Statement
Printmaking serves as both technique and visual language to convey issues of identity, passage of time, memory, and communication in my work. Culturally iconic images fuse with my own drawn and photographic sources to create the final print. Likewise, traditional and newer digital technologies combine to add visual and conceptual depth to the prints. In a diverse group of print series exploring family, ethnicity, language, evolution, bioengineering, and my own experience with breast cancer and genetic testing I reveal the past in order to understand its impact on current identity. Printmaking continues to stimulate my passion for creative inquiry.
Statements about each body of work created since 2004 are included with each gallery in the Portfolio section of this site.
Biography
April Katz will be forever grateful for the bite of the printmaking bug that she first experienced through Tom Majeski at the University of Omaha, Nebraska while she was teaching high school art. It changed her life. She left and earned an M.F.A. at Arizona State University in 1988. She and JoAnn Boehmer together form the artist collaborative BOKA. April is Morrill Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University where she organized the Annual International Postcard Print Exchange and taught for 20 years.. From 2004–2006 she was president of the Southern Graphics Council.
Katz’s prints have been exhibited throughout the US and are in numerous collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
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