A positive happening for print show

It would all be fairly lonely and discouraging, save for the community it engenders through collaboration and organizations such as the Boston Printmakers, founded here in the late 1940s and now reaching beyond the borders of the United States. Every two years, the organization stages one of the more exclusive juried print shows on the continent. “Boston Printmakers 2011 North American Print Biennial’’ is up at the Danforth Museum of Art through May 1.

I’ve seen a few of these exhibits over the years, and found them dodgy. Most recently, they were staged at Boston University’s cavernous 808 Gallery, and I got bleary eyed and scatter-brained wandering through the sprawling shows held there. The one at the Danforth is better organized, although still too big, filling nearly all the wall space on the museum’s first floor. It’s also better focused.

Thank juror Jim Dine for that. Dine is a big-name artist who has been on the scene since the 1950s. He, along with Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and Allan Kaprow, staged the fabled Happenings in New York. He’s a painter, sculptor, and printmaker best known for images of humble items such as tools and bathrobes. Dine sorted through more than 2,000 images by more than 800 artists to select the 149 works in this year’s biennial.

The resulting show reflects Dine’s own eccentric vision. It’s filled with strong gestures. There’s a preponderance of woodcuts and very few digital prints. There are far more representational works than abstract pieces.

“I’m not anti-abstraction,’’ Dine insisted over the phone from his home in Washington state. “I just tried to choose the best work, period. I chose the prints I wished I had made.’’

And he makes no bones about mostly ignoring digital printmaking. “Why call it a print if it’s a digital print?’’ he asked. “Call it a photo or a reproduction. Frankly, [digital printmaking] bores the [expletive] off me.’’

Dine clearly favors handwork, gesture, bold lines, and elegant composition. Look at Don Gorvett’s reduction woodcut “Sharpshooters at Twilight,’’ depicting a port crammed with ships in dry dock and low shingled buildings. It’s a symphony of planes sloping and fanning and shouldering into one another. His use of color is economical and effective; there’s a pale sparkle of blue in the sun-setting sky. Another eye-catching woodcut, Endi Poskovic’s “If This Be Not I in Yellow and Red,’’ captures a fiery explosion of color in the sky surrounding a three-masted ship, carved out of the woodblock in bubble-like gestures. Delightfully, the sky has more weight than the ship, the sea, or the long shadow that the ship casts on the sea.

The exhibit trumpets the versatility of the woodcut, from brawny to edgy. The title of Mike Stephens’s “Barefoot and. . .’’ may suggest a disempowered pregnant woman, but instead we have a sharp, cartoonish vision of a portly, balding guy in a jam-packed kitchen, with a small dog tugging at his long underwear, à la the old Coppertone ad.

Benjamin Moreau’s exquisite etching and aquatint “The Rebel Look of [Expletive] and Failure’’ is a close-up portrait of a man besieged by emotion. He’s teary, and Moreau sets the perspective so that we’re looking slightly down at him, giving the viewer the upper hand. The modulations of tone in this black-and-white portrait make way for the compelling nuances of his expression.

Boston’s own Michael David contributes three of his gorgeous monochromatic monotypes, each a bug’s eye view of a field: grass, reeds, soil, all in sea-green, with sunlight flashing off blades of glass. It’s all so close it’s almost abstract, except that it’s vividly detailed realism. Donya Allison’s three monotypes, “From the Fair Game Series: Deer,’’ all view the antlered beast from below, with smoky chiaroscuro and vivid attention to musculature and facial expression.

There are a handful of more experimental prints, such as Brian Anderson’s “Blessed By Thy Lounger,’’ a spiffy woodcut of a comfy chair printed on concrete with rebar protruding from it, making a tart contradiction between image and material. Spencer Fidler’s “Double Fall’’ is a simple etching of a falling figure printed on two translucent sheets, one loosely draped in front of the other. The draping suggests that the sheet has been tossed in the wind, and this poor fellow somehow lost his grip; the repetition seems to prolong his fall.

One of the aims of this biennial is to educate. If you’re not a printmaking geek, you may find yourself bored with a few too many lovingly rendered landscapes. This is a stronger show than past biennials, but I’d still lobby that the 2013 exhibit be limited to 75 prints.

Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com.