Sharp-eyed curators at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey have spent decades assembling one of the world's finest collections of American color woodcut prints. Now the museum on campus is highlighting this trove with Blocks of Color, a display of more than 100 woodcuts dating from the 1890s onward. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Arthur Wesley Dow began using the woodcut technique to create visually complex, color-saturated images. His passion was passed on through the generations, inspiring such well-known talents as Blanche Lazzell, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, and Sherrie Levine, but also dozens of artists with still-unfamiliar names whose achievements are also celebrated here. Blocks of Color closes January 3.

Information: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, 732.932.7237 x 610, zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu

Image:
Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922)
Bridge Over Stream, Ipswich
1893-94, Color woodcut, 6 and five-sixteenths x 3 and one-half in.
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Photo: Bryan Whitney