Brandon Graving's, Then and Now opens in the Dean's Gallery

Brandon Graving: Then and Now, Selections of 40 years of Printmaking

The UL Lafayette College of the Arts will be exhibiting a selection of printworks by Brandon Graving 82’ this coming March and April. The exhibition is located in the Dean’s Gallery, which is located on the 2nd floor of Fletcher Hall. Brandon is also being honored this month as the College of the Arts 2022-23 SPARK Lifetime Achievement Award honoree. The SPARK Lifetime Achievement Award honors alumni and members of the arts community who have made great strides to advance the arts in Louisiana and across the country.

An opening reception will be held on Wednesday May 1st, from 6-8pm in the Dean's Gallery, inconjunction with the opening of the 2023 Juried Student Art Exhibition in the Fletcher Hall Gallery.

Brandon Graving is known for her deeply textured large scale monoprints which often include a sculptural component furthering the visceral impact of these unique works.  She is credited with making the largest monoprint made by a single artist; this work titled Ephemera: River with Flowers, measures 10.5’ by 32’ with a variable sized floor sculpture in front and was installed at the New Orleans Museum of Art when hurricane Katrina struck that city. Now in the Frederick R. Weisman Collection, this work has been widely exhibited in many museums.

Brandon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1959 and went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1982 with a focus on printmaking and sculpture; this enthusiastic focus continues today. She is a celebrated and prolific artist who exhibits widely and her work in included in many public and private collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, and The Frederick R. Weisman Collection.

After years of travel research in Africa, Costa Rica, Belize and the Yucatán, Brandon began working at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she was gallery director, curating many exhibitions and especially became the master printmaker and instructor at this wonderful facility. In 2007, she relocated her New Orleans print studio and consolidated the two print shops in this historic Massachusetts mill, creating Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop. Unlike traditional print shops, we almost exclusively use platten presses including “The Monster”, one of the largest presses in the world, sporting a 5’ x 11’ Press bed.

Using this innovative equipment, Brandon has developed many extreme techniques while maintaining a practice of creating archival works, pushing boundaries of size and extreme embossing with inky viscosities and thickly textured surfaces. Her forty years of curious exploration has led to Monoprints like no other prints ever seen.

Throughout her career, Brandon has received many prestigious awards including the Pollack- Krasner Foundation Award and has recently been awarded the “Spark” Lifetime Achievement Award from Louisiana College of the Arts, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She divides her time between Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop as Master Printmaker and working as a sculptor and print artist with works currently in multiple international exhibitions.

The exhbition will run from March 1 - April 28, 2023