Colby Artists Take Home Prestigious Printmaking Awards
Seven former and current students displayed work in the Boston Printmakers Student Print Exhibition, and two won awards
For printmakers in North America, the Boston Printmakers biennial exhibition is an important rite of passage. And, although 2024 is an off year, last spring the institution advertised a highly competitive student exhibition. Student printmakers from across New England, including at some of the region’s most prestigious art schools, entered the competition. Colby, for the first time, was strongly represented in the resulting show, which opened in September.
Woodcuts, relief prints, and collagraphs (prints made by gluing materials onto a plate) by seven Colby students were hung on the walls. And, two students were singled out by the jury for special prizes. Ava Stotz ’24 won the Boston Printmaker Excellence Award, a $150 cash prize, while Mina Ekstrom ’24 was awarded the Speedball Art Award, a prize of printmaking materials. Stotz and Ekstrom also showed together in Colby’s Senior Exhibition 2024.
The Boston Printmakers is an alliance founded in 1947 to promote excellence in printmaking. Their exhibitions showcase the best artists working with both traditional and digital printmaking methods across the continent. For those who hope to work as professional artists, like Ekstrom and Stotz, their inclusion in the show, and the awards they received, will open doors. “As a printmaker in the U.S.,” said Assistant Professor of Art Amanda Lilleston, who taught all the winning students, “I strive to be included in the Boston Printmakers biennials. They’re competitive—and very prestigious.”
‘Amazing’ opportunity
“Having my work in the exhibition was amazing,” said Ekstrom, who graduated with a major in art history and studio art. Using multiple relief prints, she layers images of leaves and complex geometric textures over red blocks to create an absorbing blend of abstract and figurative imagery. It’s sophisticated work, and this was her first show outside an academic setting.
“Outside of high school and Colby, I had never shown my work,” said Ekstrom, who is interning in an art auction house in New York and makes prints in her time off. “It was really gratifying to be included, and then to win an award was wonderful.”
Along with Ekstrom and Stotz, the other students with work included in the exhibition were Zoey Latour ’25, Zoe Onyango ’25, Hannah Soria ’25, Grace Yang ’25, and Samah Zein ’25. Lilleston knew they were all working at a high standard. But sometimes, she said, students may wonder if their professor’s enthusiasm is just one person’s opinion. Now, the students know they “can play the game nationally,” she said.
“In rural Maine,” Lilleston added, “we can sometimes feel so removed from the rest of the art world. But the truth is that we’re not. There’s so much great art being made here. For the students, having that validation was really exciting.”
The jury particularly loved Stotz’s bird collagraphs, which she titled Sandpiper and Cormorant. She used a paintbrush to apply glue onto a printing plate, a method Stotz developed in her junior year. This allowed her to render the feathers of a cormorant and a sandpiper in extraordinary detail.
It’s a level of technical prowess that marks the culmination of four years of close study under her professor. “Professor Lilleston opened my eyes to a lot of different mediums, from lino and wood cutting to copper etching,” Stotz said. And Lilleston also helped introduce her to “the thriving community that printmakers enjoy, both here in the U.S. and internationally.”
Liberal arts serve artists well
Lilleston believes that Colby being a liberal arts college and not an art school may have been key to the students’ successes. Colby students are particularly good at making links between different areas of study, she said. In Ekstrom’s case, that means melding biological and geometrical forms into a complexly layered image. For Stotz, it means allowing her knowledge of local ecology to shape her artistic practice. “It’s just second nature for Colby students to be connecting disciplines,” said Lilleston.
In September the seven students traveled to Boston to attend the exhibition, which was hosted by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. “It was really surreal to see my work on the wall,” said Soria, whose wistful, untitled multi-block woodcut print of pine trees in front of a distant mountain was displayed in the show. “And it’s given me the confidence to apply to other exhibitions in the future.”
For Latour, whose woodcut portraits Mus and Fledge #2 were on display, making a print is a powerful way to reflect on memory. By cutting into wood to make the plate, “you are breaking through layers in the wood that have grown over time,” she said. Printmaking, for Latour, confronts her with a record of the past, which makes the medium a particularly poignant way “to explore ideas of memory, and my childhood.”
The connection between printmaking and memory is present in Zein’s work, too. To make her cassette tape cover, called Memories of Oman, age 6, Number 1, she used an old family photograph, taken around the time her family first came to America. In Photoshop, she separated the photo into several layers. Then she laser cut each layer to make individual plates. The resulting print is a record of the different layers being brought together again. And the work dwells on the experience of migration, too.
“When people flee their country urgently,” said Zein, “they can only take with them what is most important. People tend to leave objects like cassette tapes behind. But tapes were an important part of my childhood. I suppose I was drawn to the idea of immortalizing those memories.”
Meanwhile, Onyango’s woodcut, Woman with Comb and Dancers, is all about rhythm. The crisscross pattern of a woman’s braided hair is effectively set off against a repetitive comb motif. The print bursts with movement and energy. “Something that’s drawn me to printmaking is the replication and repetition,” she said. “I love that you can always rework a piece, that you can always go back to it.”
Lilleston, for her part, is gratified that liberal arts students are producing artworks of a caliber that allows them to go up against students at competitive art schools and take home prizes.
“By participating in the show, I watched the students swell with pride,” she said. “After the opening, they seemed inches taller. Like they were glowing with confidence.”
