Norman Stewart



Early Prints 1970-1979

 

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Norman Stewart was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1947 and raised in Michigan and California. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art where he worked with Connor Everts and Tamarind masterprinter, Irwin Hollander. While at Cranbrook, Stewart designed and built the Academy's first comprehensive screenprinting workshop and participated in special color seminars with Sewell Sillman of Ives/Sillman Publications. Sillman, a student of Josef Albers, was a primary collaborator on Albers' fine prints and his seminal text on color theory, Interaction of Color. 

Stewart works predominantly in screenprinting, drawing and painting. His art balances the sequential nature of process against the non-sequential character of intuitive thought and idea generation. The outcome is a paradoxical blend of formal and non-formal elements that the viewer reads simultaneously. The permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and significant corporate and private collections include Stewart's screenprints. Numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad have also included his work.

The touring exhibition and accompanying catalogue titled Collaboration in Print---Stewart & Stewart Prints: 1980-1990 included Stewart's screenprints. The retrospective opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1991 and traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; and five additional museums throughout Michigan. General Electric Company continued the tour to its European offices between 1993 and 1994.

In 2005, The Art of Screenprint, an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, celebrated Stewart & Stewart’s 25th anniversary. The accompanying catalogue, Collaboration in Print, Stewart & Stewart Screenprints 25th Anniversary, was published in 2005. The exhibition was featured in the PBS/WTVS series In the Frame: Exploring the DIA, hosted by then DIA Director Graham Beal.

In 2020, Glimpse: Fine Print Selections from Stewart & Stewart 1980 – 2020, an exhibition at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Association, Birmingham Michigan, celebrated Stewart & Stewart’s 40th anniversary of printing and publishing fine art prints.

In 2021 the Detroit Institute of Arts purchased the Stewart & Stewart Print Archive, including one impression from every fine art print edition and monoprint series it has printed and published since 1980.  

Along with his wife and partner, Susan Stewart, Stewart lives and works in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where he is a partner and masterprinter for Stewart & Stewart, printer/publisher and dealer of fine art prints. The firm is one of the first contemporary printer/publishers inducted into the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) in New York and is among the longest running independent printer/publishers of fine art prints in North America.