Crossing the Date-Line is a color etching created in 1966 by American artist, Ynez Johnston. It was printed by the artist from two plates with stencils on an unidentified cream wove paper. Crossing the Date-Line is pencil signed, titled and editioned 13/40. An impression was included in the exhibition Ynez Johnston: Graphic Work 1949-1966 at the San Francisco Museum of Art in Spring 1967. The reference is San Francisco Museum of Art, catalog number 45. Crossing the Date-Line was published by the Roten Galleries, Baltimore and bears its blindstamp in the lower left. The platemark measures 8-15/16 x 11-7/8 inches.
In the foreword for the catalog for her 1967 exhibition, Johnston reflected on her media and her muses: “Prints are mysterious media. Their center of strength is in the worked block of wood, or stone or metal plate, but these remain enigmatic until they have made their declaration. The paper impression fulfills them and becomes their declaration…In spirit, my prints are close to my other work and the differences, I suppose, lie in the nature of the materials used. When I am involved in a work, I don’t much concern myself with the “meaning” – not in a way, that is, that can be verbalized, but observations can be made after the fact, and especially in view of forms recurring over a period of years….What I am up to can be thought of in this way: that there might exist a kind of live collage of time (rather than a progression), a suspension in time-relationships so that affective phenomena from distant cultures and places are all as it were live tissue. I follow an urge to synthesize and combine into images, architectural, animal, human, plant and geographical structures. The focus is a drama of personae, of ritual acts, with interpolations of love, fear, delight, conflict, anxiety, wonder. The drama is partly colored by overtones of ancient and modern tales and myths (which perhaps parallel some personal equations). The drama is never definitively resolved.”
Ynez Johnston,
printmaker, painter, sculptor, and teacher, was born in Berkeley, California on
12 May 1920. As a child, her family encouraged her artistic tendencies by
enrolling her in Saturday classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts
in Oakland and with excursions to the de Young Memorial Museum in San
Francisco. Ynez later attended the University of California at Berkeley,
receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1941 and her Masters of Fine Art
in 1946. She was given the Bertha B. Taussig Memorial Award for the outstanding
graduate in fine arts. Her instructors, Worth Ryder, Erle Loran and Margaret
Peterson, introduced her to work of Picasso, Klee, Miro and Braque. In 1949,
she moved to Los Angeles where Leonard Edmondson, a fellow artist, opened his
studio to her.
Johnston taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Chouinard Art Institute, California State College, University of Judaism, and the Otis Art Institute. She was awarded the Anne Bremer Award, Huntington Hartford Residence, Guggenheim Foundation Grant, Louis C. Tiffany Grant, James D. Phelan Grant, MacDowell Colony Residency Grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship three times. In 1992, the Fresno Art Museum honored Johnston with their Distinguished Woman Artist award.
Johnston is represented in the collections of the Kennedy Museum of American Art, Athens, Ohio; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Fresno Art Museum, California; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the National Museum of Israel, Jerusalem; the Grunwald Graphic Art Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Minnesota; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Oakland Museum of California Art, California; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Ynez Johnston died in 2019 in Los Angeles, California.
