Tia Blassingame

Blassingame holds a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University, a M.A. in Book Arts and printmaking from the Corcoran College of Art & Design, and an M.F.A. in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.[2][3][4] She was Artist-in-Residence at the International Print Center (2019), Yaddo (2011), MacDowell (2010) and the Santa Fe Art Institute (2010).

Blassingame is Assistant Professor of Art and Director of Scripps College Press at Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Her work has been collected by private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, The Tate in Britain, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Yale University. Her work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.[5]

In 2019, Blassingame was a contributing writer in Freedom of the Presses: Artist Books in the Twenty-first Century. She also founded the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color collective in the same year.[6] She has been proprietor at Primrose Press, since 2009.[7] She serves on the Board of Directors for the College Book Art Association and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the American Printing History Association.[8]

Blassingame's work focuses on social justice issues, rendering racially-charged images and histories for a nuanced discussion on issues of race and racism.[9] She has exhibited throughout the U.S., including:

• 2014 "The Exact Measure of Cruelty: Slavery and Racism in Artists’ Books", Milner Library, Illinois State University
• 2018 Mourning/Warning, Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College. In this exhibition, Blassingame provides a look into her experience as an African-American woman.
• 2018 Text & Textile, Art and Architecture Library at Yale University
• 2019 Playing with Words at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA)
• 2019 I Am Mourning/Warning, Morey Family Gallery at Art Reach of Mid-Michigan [10]
• 2019 Umbra: New Prints for a Dark Age at International Print Center
• 2020 I AM/YOU ARE, Berea College.[11] In her art book, Blassingame comments on her experience as an African-American woman through the medium of printmaking. She also offers insight into experiences of police brutality, violence and humiliation through the lens of being African-American.
• 2020 Intersections: Book Arts as Conversion at Tulane University

• Freedom of the Presses: artists' books in the twenty-first century. Marshall Weber, ed. Brooklyn, NY: Booklyn, [2018]. ISBN 978069216678

• Official website
• "Tia Blassingame: Despite Hostile Terrain." Rare Book School lecture, 10 June 2019.