Jack Lemon (foreground) with Christo at Landfall Press in 1983 (Landfall Press)
And the key roles played by Michael Sims’ Lawrence Lithography Workshop and Jack Lemon’s Landfall Press
Stephanie Fox Knappe has learned a lot about printmaking in the last six years.
Even before COVID, Fox Knappe, the Sanders Sosland Senior Curator of Global Modern and Contemporary Art and head, American Art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, began discussions with Michael Sims from the Lawrence Lithography Workshop.
The topic: acquiring prints from the studio’s archives. In 2023, Richard and Evelyn Craft Belger gave the Nelson-Atkins 105 lithographs produced by the workshop. Last year, the museum purchased 249 more.
As a result, 24 prints culled from what’s now known as the Lawrence Lithography Workshop Archive will be displayed at the Nelson-Atkins through June 22.
To build the show, Fox Knappe says she and Sims zeroed in on the kind of works most likely to pique viewers’ curiosity about the process of printmaking. “One of the things that Mike instilled in me in our many, many hours of conversations is that a print is more than an image,” Fox Knappe explains. “It’s about the choices made by a master printer and the artist with whom he or she is collaborating … about the choice of paper, the paper’s texture and color. It’s about the ink, and the many layers.”
“It wasn’t just breathed onto the paper.”
Though Sims launched his enterprise in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1979, he soon moved it to Sunland, New Mexico. In 2001, he came back to Kansas City and a space in the Belger Crane Yard Studios.
Over the years Sims has collaborated with dozens of regionally and nationally known artists — including Robert Stackhouse, William Wylie, Roger Shimomura, Russell Ferguson, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Sudlow and Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton.
Fox Knappe points out that many of them have made return visits to the workshop. They’re drawn, she believes, by Sims’ humble but confident manner and his willingness to experiment.
She says that meanwhile, he’s always on the lookout for potential collaborators — like Kansas City fiber artist Marcie Miller Gross. An exhibition of her industrial felt pieces spurred Sims to propose they create a print together.
“I think it’s pretty amazing to have that eye,” Fox Knappe says, “to see an artist’s work in a different medium and see how it could translate into a lithograph.” Still, Knappe knows that prints are often dismissed as mere “reproductions.” “Yes, they’re multiples,” she says. “But even though there might be an edition of 50 or 100, each one can be unique because of that human element — looking at the registration, checking the color saturation, and auditioning them before the signing begins.”
Interestingly enough, another key player in Kansas City’s printmaking history pops up in the workshop’s backstory. A year before Sims opened TLLW, he took a job at Landfall Press. At the time, the company was based in Chicago. But its roots were here.
Landfall’s owner, Jack Lemon, graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1963. He studied there with Professor Bill McKim and took a deep dive into what soon became his passion.
“Jack fell in love with printmaking and never looked back,” explains Raechell Smith, director and curator of the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace (formerly H&R Block Artspace) at the Kansas City Art Institute. “He ended up staying in Kansas City for a bit. He started inviting artists to campus to make prints and helped set up the printmaking program at KCAI.”
Lemon’s list of co-conspirators in the late 1960s is remarkable. Artists including Peter Saul, Richard Diebenkorn and H.R. Westermann came to town and left with lithographs. Smith included some of those efforts in a recent exhibition called “Imprint: Celebrating the Collaborative Impulse in Printmaking” (Jan. 31 – March 15), highlighting Lemon’s 50-plus years of collaborating with top-tier painters, sculptors and ceramists.
“We’re not a collecting institution, but we do have some really exciting holdings of American works on paper,” Smith says. “Most of them have been gifts from Jack Lemon, many of which we’ve never shown before.”
Though KCAI didn’t offer a degree in printmaking until 2007, Smith thinks the archival evidence is pretty clear — thanks to Lemon, the school housed “one of the, if not the first, professional lithography workshops at an American university.”
Along with the Kansas City Art Institute, many other groups and academic institutions in the area have played a part in keeping “art on paper” alive and well. Since 1978, members of the Print Society of Greater Kansas City have made it their mission to learn more about local printmakers, the different ways that prints are made and the best ways to collect them.
The Hand Print Press at UMKC celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019 with “RE:Prints,” a look back at some of the most memorable pieces to emerge from the school’s printmaking facilities.
Johnson County Community College’s Art Department served for many years as home base for master printer and art instructor Zigmunds Priede, who passed away in late 2024.
In addition to their BFA, students at the University of Kansas School of Fine Arts can now earn a master’s degree in printmaking. And during the first years of the 21st century, a new breed of young printers opened small shops of their own. Among them were sisters Michelle and Angie Dreher, who started with a space in the West Bottoms, then moved to a bigger building on Gillham Road. In the back, Print League KC hosts lessons and community printing workshops, while up front their Two Tone Press handles commercial work like cards, posters and invitations.
As with every small business, the pair have learned that the shop’s to-do list is never really done. But the tactile pleasures of putting out a non-digital product? That’s still great fun. Michelle explains it this way: “When we have workshops, we cater to beginners and there’s just something magical about pulling prints. It’s like you don’t fully grasp what it’s going to look like until you finally pull the print off. That never gets old.”
