Image: Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota, b. 1976), Understanding II from Landmarks, 2013. Five-color lithograph, Tamarind Impression 1/3, edition of 15. Collaborating printers Emily Diehl and Jill Graham. Printed and published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM. Tamarind Archive Collection. Photo: Stefan Jennings Batista
The University of New Mexico Art Museum (UNMAM) is presenting Tamarind Goes Global (1985–2020) in its Clinton Adams Gallery in Albuquerque until 12 March 2027. The exhibition traces how Tamarind Institute, the lithography workshop based in Albuquerque, grew from a national studio into an internationally connected centre for contemporary printmaking. The museum has now added new interview videos and newly digitised archival film, released on its YouTube channel.
Tamarind began in Los Angeles as Tamarind Lithography Workshop and moved to Albuquerque in 1970, keeping its aim of preserving and advancing lithography through close collaboration between artists and master printers. According to the museum, the period from around 1985 onwards had gone largely unrecorded in the institution's written history, and the exhibition sets out to fill that gap.
Its core is a series of collaborative projects that brought together artists from Eastern Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia: Mexico Nueve (1984), Trickster (1999), Exquisite Corpse (2000–2015), Connections (2002–2004) and Landmarks (2015). The museum describes these as projects that joined artists whose lives and work were formed by very different cultural, historical and political circumstances.
Some 40 artists are represented, among them Nick Cave, Hung Liu, Liliana Porter, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Juan Sanchez, Dyani White Hawk, José Bedia Valdés, Elena Climent, Andrea Dezsö and Fay Ku. A central theme is the role of the master printer: the labels name the printers who worked with each artist, recognising their part in turning an artist's intentions into a finished lithograph and in solving the technical problems along the way.
The works come from UNMAM's Tamarind Archive Collection, which holds an impression of every print published by the workshop in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1970 and by Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque since then. Further material comes from the university's Center for Southwest Research.
The show is co-curated by Angel Jiang, UNMAM's Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Hannah Cerne, a former curatorial research assistant, for whom it formed her Museum Studies master's project. Cerne recorded interviews with former Tamarind director Marjorie Devon, master printers Bill Lagattuta and Valpuri Remling, and artist Maja Ruznic, which are the basis of the new videos. Her archival research also recovered eight-millimetre film shot by Harry Westlund, then a trainee printer, documenting Tamarind's relocation from Los Angeles; that footage has now been digitised and shared alongside the interviews.
