An early experimenter with printmaking in the 1960s, Joe Tilson works to unsettle the tension between serialized production and an artwork’s status as unique. Tilson excelled as a craftsman from an early point in his life. He first worked in a realist style during the 1950s, but adopted the commercial sheen of pop art in the 1960s. Tilson began creating prints during this decade, using consumer imagery, yet his work retained a handmade quality. He painted directly on the prints, making unique pieces from editioned series. The artist also added sculptural elements to his work, blurring the distinction between two- and three-dimensional space and disregarding any medium-specific hierarchies. His art later evolved away from pop content to address mythology and rural living, but Tilson has maintained the same interest in the handmade throughout his career.