GRANTS & AWARDS | IFPDA Foundation 22/25

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 and drawing as artistic mediums.

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.

Please download the Grants Guidelines for complete details.

Applications for 2027 are now open.

Application

1998

University College, London

Outstanding Thesis

1998

National Academy of Art

Treasures Revealed: 19th and 20th Century American Works on Paper

1997

Adirondack Museum

The Call of the Wild: Adirondack Prints and Printmakers

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1998

Art Institute of Chicago

Lithographs of James McNeil Whistler

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1998

British Museum

Friends of Prints and Drawings Newsletter

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1997

British Museum

Friends of Prints and Drawings Newsletter

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1998

National Academy of Art

Artists and the Avant Garde Theatre in Paris

1998

Print Council of America

Timothy Riggs' The Print Council of America Index to Oeuvre

1997

Houston Museum of Art

Color Printmaking in America 1890-1960

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 and drawings. This annual award honors excellence in research, scholarship, and the discussion of new ideas in the field of fine prints and drawings. 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 prints and drawings 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 Fair in April of 2027.

Applications for the 2027 IFPDA Foundation Book Award are now open.

Click here for the Guidelines

Application

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.

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.

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.

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 College, 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, Copenhagen, DK

2023:

Spelman College + Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA
Spelman College + Tandem Press, Madison, WI

2024:

Spelman College + L'-Atelier Galerie A. Piroir, Montreal, Canada

Clark Atlanta University + Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA

Morehouse College + Knust Kunz Gallery Editions, Munich, Germany

2025:

Spelman College + Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA

Spelman College + David Tunick, Inc., New York, NY

Clark Atlanta University + Two Palms Press, New York, NY

2026:

Clark Atlanta University + Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, NY

Spelman College + David Tunick, Inc., New York, NY

Spelman College + Atelier Piroir, Quebec, Canada

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 and drawings, the IFPDA Foundation provides funding for curatorial internships in museum print and drawing collections. [NB: Internships may be offered in summer, spring, fall, or winter with the proviso that they must be completed within 12 months of the date of funding approval.]

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.

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 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 2027 are now open.

Application

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.

2026 Recipient: The Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

As the largest collection of graphic art in Germany and one of the leading institutions of its kind worldwide, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin was founded in 1831 and is today part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin under the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage. Within this institutional complex, it serves as a reference collection for works on paper and as a center of excellence for draftsmanship, printmaking, manuscript illumination. At the same time, it functions as an innovative site for exhibitions devoted to works on paper.

View Past Acquisitions

Curatorial Travel Grant Program

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

Geneva, Switzerland

2024

BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART

Austin, TX