A medium of care: Nell Blaine’s printmaking

Nell Blaine (1922–96) was a respected member of the New York School’s Second Generation in the 1950s. After contracting polio in 1959, Blaine used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Around this time, she shifted from abstraction to figuration – especially landscapes, still lifes and scenes of everyday life. Although work on large canvases became impossible, she discovered she could still draw with her right hand, which made printmaking an ideal medium. Blaine tested printmaking’s technical capacities while introducing radical subject-matter. Many prints document the domestic life she shared with the women who were both her lovers and caregivers. By placing Blaine’s work, including previously unpublished prints, in dialogue with queer and disability studies, this article explores printmaking’s capacity to both visualise, and function as one node within, networks of care.