greater depth.
The original competition was conceived by Herb Jackson, a 1967 Davidson graduate, early in his more than four-decade teaching career at the college. Its jurors included the critics Clement Greenberg and Marcia Tucker, and artists and printmaking studios across the country submitted original works for consideration. Over the competition’s five-year run, the event added nearly 50 significant works to Davidson College’s permanent collection.
For the 2026 exhibition, more than 230 submissions were reviewed by a three-person curatorial panel: Caitlin Haskell, a member of Davidson’s class of 2000 and the Gary C. and Frances Comer Senior Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art and director of the Ray Johnson Collections and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago; Maria Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and TK Smith, a curator, writer and cultural historian based in Atlanta.
The panel selected nine artists: Paul Stephen Benjamin, Yoonhee Choi, Jillian Conrad, Maja Godlewska, María Korol, Ambrin Ling, Jenene Nagy, Adrian Rhodes and Sergio Suárez. Rather than repeat earlier editions’ model of presenting more than 100 artists with one work each, the organizers invited the selected artists to work with the gallery’s director and curator to choose works—or, in many cases, groups of works—for display.
The exhibition includes a range of approaches to drawing and printmaking. Listed works include Choi’s ‘CFD 23.04: Blue Caldera’ (2023), made with charcoal, pastel, ink and mineral oil on paper; Nagy’s ‘Untitled 6 (From Stars)’ (2024), using graphite and silver on folded paper; and Korol’s ‘Tertulia Adentro (Indoor Salon)’ (2024), an ink work on Arches paper. Godlewska’s ‘Włochacz, a Fragile Creature from Pipe Clay Lagoon’ (2026) is a monoprint incorporating seaweed, salty water, mud, coastal detritus, water-based inks, dip pen and India ink.
Related programming is scheduled at Davidson’s Belk Visual Arts Center. Exhibiting artists are due to participate in a gallery talk and lunch-and-learn on September 17 from 11:05 a.m. to 12:05 p.m., followed by the exhibition’s opening reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m. On September 23, Professor Tyler Starr will lead ‘Art + Apps: Understanding Printmaking Techniques,’ a program examining processes including monotype and woodcut and offering participants the opportunity to make a monotype. The exhibition is supported by the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment and Davidson College Friends of the Arts.
