The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to 100 objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.
In 2024, the Museum received a remarkable gift from JoAnn Edinburg Pinkowitz of some three hundred prints by Mexican and other (mainly American) artists who worked in Mexico. This gift builds on JoAnn’s earlier donation of twentieth-century Chinese prints of the modern woodcut movement.
JoAnn was raised in a family passionate about collecting art. During the 1960s, as a teenager, she volunteered in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She began collecting prints in 2009 after being inspired by the museum's exhibition Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints. JoAnn was attracted to art that had a strong social and political message. Many of the prints on view were published by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), a printmaking collective founded in 1937 in Mexico City “with the aim of stimulating graphic arts production in the interests of the Mexican people.” In the 1950s, artists from the workshop traveled to China, where they introduced their work to local artists. Artists from both countries treated similar subjects, and this spurred JoAnn to give Chinese prints to The Met.
The Pinkowitz material dovetails perfectly with The Met’s outstanding collection of Mexican prints and includes works by artists not previously represented. Prints by American artists in Mexico and mid-century Chinese artists also deepen our appreciation of traditions of democratic printmaking.