Cy Twombly (1928-2001) created art that was remarkable for its versatility, sensitivity and originality. Throughout his career, he followed his own artistic pathway, independent from contemporary trends, and for a long time his work went unnoticed by a wider audience. It was at an early age that he began to develop his own symbolic language of letters and words, which suggested a pictorial form of poetry. References from art, history and mythology soon expanded this poetic vocabulary, often combined with a sensual engagement with the painted surface. Twombly was an artist marked by the Abstract Expressionism which ruled his coming of age. By the time of his death in Rome, at the age of 83, he was internationally recognized as one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic artists of the 20th and early 21st century.

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.