Cy Twombly's (1928-2011) work stood out for its raw, emotive quality and its rejection of formal conventions in an era when many artists were turning to abstraction and minimalism. The American’s liberal use of graffiti-like scrawls, scribbles, and marks challenged the traditional boundaries of art. Twombly’s works are characterized by their large-scale canvases, bold brushwork, and use of calligraphic marks and gestural lines; often conveying a sense of spontaneity and urgency, as if they were created in a big bang.

Twombly's last painting, completed shortly before his death in 2011, titled "Untitled (Camino Real)", was sold at Sotheby's New York in November 2015 for $70.5 million dollars. The large-scale canvas features Twombly's signature style of bold brushstrokes and scribbles, with muted tones of gray and white dominating the composition. The painting is considered a masterpiece of his late period..

Silkscreen printing is one of the oldest forms of printmaking. The technique, as we know it today, can be traced as far back as the era of Song Dynasty Art in China, around A.D. 960-1279. Japanese artists then turned screen printing into a complex art by developing an intricate process wherein a piece of silk was stretched across a frame to serve as the carrier of hand cut stencils. By the 15th century, silkscreen printing eventually found its way to the west.

For much of the 20th century, this printing method was kept confidential and safeguarded as a “trade secret.” As an artistic form, it appeared for the first time in the United States in the 1930s when a group of artists working with the Federal Art Project experimented with the technique and subsequently formed the National Serigraphic Society. American artists began making "fine art" screen-prints and devised the term "Serigraph" (derived from the combination of two Greek words, seicos, meaning silk, and graphos, meaning writing) to distinguish fine art from commercial screen printing.

In printmaking, each print in an edition is considered an original work of art, not a copy. During the 1960s, silkscreen printing became popular with Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who were attracted to its bold areas of flat color. The technique would go on to make up a large percentage of printed garment works. Silkscreen's predilection for bold and graphic designs makes it ideally suited for our graphic exhibition sweatshirts.