La Mama in Print includes original posters on display for the first time outside of the walls of the La MaMa Archive. The selected works-on-paper, accented by theatrical artifacts and video performance selections, combine in-display to offer the viewer a unique glimpse into the influence and evolution of contemporary experimental theater in America and abroad.

For many artists in the 1960s, access to a Xerox machine was access to the public. Posters, programs, photos, and publicity were an after-thought, once the rigors of mounting a production with little or no resources and any available help, had been surmounted. Suddenly, theater posters were being created by anyone on hand --with press-type or house paint, it didn't matter. Word of the production was what mattered.

As the first La MaMa Troupe, under the direction of Tom O'Horgan, toured Europe in the mid 1960s, La MaMa's American identity suddenly came under the vanguard of European design. The translation of off-off Broadway's American plays into Dutch, French, Spanish and German forced Europeans to grapple with interpreting the American theater revolution of the 1960s. As plays were translated, concepts and their visual renderings altered design values.

In creating La MaMa, Ellen Stewart pulled together a diverse and enormous artistic community. That community of countless local, national and international playwrights, directors, composers, actors, musicians, designers, choreographers, dancers, painters, puppet-masters, media artists, performance artists, cabaret, graphic and photographic artists has created the La MaMa Paper Trail.

Lawrence Mirsky, director of the Lubalin Study Center, and Ozzie Rodriguez, archivist and a resident La MaMa director, are co-curators of the exhibition.

La MaMa has grown from its early basement theater with two tables and chairs. Today, La Mama is a multi-purpose, non-profit art complex, housing four theaters, a cabaret, rehearsal spaces, administrative offices, an art gallery, a performance workshop space, an international artists' cultural center in Italy and an archive documenting extensively the beginnings of its off-off Broadway theater.