SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Crown Point Press announces its annual group exhibition Summer Choices, which features a diverse selection of prints available to Seasons Club members this year. A long-standing program at the press, Seasons Club offers special benefits to members beginning or expanding their art collections (see details below). The exhibition presents twenty-five artists who have made etchings at Crown Point, a leader in the medium for over fifty years. The prints on display will rotate midway through the summer to highlight an additional selection available at half price to members. Summer Choices is on view June 6 to September 2 with a reception on Wednesday, July 12, 6-8pm.

In the Crown Point studio artists make marks on copper plates, and printers ink and print each plate with an etching press—a slow, layered process still completed by hand and technically unchanged from its 15th century invention. Artists today, however, use the medium in new ways to make their art, resulting in limited edition, original prints. “Just as an identical twin is not a copy of his brother, the prints in a fine art edition are not copies of one another,” explains Kathan Brown, Crown Point’s founding director and first master printer.

Richard Diebenkorn, for example, used aquatint reversal and drypoint to render spades, crosses, targets, and buttons jumbled together in Flotsam. Ed Ruscha manipulated text in a desert landscape through photogravure, and Shahzia Sikander layered six plates of images, some hand-drawn on translucent Mylar and some developed on her computer, through direct gravure (pictured). Chris Ofili combined spit bit and sugar lift aquatints, hard ground etching, and drypoint to achieve a rich, varied texture in the romantic scene of embracing figures under a cave waterfall in Last Night. New Day.

Summer Choices includes work by Tomma Abts, Mamma Andersson, Anne Appleby, Robert Bechtle, Christopher Brown, Chris Burden, Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held, Sol LeWitt, Tom Marioni, Susan Middleton, Jockum Nordström, Chris Ofili, Nathan Oliveira, Laura Owens, Markus Raetz, Ed Ruscha, Laurie Reid, Wilson Shieh, Shahzia Sikander, Pat Steir, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Tuttle, and William T. Wiley, Fred Wilson. It is a sampling of works available to Seasons Club members during July and August. The exhibition is on view in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, June 6 – September 2, 2017. The gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.