Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney (born 1945) has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. Barney's work is characterized by rich colors and deep focus, achieved through controlled lighting, that capture the material details of the lives of her subjects. Her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Zug, Switzerland. She is considered to be one of the most important photographers of her generation.

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.