The Women Defining Printmaking At The 2026 IFPDA Print Fair

At the 2026 IFPDA Print Fair, the strongest signal was not nostalgia for the medium's history, but its current range. Held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the fair brought together works that moved from Renaissance echoes to highly experimental editions, with women artists and women-led print studios emerging as a central focus.

That breadth helps explain why prints continue to gain ground with collectors. They offer a lower barrier to entry than unique paintings, but the fair also made clear that affordability is only part of the appeal. Many of the works on view were technically ambitious, materially layered, and in some cases unique despite their print-based origins.

Childs Gallery in Boston presented both secondary-market works and new prints by artists it represents, including Joan Hall, whose large-scale hanging works were priced at $18,000 each. Hall makes her own paper and uses printmaking methods to build sculptural forms shaped by invasive algae species and plastic pollution near her home by Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay.

Cade Tompkins Projects of Providence showed three large-scale works by Israeli artist Orit Hofshi (b. 1969), whose hand-carved woodblocks are reused to generate different compositions. Each work was unique, with charcoal rubbing and additional drawing, and prices ranged from $55,000 to $75,000. Ruiz-Healy Art highlighted Santa Barraza, whose 1984 serigraph Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl, Reversed was embellished with colored pencil, hand stitching, and gold leaf and priced at $8,250.

The collaborative side of printmaking was equally visible. Tandem Press in Madison, Wisconsin, presented Marie Watt's Shared Horizon (Facing East), a 2025 edition of 24 priced at $12,000 each, alongside work by Dyani White Hawk, Alison Saar, and Michelle Grabner. At Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, an all-women presentation titled“A Woman's Place is in the Workshop” included Vija Celmins's $40,000 drypoint and Tacita Dean's Eclipse Drawings screenprints, which started at $1,500.

Laura Owens also drew attention with a new series of five colorful images in an edition of 12; six sold on opening night at $8,500 each. The result was a fair that framed printmaking not as a secondary category, but as a field where market accessibility and artistic invention now meet with unusual force.

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