By Julie Lapping Rivera and Kaye Carroll

Printmakers have a long history of addressing social justice concerns. Six years ago at Zea Mays Printmaking, in response to a growing climate of discrimination against women and other marginalized groups, Julie Lapping Rivera began creating the woodcut portraits that became Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women. From a modest opening at the Sanford Gallery, cut short by the COVID-19 lockdowns, this exhibit has grown to travel around the country and shine as an example of meeting a political moment the way that only art can.

“Look Again celebrates the lives and accomplishments of courageous women from around the world and across centuries. I was initially inspired to focus on portraiture by the New York Times’ Overlooked series, which launched in 2018. Amy Padnani, the first woman of color to work at the New York Times obituary desk, created Overlooked to tell the stories of exceptional women and others whose obituaries had never been published in the Times.”

Woodcut is a printmaking process that requires patience, dedication, and intimacy with the subject matter. Look Again currently includes portraits of 30 women, each an example of dedication in her own right. They come from diverse backgrounds and fields, and Rivera employs a diverse range of woodcut techniques to express their essence, including color reduction, multiple blocks, stencils, masks, and collage.

“My selection process is a mixture of gut response to a particular story or image, and social concerns I especially want to shine a light on. Look Again incorporates printmaking, poetry and history, giving viewers multiple pathways through which to connect.”

All of the portraits are accompanied by poems, contributed by women poets from diverse cultural backgrounds. Their words add breadth and depth to each subject’s portrayal.

Look Again debuted at the Sanford Gallery at Zea Mays Printmaking in March 2020, intended to be in honor of Women’s History Month. The pandemic forced the exhibition to close early, but the project continued to resonate with those who saw and heard about it, be it through the Zea Mays Printmaking Flat File, pieces that ended up in other exhibitions, or simply word of mouth. Through it all was Rivera’s dedication to the project, as she continued to research the stories of underrepresented women and the series continued to grow.

On April 27th, 2024, six years after the project began, Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women opened at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. And on September 5th, Amy Padnani, the New York Times journalist and creator of the Overlooked series that inspired the exhibit, gave a talk at the museum, bringing full circle the spirit of solidarity and recognition for women’s’ achievements that unite the two projects.

Look Again will run at the D’Amour Museum through February 2025, but this project’s journey won’t end there. Starting in 2026, the exhibition will join Exhibit Envoy. Based in California, the mission of Exhibit Envoy is to bring socially relevant, high-quality art exhibitions to cultural institutions and the communities they serve. Their exhibitions encompass art, history, culture and the natural environment, and they specialize in bringing exhibitions to spaces and communities that don’t typically have them. With Exhibit Envoy’s help, communities all over the country will soon have a chance to experience Look Again, and be inspired by its subjects, its story and the creators who brought it to life.

Julie Lapping Rivera teaches woodcut workshops at Zea Mays Printmaking. You can find her video tutorials on Beginning Woodcut and Color Reduction Woodcut at the Zea Mays Printmaking Online School.