Copy of IFPDA Foundation Book Award | IFPDA Foundation 6/18

IFPDA Foundation Grants

The Foundation provides financial support to museums and non-profit organizations for exhibitions, publications, and educational projects that promote greater awareness and understanding of printmaking as an artistic medium.

Grants are made to non-profit organizations that are certified tax-exempt under section 501(c) (3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service code. Applications from organizations outside the United States that can document not-for-profit status will also be considered.

Online submission typically opens in January each year and must be completed by April. Please download the Grants Guidelines for complete details.

2024 IFPDA Foundation Grant applications are due April 14, 2024.

Apply Now

2007

Ackland Art Museum, The UNC at Chapel Hill

Theme and Variations: Print Sequences from Ornament to Abstraction

2007

Connecticut Historical Society Museum

Picturing Victorian America: The Kellogg Brothers of Hartford and Their Prints, 1830-1880

2007

Newark Public Library

A Gala Survey of Graphic Art: Celebrating A century of Print Collecting

2006

Association of Museum Curators for the Nord-Pas de Calais

Feuille a Feuille: Printed Images

2007

Anchor Graphics at Columbia College

2007

Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College

Grand Scale. Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian

2007

Philagrafika

Working States

2006

Friends of the Bass Museum

Prints and Cultures: Comparing the European and Japanese Fine Art Traditions

2007

Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School

2007

LaSalle University Art Museum

The Buffoonish Bourgeois: Caricatures and Satire of the Upper Middle-Class Businessman in 19th Century France

2007

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery

More Than One: Contemporary Prints and Multiples from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Collection

2006

McNay Museum

Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts

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 March of 2025.

2025 IFPDA Book Award applications are now closed.

Click here for the Guidelines

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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.

2007

Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950

John Ittmann

Philadelphia Museum of Art and the McNay Art Museum in association with Yale University Press

Published 2006

2005

Ornament Prints in the Rijksmuseum II; The Seventeenth Century Part One, Two and Three

Peter Fuhring

Rijksmuseum and Sound & Vision Publishers, Rotterdam

Published 2004

2006

Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly

Richard H. Axsom

Yale University Press and Grand Rapids Art Museum

Published 2005

2004

Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things

Wendy Weitman

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Published 2003

AUC Art Collective + IFPDA Internship Program

The Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective prepares undergraduate students for careers in the visual arts. The collective is comprised of three schools --- Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse, and Spelman College --- united by the world’s oldest and largest association of historically black colleges and universities and a shared vision that innovation + art = change. The IFPDA has partnered with the AUC Art Collective to develop a professional internship program which launched in the summer of 2022 with a student from Spelman College who received an internship at BORCH Editions and Gallery in Berlin and Copenhagen.

2022: Spelman College + BORCH Editions and Gallery, Berlin, DE
2023: Spelman College + Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA
Spelman College + Tandem Press, Madison, WI

Detail, Amy Sherald (AUC alumna), Hope is the thing with feathers (The little bird), 2021
Color screenprint on coventry rag. Image courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Curatorial Internships

Recognizing the importance of early career exposure to prints, the IFPDA Foundation aims to empower print curators to cultivate the next generation of scholars, curators, dealers, and specialists in the field of fine prints.

Each year, the IFPDA Foundation funds curatorial internships in museum print collections. Host institutions are awarded funding based on their ability to provide an intern with object-based experience in the collection under the guidance of one or more experienced print specialists. More information can be found in the Guidelines.

Applications for 2024 are now closed.

2015

MUSÉE JENISCH VEVEY

Intern: Maelle Tappy

2014

LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA

Intern: Alison Van Denend

2014

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA MUSEUM OF ART

Intern: Alice Phillips, Ph.D.

2015

SMITH COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART

Intern: Nicole Viglini

2014

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

Intern: Katie Applegarth

2014

RISD MUSEUM

Intern: Maggie C. North

2015

THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

Intern: Jesse Feiman

2014

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Intern: Elisabeth C. Rivard

2014

ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM

Intern: Sara B. Green

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Richard Hamilton Acquisition Prize
Presented by ChampionScott

Through the generosity of ChampionScott Partners, the Richard Hamilton Acquisition Prize provides $10,000 for a museum’s acquisition of one or more prints from any period at the IFPDA Print Fair. In naming the prize, ChampionScott Partners honors the late Richard Hamilton as a tribute to the artist’s profound influence on their own appreciation of prints and to acknowledge his impact on generations of printmakers.

