Brodsky: If you were to ask me what my identity is, I would say to you first, "I'm an artist."

The second thing I would say is, "I'm also a woman."

You know, and, of course, I've been deeply involved in the feminist art movement.

Giviskos: Judy Brodsky is a dynamo.

I mean, she just turned 90.

She is amazing as both a scholar and an artist and an organizer, someone who has ideas and then knows how to execute them and get support for them.

Narrator: One of Judith's biggest ideas was the Brodsky Print Center.

Located at Rutgers University, for three decades, this now-world-renowned, innovative print center moved to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2017.

Brodsky: And I thought, "We need a print center that is -- has facilities that are available to women artists and to artists of color."

And that became my mission.

This was not going to be a print center for white male art stars.

Olin: These artists also were innovative, as well, in their ideas aesthetically, as well as intellectually.

It hosted 440 visiting artists, who produced over 660 projects during the 30 years it was at Rutgers.

And what happened is, those beautiful works on paper ended up in museums, collections, and galleries, like the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, which bought a bunch of the prints because Judy carried them to London to share them with the Keeper of Prints.

Brodsky: ...screen behind you, and so I... Burko: Well, I think Judith is a national treasure.

Anything she puts her mind to gets done, because that's the way women are.

You know, we get things done.

And Judy's a visionary, she's headstrong, and she's brilliant.

Narrator: Diane and Judith worked together 50 years ago to organize a groundbreaking exhibition in Philadelphia.

The show, called "FOCUS," featured 81 women artists.

It was one of America's first large-scale exhibitions of work by women.

Brodsky: The issue at the time was that women artists were being shut out of exhibitions at museums.

They weren't being shown at galleries.

Narrator: Now, 50 years later, the two are restaging the 1974 exhibition as part of a whole series of shows and events with women artists.

Dozens of galleries and museums throughout the city are participating.

They're calling it (re)FOCUS.

Brodsky: I think I was really lucky because I grew up in a household that valued art, and my father was a professor of English literature at Brown University, but he was also somebody who was very interested in art.

He collected prints and bought things that he could afford.

My parents realized that I was really interested in making art, and so they sent me to the Rhode Island School of Design on Saturday mornings from the time I was 6 years old all the way through high school.

Narrator: Judith studied art history at Harvard, then married and moved to Princeton with her young family in the late '50s.

In the 1960s, with two small children off to school, she entered the MFA program at Tyler School of Art, determined to become an artist.

Brodsky: My husband -- his mother had died when he was 3, so even though this was a period of women being at home, I said he had no idea about what women's roles were supposed to be, and so I could do whatever I wanted, and he was very happy.

And he encouraged me to go to graduate school.

Narrator: It was there that Judith had her first hands-on experience in a print studio.

Brodsky: Well, I actually just fell in love with printmaking.

I was coming from a literary background, I was coming from a history background, and I had a lot of ideas.

And, also, this was a period when there was turmoil, in the '60s.

So it was the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement.

So, printmaking is a series of processes, and in a way, it became a metaphor for the complexity of my own thoughts.

My prints won prizes in juried print shows, and I had galleries all over the country that were handling my prints, and my prints began to enter museum collections.

The first one was the Library of Congress.

Narrator: Judith started the Brodsky Print Center, originally called the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, in 1986.

A show at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers included over 90 works created at the center between 1986 and 2017.

Foti: This one, it's called "What is an American?"

The artist is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

She is from the Salish and Kootenai Confederation of Tribes.

It's been an incredible journey.

Many of the artists that we started working with in the early days have become nationally and internationally recognized.

Brodsky: We figured we'd better ask them.

Faith Ringgold just had a one-person exhibition that filled the New Museum in New York, and she just had a solo exhibition in Paris at the Picasso Museum.

Ringgold: First, let me tell you this.

I took printmaking, lithography, when I was in college in the late '40s, and I was so bad at it.

I was so awful.

When Judy asked me to come here, that was the beginning of my nouveau experience.

Really, it was wonderful.

And Eileen Foti would come to my house, and we would do the drawings and the plates.

Brodsky: Joan Snyder, in her paintings, is tactile, almost sculptural.

So all the prints she had ever made were flat.

And we said to her, if we use paper pulp and you paint with paper pulp, you can make them just as tactile as your painting.

Snyder: When you're making a print, it's a process that, really, you're working all day.

When I paint, I paint for maybe 3 or 4 hours and I'm done.

It's a different way of thinking.

You have to think in layers.

You know, it'll just bring up some of these browns.

So maybe let's try this.

For printmaking, you kind of have to have a pretty good idea beforehand of what those layers are going to be, how they're going to sit on top of each other.

I mean, do I want it to be an etching?

Do I want it to be a lithograph?

Do I want it to be a woodblock?

Do I want to use digital photography?

And now I'm using all of them in one print often.

So that gets even more complicated.

I think I can safely say that I drive my printmakers crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, I do, you know?

Brodsky: Willie Cole got one of our New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowships.

I think making the print is related to his ideas about the iron and the idea of the scorch of the iron is really a print.

He was already thinking in terms of the iron because the iron has the same shape as the ships in the slave trade.

Diane, of course, is not only somebody who is an activist, but a really wonderful artist.

She did this wonderful woodcut which is in the exhibition.

Burko: The work that I did there was about the Delaware River.

My work has been about the landscape since the beginning.

Well, I am basically a painter, but what's wonderful about the printmaking process, it's a collaborative process, and I wasn't really interested in doing -- I said, "I don't want to really do a litho."

I said, "I'd love to do a woodcut.

I haven't done a woodcut.

Can I collaborate with someone on that?"

And "Sure."

And that's what I did.

Brodsky: Printmaking has been a medium for experimentation often.

Rembrandt, for instance, and Duerer were big experimenters.

Picasso's prints are fabulous.

I happen to think that his prints are more exciting than his paintings, but, of course, they don't have the same value as his paintings.

And that's something that I work on all the time, you know, that prints belong in the same category as paintings and sculptures.

A hand-done print is as labor-intensive as any painting or sculpture.

Yes, they're democratic because there's more than one impression that's pulled from it.

What difference does that make?

That's a wonderful aspect of it.

It means that, you know, more than one person can have this marvelous image.