Blackburn, Robert

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Blackburn, Robert

December 10, 1920
April 21, 2003

The lithographer and teacher Robert Hamilton Blackburn was born to Jamaican parents in Summit, New Jersey, in 1920 and moved to Harlem in 1926. He took art classes at P.S. 139 in Harlem under the instruction of Works Project Administration (WPA)-sponsored teachers Rex Gorleigh and Zell Ingram. In 1935 he studied at the Harlem Community Arts Center and joined the Uptown Community Workshop. In 1941 he received a scholarship at the Art Students League and apprenticed in the studio of printmaker Will Barnet (1941–1943).

In 1948 Blackburn opened his own studio, the Printing Workshop, on 17th Street in New York City, offering evening classes and space for artists to operate printing presses. He created a collaborative relationship between the artist and lithographer so that printing became part of the artistic process. He remained involved with the workshop for over forty years, teaching printmaking and creating his own prints. Artists who used the facility included Romas Viesulas, Clare Romano, Sue Fuller, and Chaim Koppelman.

While teaching at the workshop, Blackburn was also an instructor at the National Academy of Design (1949), the New School for Social Research (1950–1951), Cooper Union (1965–1971), the School of Visual Arts (1967–1971), and at the Painting and Sculpture Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts (1970–1991). He exhibited at community galleries and in larger venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina.

In 1957 Blackburn became the master printer for Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions, a printing house that operated from Grosman's living room in West Islip, Long Island, in New York State. While at Universal, Blackburn was the lithographer of choice for many artists of the New York School, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He also printed works by many black artists, including Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff.

In 1971, the Printing Workshop was incorporated as a nonprofit organization and began teaching lithography in economically disadvantaged communities. Some of Blackburn's own prints include "Girl in Red" (1951), "Strange Objects" (1959), and "What Is Apartheid" (1984). Blackburn died in 2003 at the age of eighty-two.

See also Art; Bearden, Romare; Woodruff, Hale Aspacio