The Print Center presents its 100th ANNUAL International Competition

Documents to go

Grease-stained food wrappers in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, drew Adi Sundoro’s attention. He noticed something strange in the paper that once held gorengan, a popular Indonesian street food made from fried vegetables, tempeh, and tofu. As the coverings absorbed oil, thumbnail-sized photos, certifying stamps, signatures, and embossed edging became visible. Sundoro realized that intact official documents, once private and confidential, were finding second lives as takeout wrappers, and being tossed into the nearest receptacle when lunch was over.

Some of the documents Sundoro found are displayed, and their sensitivity is obvious even without fluency in Indonesian. There’s someone’s birth record, and diplomas for students Desi and Depi, bearing their full names, 1994 birthdates, photographs, fingerprints, and a department of education seal.

How (not) to recycle

From this chance discovery came Sundoro’s Belantara Data (Data Wilderness) (2025), wall-hung lithograph sculptures formed from rows of precisely folded, nested lunch bags. Two in the series contrast document recycling in Indonesia and Japan.

Belantara Data #2 represents Indonesia’s approach. Sections of documents are identifiable in the sculpture, crafted from red, white, and aqua printed bags. In several places, there’s a fierce bird in profile, perhaps the Javan hawk-eagle, Indonesia’s official bird, as well as scrawled signatures, pieces of photographs and ledger pages, and several authorizing seals.

Belantara Data #3 shows Japan’s method, shredding documents before recycling. Creating paper for this sculpture required Sundoro to painstakingly glue together thousands of slivers bearing Japanese characters. Seen from a distance, the green-on-green assemblage resembles a leafy tree rippling in a gentle breeze, a soothing sight and presumably, a balm to the psyche of security-conscious Japanese citizens.

Who has seen our info?

Seri Bungkus Gorengan #1 (Fritters Wrapper Series #1) (2022) consists of 16 white bags arranged in groups of four on high tables. Sundoro created themed black-on-white designs for each set from document elements—ledger grids, ID photos, official stamps, and a repetitive arrangement of signatures that looks like a cursive exercise gone mad.

The fact that the retrieved documents are in an unfamiliar language does nothing to diminish the sympathetic feeling of exposure at viewing strangers’ closely held information. Is anyone left who hasn’t experienced the vulnerability of being victim of a records release, whether inadvertent or malicious, analog or digital? The chill of wondering who’s seeing your personal information, and what might be done with it? It’s a sensation that was pervasive even before DOGE’s supercharged, all-thumbs “reforms” immeasurably weakened Americans’ data privacy. Maybe someone should check fast food vendors in our nation’s capital.

Everyday deities

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s first solo show in Philadelphia, where she was born and lives, builds on earlier work examining Marian worship and prevailing narratives about Black women and girls. An upper Print Center gallery has been transformed into a chapel of sorts, with soft carpeting and large self-portraits evoking religious iconography of guardian angels and patron saints watching over the faithful. The portraits, in which Baxter poses with a floral drape shielding herself and an unseen child, come from her series Cult of the Virgin (2025). In the center of the gallery are four prie-dieu, kneeling benches equipped with angled ledges, where clasped hands and prayer books rest.

Instead of missals, however, these ledges hold vitrines containing Baxter’s modern versions of 19th-century daguerreotypes, Virgo Sacrata (2021-present). Baxter made digital prints from Thomas Eakins’s original, problematic images of young Black girls in provocative poses, with one difference: In the updated versions, the artist inserted herself, exchanging her face for the child’s, or adding her image to the scene as a witness/protector. The result is that observers must confront who, and what, is worshipped in the artistic firmament.

Much of the work on view draws a parallel between Black women and Black Madonnas, dark-skinned iterations of Christ’s mother, which were venerated across early Christian cultures. Baxter claims the image and extends it to Black women and girls, long disregarded by Western art. Reverence for the Everyday Black Woman (2026) is a shelf altar honoring women at various stages of life. Before each, and on the floor below, Baxter laid offerings of dried flowers.

Psychedelic nature

When Glen Baldridge tired of urban life, he headed to rural Maine and set up a motion-activated camera near a pond in the woods. Three captured images comprise The Pond.

For Real, Weather Tamer, and Moon Wobble (all 2025) depict the nighttime wanderings of deer, but not so fast: dismiss whatever quiet botanical image you harbor. Instead, imagine the result if Timothy Leary joined Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.

After screen printing the photographs of deer in the night, Baldridge processed and sealed the original images with ultraviolet ink. Over that, he added a free-flowing layer of watercolor and ink. The effect is haunting: Not only are the deer camouflaged by darkness and the thicket, there’s the added visual interference of swirling color, as if looking through a paisley veil. Processing preserves the integrity of the original picture of deer and trees, but to perceive it, you must penetrate Baldridge’s fantastical forest.

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