Kate Krasin (1943-2010) was a master of the silkscreen print. Her highly refined work proved that silkscreen, or serigraphy, was not just a medium for photo-transfer T-shirts or simple graphic designs in flat colors. For a single print she might use as many as forty screens, all cut by hand, to create a detailed, textured work of art that could be described as photo-realistic.

Early in her artistic career, Krasin studied the work of Japanese woodblock print artists and fellow Santa Fe woodcut artist Gustave Baumann. She, however, preferred the "dance" of silkscreen: the process of making the sketches, cutting the stencils, formulating the colors, printing by hand. She was a perfectionist who loved working through the details in creating her art.

Krasin discovered that with successive screens, she could create highly detailed imagery. By diluting her inks, she could layer colors on top of one another to achieve still further levels of detail. Her technical feat produced an unusual level of subtlety and refinement, and a transparent, ethereal beauty.

Kate Krasin: Luminous Prints reproduces in full color more than sixty of the artist's prints from the Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Author Carmen Vendelin brings forth the voices of Krasin's lifelong friends; her former husband, artist Peter W. Rogers; and the pair who so appreciated Krasin's technical abilities and aesthetics that they chose to represent her in their photography gallery.