Among sprawling contemporary drawings, video installations and computer-drawn artworks, visitors exploring Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art will find several rooms covered in dozens of striking relief prints. Spanning a variety of styles, subjects and processes, the prints range from emotive and dynamic to intricate and quiet.
These pieces belong to one of the Benton’s new fall 2025 exhibits, “An Unruly Assembly: Selections from the Culley Collection of Woodblock Prints,” which opened on Aug. 21 alongside “Line, Smudge, Shade: Contemporary Drawing in Our Los Angeles,” “Two-Way Stretch: Electronic Drawing in Early Animation and Computer Art” and “Art Hall Projects 1: Manuel López.” Museumgoers came together to celebrate the four new exhibits at an opening reception on Sept. 6.
“Line, Smudge, Shade” showcases works on paper by 16 Los Angeles-based contemporary artists, including a year-long massive site-specific wall drawing by Manuel López. The exhibit emphasizes the continued relevance of drawing at a time when artists have unprecedented access to a variety of creative forms. Just down the hall, “Two-Way Stretch” explores electronic drawing in twentieth-century computer art and animation.
“An Unruly Assembly” is centered around the Culley Collection, a series of early-twentieth-century relief prints donated to Pomona College in 1959 by the family of art collector John H. Culley. The exhibit, which features 85 of the collection’s 187 prints, marks the first time works from the Culley Collection have been displayed comprehensively.
Woodblock printing emerged as a means of mass communication in Europe in the late fourteenth century. “An Unruly Assembly” highlights the resurgence of printing in 19th and 20th century Europe, giving new relevance to the medium and bringing attention to a varied set of artists included in the Culley Collection.
As the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel PO ’23 director of the Benton, Victoria Sancho Lobis expressed her hope that visitors and Benton enthusiasts are able to develop an interest in relief printing.
Lobis was initially inspired to spotlight works from the collection in 2023, after the museum received a federal grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to complete a full cataloging effort of their collection. In the first year of the grant, the Benton’s staff invited specialists to assess their collection, one of whom gave particular attention to the Culley prints.
“One of the specialists that we brought was just enraptured by the Culley Collection of wood block prints,” Lobis said. “It helped us appreciate anew how special it is. And then we all kind of caught the bug.”
Lobis curated the exhibit in collaboration with curatorial assistants Tristen Alizée Leone PO ’26 and Arivumani Srivastava PO ’26, as well as 5C students from a Pomona art history seminar called “Print Cultures: History and Theory.”
Each student in the class, which Lobis taught in the fall of 2024, studied the Culley Collection throughout the semester and ultimately selected five to seven prints with a thematic or aesthetic throughline to be featured in the exhibit. After getting acquainted with the collection and grouping their prints, the students began writing descriptive labels for the exhibition.
A smaller gallery accompanies the exhibit, entirely curated by members of the seminar, and includes older pieces that highlight the origins and history of the medium.
Working through every step of the process, Anika Yoshida SC ’27 spoke about how much deliberation her and her classmates went through in order to present the exhibition this fall.
“Every day we organized the prints in different ways, and the class looked at each others’ groupings,” Yoshida said. “We would come up with certain patterns we noticed, drawing connections between the different prints.”
The completed exhibition lists the students’ names on the wall, with a brief description of the course. Walking through the dimly-lit halls, each print is accompanied by a short description packed with historical context and reflective descriptions. The process of writing these object labels, however, was anything but short.
“My Professor [Lobis] wanted something very different than what I would have imagined from an object label — it seemed they need to not be overly intellectual, but instead very welcoming and inviting to read,” Yoshida said. “It was definitely not the most natural process of writing, but over time it got more fluid, and I realised it’s something to have fun with.”
Part of the challenge of curating the exhibition, student curators explained, was the diversity of prints within the Culley Collection.
“It’s a very interesting collection because all of the pieces are incredibly compelling, but the names are so wide-ranging,” Srivastava said.
“There’s household names,” he continued, “and there’s names that nobody in the museum, even people who have been working in the field for decades, recognized or heard of.”
Examples of this juxtaposition are scattered across the museum’s beige walls.
Expressionist print by renowned German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Dancer with a raised skirt,” exhibits broad, jagged lines, adding an intensity to the artwork. “The Kiss,” on the other hand, by lesser-known artist Sonia Lewitska, showcases an enticing, ambiguous image — two embracing profiles seemingly conjoined into one face in an eye-catching illusion.
The exhibit places art history giants like Kollwitz and Kirchner in conversation with these lesser-known artists, creating an interesting juxtaposition between the famous and the obscure.
“A big goal of this was to establish scholarship on those [lesser known] artists,” Srivastava said.
Lobis also emphasized the anonymity of many of the artists, explaining how difficult it was for the staff to track down simple background information.
“In some cases, we couldn’t establish their place and date of birth,” she said.
The works included in the exhibit are as varied as the artists, highlighting the power and versatility of the medium of printing.
“[The exhibit] was a really cool compilation of all these different pieces,” attendee Ella Lee-Guest PO ’29 said. “A lot of these pieces were just incredible, how detailed they were with just woodblock printing. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the past.”
Varying in everything from subject and sharpness to intricacy and size, each print in the “Unruly Assembly” tells its own unique story. Placed side by side in conversation, the exhibition invites visitors to join in on that discussion and contemplate the value of such an “Unruly Assembly.”
The Benton is open to visitors curious to see the collection of woodblock prints, as well as the concurrent exhibitions “Line, Smudge Shade,” and “Two-Way Stretch” until Jan. 4, 2026.
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