Applications for 2026 are now open.

Image: Richard Hamilton Picasso's Meninas, 1973 Hard-ground, soft-ground and stipple etching, open-bite and lift-ground aquatint, engraving, drypoint and burnishing on Rives paper. Courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery.

2025 Recipient: Asheville Art Museum

Established by artists and incorporated in 1948, the Asheville Art Museum is committed to being a vital force in community and individual development and to providing life-long opportunities for education and enrichment through the visual arts. Furthering its mission to engage, enlighten, and inspire individuals and enrich community through dynamic experiences in American Art of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Museum serves local residents and visitors and is a place of education, exploration, and inspiration, an advocate for the arts and artists, an economic engine, and the preeminent arts resource for the 24 counties that comprise Western North Carolina (WNC) and beyond.

View Past Acquisitions

Jordan Schnitzer Award for Excellence in Printmaking

The Jordan Schnitzer Award for Printmaking Excellence is a grant (currently $25,000) in celebration and recognition of exceptional creativity in the field of fine art prints through artistic expression, technical innovation, and elevation of the medium.

The recipient is selected by an independent advisory committee. The 2022 committee was comprised of Jennifer Farrell, Curator, Department of Prints & Drawings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Leslie Jones, Curator, Prints and Drawings, LACMA; and Susan Tallman, independent curator.

JORDAN SCHNITZER AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PRINTMAKING RECIPIENTS:

2022: Vija Celmins

2019: Mel Bochner and Matthew Day Jackson

2018: Ida Applebroog and Lothar Osterburg

Image:

Vija Celmins, Constellation-Uccello, 1983

4-color aquatint/etching.

Courtesy of the artist and Gemini G.E.L.

About the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation:

Sparked by a keen interest in the inventiveness for printmaking and carrying on a family legacy of collecting art, Jordan Schnitzer began collecting prints in 1998. Today, the collection exceeds 20,000 works as one of the country’s largest private print and art collections. The Foundation has organized over 160 exhibitions and has had art exhibited at over 150 museums. The Foundation also contributes to the ﬁeld of artistic scholarship through the publication of exhibition brochures, texts, and print catalogue raisonnés.

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Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Lecture Series

Established with the generous support of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, this annual program honors the unique ways in which contemporary artists use printmaking in their artistic practice. It has been presented each year at the IFPDA Print Fair since 2014.

Mel Bochner (2014)

Kiki Smith (2015)

Nicole Eisenman (2016)

Leonardo Drew (2017)

Christiane Baumgartner (2018
Jim Dine (2019)

2022 Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Lecture Honorees:

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Enrique Chagoya

Enrique Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. Drawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues, examining the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that riddles contemporary American foreign policy.

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Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist focusing on themes relating to perspective, identity, commodity, media and popular culture. His work incorporates recognizable icons from advertising or branding campaigns to explore their ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity. Thomas created one of his most iconic series in 2006, B®anded, in which he superimposed bodies of Black men with the Nike swoosh logo recalling the history of branding slaves in America as well as the literal and figural objectification of Black male bodies in contemporary culture. Thomas’ practice has evolved to incorporate a variety of media including silkscreen, mirrors and retroreflective vinyl —an industrial material rarely used in the arts—to challenge perspectives in his work, exploring 20th century protest images and often overlooked historical narratives.

About the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation:

Curatorial Travel Grant Program

The IFPDA Foundation Curatorial Travel Grant Program provides funding ($2,000) for institutionally based print curators to attend the IFPDA Print Fair held in New York City. The dates for 2026 are April 9-12 at the Park Avenue Armory.

This event represents the largest annual convening of international print scholars, collectors, gallerists, artists, and curators as well as presenting a unique opportunity for in person viewing of works of art spanning the full 550+ years of printmaking.

Candidates are invited to complete an online application and attach a CV along with information about their institution’s print collection and plans for future acquisitions.

Recipients will be asked to submit documentary proof of travel (e.g. plane/train tickets, hotel receipts etc.) and a brief report within two months following their travels to New York.

Applications for 2026 are now open.

Apply Now