Claremont, CA—The Benton Museum of Art is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition devoted to one of the most singular print collections in the United States. On view from August 21, 2025, to January 4, 2026, An Unruly Assembly: Selections from the Culley Collection of Woodblock Prints tells the story of the revival of woodblock printing by European and American artists in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Until now, this collection has only been previously exhibited or published in fragmentary form; thus this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue mark the first comprehensive presentation and rigorous assessment of the collection, offering a revelatory experience of the era in which avant-garde artists revitalized one of the oldest artistic media.
“It has been a profound joy to renew my appreciation of relief printing and learn so much about the many different artists represented in this collection,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton and associate professor of art history. “The Culley gift came to Pomona the year after the college dedicated its first purpose-built gallery space, the Gladys K. Montgomery Art Center. Now, our new building with its study rooms and art storage spaces has allowed us to study the Culley Collection in a more sustained fashion. Teaching with the collection gave me the chance to see the twentieth-century avant garde through the eyes of our students, and I’m thrilled that they could contribute so significantly to the selection and interpretation of the prints we are presenting in the galleries this fall.”
In 1959, the daughters of John Henry Culley, Margaret Culley Hamilton and Mary Culley Lund, gave 187 works representing the Culley Collection of Woodblock Prints to Pomona College. The family’s love of relief printmaking remains something of a mystery. John Culley was born in England in 1864 and moved to the American Southwest to work as a rancher as a young man. He returned to England after his service in World War I and eventually relocated once again in the late 1920s to the United States, where he settled with his family in Los Angeles. After retiring from the livestock trade, Culley embraced a career as a writer, publishing his autobiography, Cattle, Horses & Men of the Western Range, in 1940. Culley also became a noted figure in the California art world, where he was celebrated as the owner of what one critic called “the largest private collection of modern woodcuts on the West Coast.”
The Culley Collection is distinguished by its breadth and range. Rather than going deep into the individual oeuvres of particular artists, Culley instead amassed a collection that includes a select number of works by dozens of artists. For An Unruly Assembly, nearly 100 works from the full collection were selected to demonstrate how widely the woodblock technique was adopted in the first part of the twentieth century by modern artists—including Josef Albers, Rockwell Kent, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde—and the creative flexibility that the medium allowed. Through the exhibition, viewers can see how the woodblock print, with its origins as a means of mass communication, particularly in late medieval to Renaissance German art and book publishing, exploded in popularity among avant-garde artists and was used to chronicle, critique, and re-imagine the war-torn and industrial conditions that defined the era.
By turns savage and lyrical, incisive and dream-like, the prints picture the complexity of the era and the artists’ responses to it. The sheer force of industrialization, economic perils, remembrances of a rosier past, and utopian visions all make appearances in these works crafted by both well-known artists and those whose legacies deserve more care and attention, including Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita, Cecil Wray Goodchild, Moissey Kagan, and Emma Schlangenhausen.
The works in the Culley Collection are framed in the exhibition by additional prints that sketch the history of the medium and explain its techniques and processes more fully, including examples by Albrecht Dürer, Hiroshige, and Peter Paul Rubens. The product of a student seminar and one of the largest art historical projects undertaken at the Benton Museum of Art, An Unruly Assembly is a landmark exhibition that reframes our understanding of early twentieth-century avant-garde art and the expressive potential of a solid block.
The exhibition is organized by Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton and associate professor of art history, with curatorial assistance from Tristen Alizée Leone PO ’26 and Arivumani Srivastava PO ’26. The 224-page, full-color exhibition catalogue, with 187 plates, will be available in September for purchase at the Benton Museum of Art and on the museum’s website.
Exploration of the Culley Collection served as an organizing feature of the seminar "Print Cultures: History, Theory, and Technique," which took place at Pomona College in the fall semester of 2024. Each student in the seminar reviewed the contents of the Culley Collection as a whole and made a thematic selection of several prints to study firsthand and interpret. The prints chosen by the students form the basis of this exhibition. Through their selections, we see the relevance of the Culley Collection to a new generation of art enthusiasts and cultural stewards.
Members of the Print Cultures seminar
Yadira Barrales Lopez, Pomona College ’26
Charlie Coleman, Pomona College ’27
Sofie Koutroulis, Scripps College ’25
Fiona Kubalak, Scripps College ’25
Amirah Renée Lockett, Pomona College ’26
Fotini Mourelatos, Harvey Mudd College ’26
Joshua Park, Pomona College ’26
Cate Pesner, Pomona College ’27
Gabri Sabo, Scripps College ’27
Arivumani Srivastava, Pomona College ’26
Anika Yoshida, Scripps College ’27
Foundational research for this project was made possible by a Hirsch Research Initiation Grant. Support for the realization of the exhibition was provided by the Judith A. Cion ’65 Fund in Endowment for Student-Curated Exhibitions and the Eva Cole and Clyde Matson Memorial Fund.
The collection catalogue accompanying this exhibition was supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Additional support for the publication was provided by Meg and Mark Hausberg.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening Celebration
Saturday, September 6
5 to 7 pm
Guest Lecture
Christiane Baumgartner, artist
Thursday, November 13
4:30 pm
Culley Collection Study Days
(by invitation only)
Thursday, November 13
Friday, November 14
Please contact erika.ito@pomona.edu for more information.