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September 10, 2020 - IFPDA Foundation Announces Annual Grants and Awards for 2020
January 10, 2020 - Applications for Summer 2020 Curatorial Internship grants are now open to eligible institutions
August 30, 2019 - IFPDA Foundation Announces Annual Grants and Awards
August 1, 2019 - Tickets On Sale for the IFPDA Foundation Cocktail Benefit
The IFPDA Foundation Book Award
The IFPDA Book Award was founded in 2004 to highlight and promote published books, articles, or catalogues on fine prints. This annual award honors excellence in research, scholarship, and the discussion of new ideas in the field of fine prints. The award provides one outstanding recipient and publication with a prize of $3,000, and represents another milestone for the organization. As a result, the winner will receive acclaim from one of the most recognizable bodies in the print world.
The jury limits its consideration to books published during the prior year. Each submission will be vetted by members of the jury, who have been selected according to their expertise in that particular field or specialty. They will consider the use of original ideas, fresh research and individual interpretations. The jury will review the submissions and the award will be announced at the IFPDA Print Fair in April of 2026.
Applications for the 2026 IFPDA Book Award are now closed.
2026 Winner
Karamu Artists Inc. : Printmaking, Race, and Community
Britany Salsbury and Erin Benay
Contributions by Richard J. Powell, Jacqueline Francis and Curlee Raven Holton
Cleveland Museum of Art
An exploration of the rich history of printmaking at Cleveland’s Karamu House, a center of Black arts, culture, and community since 1915
Karamu House, founded as a settlement house in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1915, is one of the preeminent homes of Black arts, culture, and community in America. Noted for its theater program, Karamu House also hosts a rich legacy in the graphic arts. Printmaking workshops open to artists and community alike launched in the 1930s, allowing a young Langston Hughes—as one notable example—to experiment with print.
Linked with printmaking’s ethos of accessibility and democracy, a group including Elmer W. Brown, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles L. Sallée Jr., and William E. Smith—some of the most prominent Black printmakers of the WPA era—founded Karamu Artists, Inc. Reproductions of works by such artists are accompanied by essays situating the prints, the artists, and this locus of Black arts and culture in the histories it shaped. These writings are complemented by an interview with printmaker and Karamu alumnus Curlee Raven Holton.
2026 Winner
Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking, 1400-1850
Edina Adam and Jamie Gabbarelli
Getty Publications
Imprint: J. Paul Getty Museum + The Art Institute of Chicago
The first volume to chart the rich and reciprocal relationship between drawing and printmaking from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.
While often viewed and studied separately, drawings and prints have always been closely intertwined. They facilitated and generated the production of one another, and in some instances, clear distinctions between the two dissolved. Many artists created drawings specifically intended for translation into print, and an even greater number used prints as a training tool, copying from them to hone drawing skills. This reciprocal relationship goes even deeper, however, as innovative artists made fascinating hybrid works that blurred the boundaries between the two media, pushing against modern definitions and hierarchies.
2025 Winner
The Radical Print: Art And Politics In Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
Esther Chadwick
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
This volume argues for printmaking in Britain as the most exciting, innovative, and critically engaged field of artistic production in the late eighteenth century. Moving the print from the margins to the centre of the study of art history, this new critical study demonstrates how print responded to the acceleration of historical events, the polarisation of public discourse, and the sense of a world turned upside down in ways that traditional artistic media could not.
2025 Winner
Terry Winters: The Printed Work, A Catalogue Raisonné
Richard H. Axsom
Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
Across four decades of his work, Terry Winters has been examining, in various iterations, the relationships between modernist abstraction, information systems, and the architecture of the natural world. While predominantly a painter, Winters is also known for his drawing and printmaking. Each of these different media furthers his overall project where mark making is seen as a pictorial process, and where each medium is used to reveal new subjects and possible meanings.
2024 Winner
A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries
Ed. Lauren Rosenblum, Christina Weyl
Hirmer Publishers
This volume explores the understudied impact of Margaret Lowengrund (1902–1957) – a visionary leader, organiser and critic within the mid-twentieth century printmaking community – and the vibrant New York print workshop/gallery she founded, "The Contemporaries". The book expands histories of 1950s printmaking by showing Lowengrund and The Contemporaries to be a vital nexus in the mid-century print field, placing them within a constellation of contexts including organised labour, feminisms and entrepreneurship, international exchange, and making the modern print.
2024 Winner
The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg's Library of Prints
Holly Borham
Blanton Museum of Art
Beginning in the early 1960s, with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints that spans the medium’s five-hundred-year history in the West. Akin to books on a shelf, Steinberg’s prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. His collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that in the era before photography, prints functioned as the “circulating lifeblood of ideas,” disseminating figures, compositions, and styles across boundaries of geography, time, and medium.
2025
Honorable Mention
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Definitive Collector's Edition
Andreas Marks
Tuttle Publishing
Published 2024
2025
Honorable Mention
From Michelangelo to Callot: The Art of Mannerist Printmaking
Blanka Kubíková, Alena Volrábová
National Gallery in Prague
Published 2024
2022
Honorable Mention
Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
Andreas Marks
Taschen
Published 2021
2025
Honorable Mention
Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century
Cristina S. Martinez , Cynthia E. Roman
Cambridge University Press
Published 2024
2023
Paper Knives Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic
Maureen Warren et. al.
Krannert Art Museum
Published 2022
2022
Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya
Rena M. Hoisington
Princeton University Press
Published 2021
