Henri Matisse was a French artist known for his pioneering role in the development of modern art in the early 20th century. Born in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, Matisse initially studied law before turning to art, and he enrolled in the Académie Julian in Paris in 1891. He is best known for his vividly colored paintings and his use of bold, simplified forms, which he developed in his Fauvist period from around 1900 to 1908.

Matisse's work was also influenced by his travels to North Africa and the Middle East, as well as by his interest in non-Western art. In addition to painting, Matisse worked in other media such as sculpture, printmaking, and collage. He continued to create art until his death in 1954, and his legacy remains an important influence on contemporary art. Significant collections of his work can be found at the MoMA in New York, London’s Tate Modern, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg Russia, The Met, and Musée Matisse in Nice, France.

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.