This fall, the Japan Information & Culture Center invites visitors to explore contemporary printmaking through Impressions of Japan: A Dialogue with Local Printmakers, a collaborative exhibition featuring affiliate artists of Discover Graphics Atelier in Alexandria, Virginia.  

Bringing together works in woodcut, linocut, etching, and lithography, the exhibition introduces visitors to the processes and possibilities of print as an artistic medium while examining the ongoing dialogue between Japanese art and Western artistic practices.  

Participating artists were asked to respond to Japanese art and culture through print. Drawing from historical and contemporary artworks, imagery, aesthetics, techniques, and everyday cultural practices, artists found inspiration through a range of personal experiences, travels, research, and encounters with Japanese and Japanese American artists. 

The resulting works offer varied perspectives on Japan, demonstrating how artistic influences can be interpreted and transformed through different materials, techniques, and creative practices. Together, they reveal the many ways an encounter with Japanese art and culture can leave an impression—and how that impression can take new form through the language of printmaking. 

Visit the JICC to see how artists in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are interpreting their impressions of Japan through print.  

Discover Graphics Atelier, established in 1983, is a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit. Serving the community, DGA is a place where art is created, and the knowledge and understanding of printmaking is passed on to the next generation of artists and lay people alike. Since its inception, DGA has offered regular instruction in stone and plate lithography, relief printmaking, collagraph, monotype, and in the multiple possibilities offered by the whole range of etching and intaglio techniques. DGA also provides facilities in which advanced students and proven printmakers can pursue their art in a supportive environment.