April Katz
April Katz received her M.F.A. degree from Arizona State University. She is Morrill Professor at Iowa State University where she has taught printmaking since 1999. For nineteen years she organized the university’s annual international postcard print exchange. From 2004 – 2006 Katz served as president of the Southern Graphics Council. Her prints, which synthesize digital and traditional printmaking processes, are in numerous collections and have been exhibited throughout the US and recently in Portugal, Spain and China. She has presented papers for print, photographic and visual literacy professional national and international conferences.
Katz’s primary language and tool is the print whose vocabulary includes transfers, layers, seriality and variations on a theme. Death of loved ones, serious illness and political discord are the forces that have shaken Katz to the core and led her to ask fundamental human questions about herself and her relationship to the world. She searches for connections between disparate elements to understand and convey their impact on current personal and cultural identity.
Statement
Printmaking serves as both technique and visual language to convey issues of identity, passage of time, memory, and communication in my work. Culturally iconic images fuse with my own drawn and photographic sources to create the final print. Likewise, traditional and newer digital technologies combine to add visual and conceptual depth to the prints. In a diverse group of print series exploring family, ethnicity, language, evolution, bioengineering, and my own experience with breast cancer and genetic testing I reveal the past in order to understand its impact on current identity.
Statements about each body of work created since 2004 are included with each gallery in the Portfolio section of this site.
The printmaking community continues to have a tremendous impact on my work. I acknowledge this dialogue through my ongoing participation in national and international print exchange portfolios. My 2011 decision to work as a partner in BOKA reflects my belief in the significant role collaboration can play in an artist’s development. Participation in critical discourse and analysis within an artistic collaborative and also through engagement with the printmaking community nurtures my artistic growth. Printmaking continues to stimulate my passion for creative inquiry.
Biography
April Katz will be forever grateful for the bite of the printmaking bug that she first experienced through Tom Majeski at the University of Omaha, Nebraska while she was teaching high school art. It changed her life. She left and earned an M.F.A. at Arizona State University in 1988. She and JoAnn Boehmer together form the artist collaborative BOKA. April is a professor at Iowa State University where she organizes the Annual International Postcard Print Exchange. She regularly presents research papers related to her studio work and research at national and international conferences. From 2004–2006 she was president of the Southern Graphics Council.
Katz’s prints have been exhibited throughout the US and are in numerous collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
