Exhibitions: Carol Summers: Woodcuts

August 15, 1977: Carol Summers: Woodcuts 1951-1976, a retrospective exhibition of 50 works by one of the most popular and gifted of contemporary American printmakers, will be on view at The Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, through September 25. The show was organized by Gene Baro, the Museum’s Consultative Curator of Prints and Drawings.

In a catalogue raisonné issued simultaneously with the exhibition, Mr. Baro says: “Summers’ vocabulary of forms reflect the natural world. In one sense, they are landscapes, but in another these forms can be seen to be free of descriptive specificity. The mountains and skies are mountains and skies as sensation only. We confront them as feeling. The simplicity and undisguised manual quality of woodcutting, the sense in the rubbing technique of a direct human enterprise, makes even more mysterious the impact of these luminous images that seem metaphors of a border country between the imagined and the real.”

During the span of 27 years, Carol Summers has realized 143 prints, principally woodcuts, but also lithographs, silkscreens and stencils. And he has used stencil, monotype, metal leaf, and collage as elements in the development of a substantial number of his works. Summers was born in Kingston, New York, on December 26, 1925. He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Bard College, where he studied under Louis Schanker and Stefan Hirsh. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York, Alfred University, Alfred, New York, and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. His awards include an Italian Government Grant for study in Italy, and Tiffany, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Fellowships. Since 1954 he has taught, among other institutions, at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Pratt Graphic Art Center, Hunter College, Columbia University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and in a tour of universities in India under the auspices of the United States Information Agency.

Summers’ work, exhibited widely in this country and abroad, is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum, the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the M[u]seum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and many others.

“Out of my hands roll surprises, history, enigmas--images brown and unknown,” Summers says. “They have seeped up through my feet from Mother Earth, or down through fathers and mothers--the compost that connects us to the original creation. I feel no responsibility for these images. They contain my personal self, but come from far beyond that self--from some energy source of whose nature I have no inkling--save sensing its power and admiring its truth. If I can make myself transparent and guileless enough, I can induce that energy to flow through what I call me. That effort and whatever skill I’ve developed, is all that is individual. The rest is beyond me, as that rest is beyond all of us. It is that unknown source that you recognize is these shapes and colors--they’re as much yours as mine.”

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1977, 014-15. View Original 1 . View Original 2