In June of 2024, Petrie Institute staff members JR Henneman and Meg Selig sat down with Barbara J. Thompson to discuss her collection and collecting history, which started with the work of her grandfather, Wichita-based printmaker C. A. Seward.1 As revealed in this interview, his impact on her life, and on the art ecosystems of Kansas and the American Southwest, is an important story: one that she is helping to tell through her own research and one that the Petrie Institute can now support thanks to her generous gift of fine art prints, which includes works by Seward and his many friends and colleagues.
In this interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, Thompson discusses her grandfather’s legacy, her collecting journey, and her advice to collectors.
PIWAA How and where did your journey to being a print collector begin?
Barbara J. Thompson It began when I was a kid. I grew up with prints. My father was a schoolteacher, so we didn’t have tons of money to go out and do things. To entertain us, my mother would pull out boxes filled with her print collection, and we would go through them and she would tell us stories. I recently had an argument with one of my cousins. She said, “Oh, everybody knows what a lithograph and a woodblock are.” And I replied, “We know because we grew up with them on the walls.” My nephew said he was in shock when he discovered his friends didn’t have prints on their walls. It was just part of how we grew up—there was no escaping it. I have two brothers and a sister, and of course, I had favorite prints. At one point, when I would go home to visit my mother after we all grew up, I would discover that my brothers and sister had been home and said, “Sure, Mom, I’ll take that.” I didn’t want to take prints off my mother’s wall, but finally I thought, “Take note.” That was the beginning. I began buying prints that I just liked, and then my mother added substantially to my collection. I still collect to this day.
PIWAA What has surprised you along the way, and have your interests changed over time?
BT I always liked those from the Southwest, and fortunately, my brothers and sister didn’t, so some of the great prints were still in my mother’s boxes and on her walls. They were her personal favorites. When she had severe rheumatoid arthritis but could still travel, I called her up and said, “Why don’t you meet me and we’ll go to New Mexico together?” It was a wonderful journey. She had been to the Southwest with her parents in 1925, so we repeated her childhood trip. I learned a lot from it, and it was something that she and I shared because she loved the same prints and the same locations. We sat in the Blumenschein garden outside the Blumenschein house, and she told me about sitting there as a kid waiting for her father C. A. Seward to finish his conversation about art. I had great experiences and a lot of coaching and encouragement from my mother.
PIWAA How did your mother become engaged with prints and print collecting?
BT She was the oldest daughter of printmaker C. A. Seward. Printmaking was a major part of her father’s life. When he did an edition of prints, he had six boxes, one for each of his four daughters, one for his wife, and one for his sister.
PIWAA So your journey began with the Southwest, something you and your mother bonded over. How did your world expand in terms of print collecting?
BT I never met my grandfather. He died at fifty-five years old, before I was born. In fact, he had eleven grandchildren and only met one of them. I was always curious because I’d been raised with stories about my grandfather and how important and wonderful he was. When I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, one of the assignments in an American art history class was to write a paper about an artist who lived through the changes at the turn of the century. I asked, “Can I write about my grandfather?” And that’s what I did. I thought, It’s time for me to look at what I think may be myths about my grandfather and see if they’re correct. I went home, back to Kansas, and still living were maybe four or five of the artists he’d mentored. From their stories and comments it became clear that for them he walked on water. It’s unbelievable what he accomplished in just fifty-five years.
PIWAA You went into the research with a myth-busting mindset.
BT I totally did.
PIWAA But in this case, you didn’t need to bust them.
BT I didn’t, and as a matter of fact, I wanted to say, “You should have enlarged them.” Everybody associates Seward with founding the Prairie Print Makers, but he did one other thing that’s extremely important: He instigated an annual exhibition of American Block Printmakers in 1928. Not only did he mentor young artists in Wichita, he brought to Wichita major exhibitions every year: the Annual Prairie Print Maker Exhibition and the Annual American Block Print Exhibition. The Prairie Print Makers ended in 1965, and the block print shows went on in different formats until the ’70s. That’s a long legacy.2
I’m currently working on a catalog about my grandfather, and I’ve realized that what he loved the most was lithography. He made relief prints and a lot more etchings than I’d thought. The more I looked, the more I could see that he was experimenting with other printmaking techniques alongside his lithographs. He understood how to pick the right medium for what he wanted to talk about.
