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10/23/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/23/2026 20:41

New 808 Gallery Show Celebrates the Perfect Imperfection of Printmaking in the Age of AI

New 808 Gallery Show Celebrates the Perfect Imperfection of Printmaking in the Age of AI

The Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial includes 120 prints from artists using a broad array of printmaking techniques,from traditional etching to experimental digital methods. Photo by Lily Jurman (COM'26)

Arts & Culture

New 808 Gallery Show Celebrates the Perfect Imperfection of Printmaking in the Age of AI

Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial showcases some of the best artists in a medium that is constantly pushing boundaries

October 23, 2026
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Strolling around to view the latest exhibit at Boston University's 808 Gallery, it's almost hard to believe that all of the pieces on display are prints. A black and white near-photographic print of a nocturnal cityscape hangs alongside a colorful acrylic painted, ribbon trailing screenprint of Native American symbols and an image of green guardian lions made using a LEGO tray.

Yet the beauty of The Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial, on view through November 21, is in its diverse representation of an equally diverse form of expression.

Over 600 artists submitted more than 2,000 prints for this prestigious exhibit. The 2026 iteration of the Boston Printmakers' travelling showcase of printmaking excellence features 120 prints selected by this year's juror, Elizabeth Rudy, Harvard Art Museums' Carl A. Weyerhaeuser curator of prints. The Biennial has a long history with BU: the University hosted the event between 1999 and 2009, in 2013, and, most recently, in 2023.

Printmaking is a centuries-old medium that involves transferring ink from a prepared surface made of wood, metal, stone, or silkscreen, among other materials, that is then transferred onto another surface to make an imprinted piece of art. Over the years, as technology has developed, so too have the techniques printmakers use to create their art.

Wendy Prellwitz, a member of the Boston Printmakers, attends the opening reception for the 2026 North American Print Biennial, a showcase of work from across the printmaking medium, on September 26 in BU's 808 Gallery. Photo by Lily Jurman (COM'26)

Despite the many techniques used in the work on display in the 808 Gallery, the pieces are united by a sense that a human hand played a part in their creation.

"At a time when there is increasing nervousness (panic, even, in some circles) about artificial intelligence and the expanding realm of the digital, I remain in awe of the handmade-both the mark carved into wood or linoleum or drawn on an intaglio plate-and the mechanism of rolling a matrix and a sheet of paper through a press," Adler writes in her juror's statement.

Printmaking as a medium is built on techniques that embrace the perfect imperfection of human artistry, explains Deborah Cornell, chair and professor in the College of Fine Arts printmaking department and cochair of the exhibit.

"One thing AI doesn't have is hands," Cornell says. "These prints are made from drawings. They're made from observation, made from life, made from being. The colors are because of perception, not because of some mathematical [algorithm]."

Every print is an expression of the potential and limits of the medium and, in its own way, humanity.

Kathy Klitz' Solitude is an array of winding, river-like white-and-black lines that come together to make up a shadowy glacier. Klitz covered a wooden surface in ink, then carved white lines out of the darkness.

"These [carved] marks are marks of the hand," Cornell says. "You can see they swell and taper. They have mistakes."

In a different way, the human hand takes on a character of its own in Art Werger's Nocturnal, another work featured in the show.

Skyscrapers tower over cars and people in Werger's almost-photographic depiction of a city nightscape created using an engraving technique known as mezzotint. Werger pits and textures a piece of copper until it is velvety smooth, then pours ink over it to create a rich, black surface. Working with a tool called a burnisher, he softens the small holes created at the start of the process, sculpting greys and whites out of the pure black print.

Click on each piece below to learn more.

Cascade Almond made The Guardians using a relief print of Legos, an unorthodox method that picked up steam with artists working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo courtesy of Cascade Almond

Solitude by Kathy Klitz is a black-and-white woodcut print. Klitz hand-carved a wooden surface that had been inked, allowing the ink to sit on raised parts of the surface while her cuts reveal contrasting lines of white. Photo courtesy of Kathy Klitz

Joshua Brennan, cochair of the exhibit and a College of Fine Arts lecturer in printmaking, uses archival ink jet printers and a technique known as ghostprinting-which involves using residual ink from a previous print to make additional prints-in his piece Subcutaneous Field. ."It's an inherently interesting quality of the medium. Why fight it? Why not work with it?" Brennan says. Photo courtesy of Joshua Brennan

Art Werger's Nocturnal is a near-photographic etching of a city at night, created using a technique known as mezzotint that involves painstakingly working with a piece of copper covered in ink. Photo courtesy of Art Werger

With We Are The Blood Of The Americas, John Hitchcock brings his Native American heritage to a colorful screenprint made of paper, wool, ribbon, and grommets. Photo courtesy of John Hitchcock

Joshua Brennan, a Boston-based artist, exhibit cochair, and CFA lecturer in printmaking, is among the creators featured in this year's exhibit.

With Subcutaneous Field, Brennan reimagines an artistic tradition. There is a long history of artists painting a curtain to conceal their work, tricking viewers into thinking they need to peek behind it. Brennan printed a colorful image and then crafted a physical curtain, onto which he printed a second version of the same image, creating an illusory effect that makes it hard to distinguish between foreground and background.

"This becomes more of an interplay between the forms and how they line up," Brennan says.

Other pieces in the exhibit push printmaking into bold, new, and unexpected directions. Cascade Almond takes a pandemic-era experiment--printmaking with Legos--and brings it mainstream. The two printed green Chinese guardian lions in Almond's aptly titled The Guardians are made up of iconic Lego shapes that instantly harken back to childhood and "bring [printmaking] back down to earth to get kids excited about art," Brennan says.

Filtered through Rudy's vision, the Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial offers a glimpse into the best printmaking has to offer and a lesson in the value, and necessity, of human artistry. Cornell believes the latter is a lesson established artists and art students alike can take away from the exhibit.

"We teach our students to embrace accidents because there's so much unpredictability in what you do," Cornell says. "We say, how can you use it?"

The Boston Printmakers 2026 North American Print Biennial is on view through November 21 at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave. Gallery hours are 11 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free.

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Boston University published this content on October 23, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on October 24, 2026 at 02:41 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]