In an age of visual overload, it’s easy to forget that endlessly available pictures of people, places, and things were once exceptionally rare. So scarce, in fact, that artistic representations were mostly reserved for religious ritual and sacred spaces, for specialized education, or for the very wealthy. Printmaking was arguably the first, and most lasting, innovation counter to such exclusivity.
Holly EJ Black’s The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art (2026) traces a medium that has too often been under-appreciated. It’s been relegated as secondary to painting or sculpture, for example, even as prints have been essential to the dissemination of religious belief, intellectual history, and artistic understanding, and functioned as engines of propaganda and protest. As prints were the first mass-duplicated and widely distributed art objects, the history of printmaking is fundamentally a history of the democratization of art. And we could all use a little more democracy right now.