I consider printmaking to be kind of a high-wire act of making art. You have to be a painter, a draftsman, and a sculptor. You’ve also got to be a little bit of a chemist to understand how all the elements are going to come together. And instinctively, you have to know that the imagery is going to be printed in reverse.
My grandfather is a great example of an artist who died before people were writing extensively about American artists, and especially not printmakers. The early writing about American printmakers happened after World War II, and the focus was modernism. So, if you were an artist who understood modernism but that wasn’t your thing, nobody picked up on you. And there are countless American artists, and especially printmakers, who fall in that category. I became sort of a missionary. I talked to and looked at the work of all the artists that Seward mentored, the printmakers like Chili [Charles] Capps, Lloyd Foltz, Bill [William] Dickerson, and Arthur Hall—I mean major printmakers.3 They gathered in his little studio and went out on sketching trips. And again, this is just Wichita, Kansas. It was a supportive environment. Print exhibitions were so important at that time, especially if you lived in the middle of the country. You didn’t have a chance to see a lot of major work from the coastal art scenes, so these circulating print shows were incredibly important for artists, and it created an environment of people who became print collectors.
The Kansas-based printmakers circulated both the annual Prairie Print Makers exhibition as well as the annual American Block Print national exhibition throughout the country. The Chicago Society of Etchers and the Print Makers Society of California did the same. These shows were easy to pack, and they just put them on a bus and sent them off.
When my grandfather knew his health was getting worse, he helped reinvigorate the Kansas Federation of Art, especially their circulating exhibition programs. They then took charge of organizing and circulating the Prairie Print Maker Exhibition and the American Block Print exhibition.
PIWAA What a legacy. And how interesting that you didn’t meet your grandfather in person but got to know him in a special way through your own research and love of prints, which makes it such a privilege that you’ve given your Southwest collection to the Denver Art Museum in honor of him.
BT My intention is to honor his legacy, and I appreciate the museum’s response because I wanted to keep the collection together. I believe that to understand an artist, you have to put them in a bigger context. That was why I started collecting other printmakers in the Southwest.
PIWAA And outside the Southwest: You ended up building a collection that was international.
BT I did because, again, of the context. I grew interested in other members of the Prairie Print Makers. As I discovered all the information about the block print exhibitions, and I said, “If we’re going to talk about block prints, let’s go back to the beginning of this revival.” I wrote a catalog to document how the revival of this printmaking technique moved all the way through Europe and then to the United States.4
PIWAA What kind of a man was your grandfather?
BT Chili Capps told me the best story. He said, “We’d be in a group, and your grandfather never liked to be in the front leading. He liked to be standing in the back.” And he said, “But if the conversation got off course, he’d make a wisecrack and bring it back to the point it needed to be.” If you look at the different organizations he got involved with, he was always the secretary or secretary/treasurer. He didn’t want to be the president. He wanted to be the workhorse and make things happen.
People say he was this quiet, gentle person who had a funny sense of humor. In a letter to Bill Dickerson, who was at the Art Institute at the time, he wrote, “B. J. O. Nordfeld came by last night, and I taught him how to make a lithograph on an etching press. This press will print anything except money.” That is totally his sense of humor.5
PIWAA Could you elaborate a bit more on the Prairie Print Makers? How should we understand this group and its art and the bigger picture of American art?
BT The Chicago Society of Etchers already existed, so did the Print Makers Society of California. The people leading those were two women, friends of my grandfather’s, and they were kind of his coaches when he decided the Midwest needed a print society. He built on what they were doing and added some nuances. The Chicago and California groups exhibited traditional etching for the most part. They didn’t do block prints—definitely not lithographs—and so that became an opportunity for the Prairie Print Makers. They were always open to new media and experimentation. They offered their members an annual gift print. If you joined as an associate for five dollars a year, you received a print. I have letters from major printmakers [who could join at a reduced rate] saying, “I’m not sure I can afford to join the Prairie Print Makers this year, my $1 membership,” because times were really tough during the years of the Depression.
