Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
John E. Dowell Jr.
American; 20th-century
Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum
59%
The White Wheel of W.T.H. Etching. 1967
A wall text related that this print is about a racist incident which Dowell underwent in the mid sixties; I am agnostic as to whether that is artistically relevant. (Well, of course it's relevant, insofar as it has intimately to do with the idea which Dowell intended to express through his print's form; but it's likely that knowing that about the print isn't relevant to experiencing the print, which, as a print, ought to be relating its idea through visual means.) Dowell's good when wisps and whispers of white just barely come to being behind his picture's black surface — there's one great instance of this in the top right corner. He's less good the more definition his forms have, and the more demonstrative he gets with them. The scene taking place atop the white clothes-iron object is a case in point. Everything here could have benefited from being blurrier by about half. This might have made the print's drama less a structural one than an (I guess) ontological one — white struggling to make representational sense of anything against the dull scream of a black ground. (This is more how the early prints of Terry Adkins, an epigone of Dowell's, tend to work, and they are better for it.) (2025)