Gemini G.E.L. Turns 60 With an Archive Show in Los Angeles

Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles print workshop founded in 1966 by Sydney B. Felsen and Stanley Grinstein, marks its 60th anniversary this year with the exhibition "(Almost) Every Year: Sixty Years of Printmaking at Gemini G.E.L." Curators Susan Dackerman and Helen Molesworth assembled the show by mining the workshop's archive.

The title is nearly literal. The exhibition covers almost every year of the workshop's history, but the curators' stated interest lay elsewhere: in Gemini as a place where visiting artists found dialogue and tinkered outside their normal routines and comfort zones. That framing, offered in a gallery talk by the curators themselves, sets the terms for how the anniversary is read.

How did the workshop build its roster?

The chronology shows Gemini opened with a bang. It brought celebrated New York artists to Los Angeles early on, including:

• Josef Albers
• Man Ray
• Robert Rauschenberg
• Jasper Johns
• Claes Oldenburg
• Frank Stella
• Ellsworth Kelly

At the same time, the workshop recognized Los Angeles's own growing artist community by inviting David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ron Davis, and Bruce Nauman. By the 1980s, women worked at Gemini, starting with Dorothea Rockburne and Vija Celmins, followed soon after by Susan Rothenberg and Elizabeth Murray. The curators noted in the gallery talk that Gemini's artist list today is distinguished by its gender equality — a claim about the roster's composition, though the exhibition itself is what documents the shift.

What do the pairings reveal?

Mutual interests among resident artists drive the installation's juxtapositions. Stella and Kelly explore shape and color. Rauschenberg and Johns toy with found object imagery. Rothenberg and Richard Serra take the color black to the extreme. Toba Khedoori, Julie Mehretu, and Analia Saban examine linear matrices.

Several works stand out because the artists defy expectations. Joel Shapiro and Richard Tuttle, both known for their predominantly minimal sculpture, opted for exuberant, polychromatic palettes and complex configurations in their screenprinted geometric abstractions.

Where does a print stop being a print?

The exhibition's strongest examples push the boundaries of what counts as a print. In 1969, Oldenburg molded polyurethane to replicate an automobile profile in relief — perhaps influenced, as the account allows, by the Southern California Finish Fetish art of the period. Johns printed an image of a lightbulb on lead, turning something fragile into a durable, permanent object.

Edward and Nancy Kienholz pushed conventions further, turning ordinary gasoline containers into sculptures resembling television sets. More recently, Allen Ruppersberg created a multi-colored screenprint on a 20-foot-long perforated piano-player roll, which he divided into four separate sections.

That work, "Great Speckled Bird" (2013), takes its title from a traditional Southern gospel hymn once recorded by Johnny Cash and offers a nostalgic look at classic Americana. Its imagery consists of reproductions of lyrics from age-old songs, handwritten by the artist on vintage motel stationery.

What does the anniversary change?

For a workshop that has spent six decades urging artists out of their comfort zones, the show's real argument is archival: experimentation at Gemini was not an exception but the operating condition. Whether the gender-balanced roster the curators describe holds as the archive grows into its seventh decade is a question the next decade of the chronology will have to answer.