PIWAA Related to the gift you recently gave to the Denver Art Museum, can you tell us about the significance of the American Southwest to printmakers, why your grandfather decided to come out here, and why others of the Prairie Print Makers, for example, decided to come to the Southwest for inspiration?
BT I think there’s a layered response to that. Among a larger movement of people from Wichita buying homes and going to the Southwest, the Chicago and St. Louis groups of artists were traveling through Wichita and talking about the region, making it a major draw. I think that’s probably it: word of mouth.
PIWAA Do you know when your grandfather would first have traveled to the Southwest?
BT He didn’t go that many times. He went in 1924, 1925, and again in 1926, when he had a summer show at the New Mexico Museum of Art. He was friends with many of the Southwest artists, including Gustave Baumann, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Ken Adams, and Walter Ufer. My mother talked about Ufer coming to dinner and what he was like, and I think, “How wonderful to have had this first-hand experience.”
PIWAA In the collection you have given to the museum, the names of many printmakers are new to us. Why do so many printmakers remain unknown, and are there any in particular that you think are ripe for rediscovery right now?
BT These printmakers didn’t always have a biographer—somebody telling their story, whether a family member, museum, or dealer. Ralph Fletcher Seymour is a great example of a relatively unknown but important printmaker of this era.
I’m writing the catalog about my grandfather now because the story needs to be told. People in Wichita should know they had an amazing person living here.
There’s a lot of material still to be covered. I think another problem is that very few art history programs talk about prints.
PIWAA Let’s talk about collecting. What do you look for in a print?
BT The subject matter and the quality of the work. The technical skill. Some people are just better printmakers than others.
PIWAA For anyone who’s new to the topic of printmaking, what is important for them to know when looking at prints? What advice do you have for aspiring collectors?
BT Read a lot. Look a lot, but don’t be afraid to take some risks. Don’t be reluctant to contact a seller and bargain. They want to make a sale. You educate your eye by owning something. It’s not like I kept all my prints. Some of them I bought, and I got tired of them. Or I realized as I collected more, it wasn’t a very good print. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Notes
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Thompson contributed to an exhibition and catalog on Seward. See C. A. Seward, Barbara Thompson, Carole Gardner, Kate Meyer, and Helen Foresman, C. A. Seward: Artist and Draftsman (Spencer Museum of Art, 2011). She also recently published a book on his life and work. See Barbara J. Thompson and Carole Gardner, C. A. Seward 1884–1939: Printmaker, Commercial Artist & Art Advocate (Pub. by author, 2024). ↩︎
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On this topic, Thompson wrote In the Middle of America: Printmaking & Print Exhibitions, C. A. Seward and Friends, Wichita, Kansas, 1916–1946 (Wichita Art Museum, 2013) to accompany an exhibition of the same name held at the Wichita Art Museum in 2013. Additionally, she coauthored The Prairie Print Makers (Kansas Arts Commission, 1984). ↩︎
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Thompson curated exhibitions on Charles M. Capps, William J. Dickerson, and Arthur Hall for the Wichita Art Museum and wrote the accompanying catalogs. See Charles M. Capps, 1898–1981: Etchings & Aquatints, Lithographs and Block Prints (Wichita Art Museum, 2018), William J. Dickerson, 1904–1972: Lithographs, Block Prints & Etchings (Wichita Art Museum, 2017), and Arthur William Hall, 1889–1981: Etchings, Drypoints & Aquatints (Wichita Art Museum, 2016). ↩︎
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Thompson curated The International Block Print Renaissance Then and Now: A Centennial Celebration of Block Prints in Wichita, Kansas, 1922–2022 at the Wichita Art Museum, on view February 26–August 7, 2022, and she authored the accompanying catalog. ↩︎
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On B. J. O. Nordfeldt, see Barbara Thompson, B. J. O. Nordfeldt: American Internationalist in Wichita (Wichita Art Museum, 2021). ↩︎