Garner Handy Tullis

1939 - 2019
December 12, 1939 – December 5, 2019

Garner Handy Tullis: Fearless; charismatic; innovative; big personality; proud; unfiltered; generous; child at heart; compulsive; organized; creative; world class artist and master print maker; disrupter...

He was educated at Principia College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his BFA degree and studied with the architect Louis Kahn; the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz; and such legendary figures of the New York school as Emilio Vedova, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, David Smith and Mark Rothko.

After winning a Fulbright Scholarship which took him to Florence, he obtained a Fulbright Extension and Travel Grant for travel throughout Europe, and later earned his MA degree studying at Stanford University with Arnaldo Pomodoro and Nathan Oliveira.

After serving with Air America during the Vietnam War, he founded the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking in 1972 with studios sequentially in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and New York City. Having those studios enabled him to collaborate with such famous artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Mangold, Kenneth Noland, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Ryman, Sean Scully, and William Tucker as well as hundreds of other painters and sculptors, including many younger figures.

The first recipient of the Ralph T. King Award for outstanding contributions to printmaking of the Print Club of Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, he had taught at Bennington College; California State College, Stanislaus; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; Harvard University; and the University of Urbino, Italy - and worked extensively as a visiting artist in Australia, Europe, and South America.

He had solo exhibitions of his own work at the Cleveland Institute of Art; the National Museum of Art, Belgrade; the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York; and numerous other galleries and museums. His art is in the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and numerous other well-known public and private collections.

After 9/11/2001 he closed his NYC studio which was within 1200 meters of the Twin Towers. Thereafter he lived and worked in his Italian home which had been a 1569 A.D. Renaissance Convent that he owned for 45 years, located in the town of Pietrarubbia in the Province of le Marche (PU).

He served over 50 years in various branches of US security agencies and the military. He is survived by a sister, a twin brother, four children, and five grandchildren.