Lecture Series: Kathan Brown

Kathan Brown Crown Point Press: An Insider's Perspective

Hello everyone, this week was  Festival Of The Arts here at Sac State.  All this past week Sac State has been celebrating  the arts like U-Nite at the Crocker.  I will detail my visit to U-Nite on a later post. Yesterday I visited the 10th annual Art History Symposium which included five lectures on cross-cultural printmaking from various times and locations in history . The keynote speaker was Kathan Brown, the founder of Crown Point Press located in San Francisco.

Kathan Brown:Lecture 2014

Crown Point was founded by Kathan Brown in 1962 with the initial purpose of serving as a print workshop.  Brown admitted not knowing totally where things were going but stated she was looking to establish a "visual language". A few years later Brown invited Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud to work there and ended up publishing some of their works.

 Over the years Crown Point has shifted back and forth between a workshop and a publishing house.   Other well known artist to have gone through Crown Point include Sol Lewitt, John Cage, and Tom Marioni who became her eventual husband.  One of the interesting things she said was to distinguish between a workshop and a collaboration.  Due to the time and complexity of printmaking it often takes many hands to produce a print.  Although artists would often create the ideas, it was up to the staff to actually make them.  Brown makes a distinction between this method and a collaboration because it is the actual idea that is credited to the artist along with the end product and not the actual production of it.  Brown did say however that she liked the artists to "put their hands' in while they were actually there.  After the lecture I asked Brown about this and if she ever produces prints herself.  She said she has from time to time but since around 1977 she has mostly focused on the publishing aspect to keep her business alive. Crown Point has survived risky ventures, advancing technologies, and even a major earthquake. She basically made a decision that in order to keep this going someone had to run the show.

Kathan Brown 1964

That decision has made Crown Point very successful through the years.  They got to celebrate their 25th anniversary at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other galleries across the U.S, and recently celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2012.  Brown and some of the artists have also traveled to Japan and China to work with centuries old printmaking shops.  I can really appreciate what Kathan Brown has done for over five decades now at Crown Point.  Her hard work and persistence has allowed many people to learn a skilled craft and others to express their imagination through this craft.  I only hope that people like Kathan Brown continue to follow in her footsteps and keep this tradition going.