The nothingness on these walls is loud. “Welcome to our empty galleries,” Huntsville Museum of Art chief curator Natalie Mault Mead says. She’s walking me through three earth-and-sky-toned galleries where the museum’s upcoming Picasso exhibit will hang. Opening July 15, “Graphic Journey: Prints by Pablo Picasso” spotlights the cubist/surrealist master’s etchings, lithographs and linocuts.

During my late June visit to the Alabama museum, the exhibit had yet to be unpacked. It was all still inside four wooden shipping crates that evoked an Acme Corporation order cartoon canine Wile E. Coyote would receive. But instead of dynamite, invisible paint or rocket-powered roller skates, these crates contain 61 works by one of the most influential visual artists to ever walk Earth.

“It’s really looking at how Picasso worked with and experimented with different printing ateliers [printing houses],” Mead says of the exhibit. “He’s mainly known for his paintings and his ceramics, but for some reason printmaking gets this bad rap.”

Mault Mead emphasizes the “Graphic Journey” works are Picasso’s original prints, not mass-produced. “He made them. He signed them. He worked on them.”

Born in Spain, Picasso made prints throughout his life, from his teens until he was 90. The Huntsville Museum of Art is presenting “Graphic Journey” as a way to mark the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, at age 91 in 1973. During his career, he even relocated from Paris to the South of France to collaborate with different ateliers.

Mault Mead’s predecessor at Huntsville Museum of Art, Peter Baldaia, and executive director Christopher J. Madkour were both critical bringing the exhibit to Huntsville. Huntsville museum curators, which also include David Reyes, have arranged this traveling exhibit, which comes from the collection of Dr. Timothy Collins of Los Angeles, in semi-chronological order.

“Picasso was basically the modernist artist who elevated the medium of printmaking,” she says. “Prior to him, printmaking was very utilitarian, like what you do for newspapers. And then Picasso comes along and his modernist contemporaries, and they were like, ‘No, there are ways that we can experiment.’”

The “Graphic Journey” works depict quintessential Picasso themes of women, mirrors, sleeping figures and bullfighters. He often took greater chances with his printmaking as he got older, reflecting the exploration of his signature work. As a painter, Picasso’s masterworks include the cubist “Guernica” from 1937, surrealist “Girl before a Mirror” from 1932, the stunning “Le Rêve” also from ‘32, and Blue Period portrait “The Old Guitarist” circa 1904.

Picasso’s printmaking offers a fascinating alternative perspective on his genius. “It’s almost like the difference between a public persona and ripping out a page from a diary,” Mault Mead says.

Elaborating on the starkly reflective nature of the Picasso prints, she adds, “Like the fact he had these somewhat tumultuous relationships with a variety of women throughout his life, and you’ll see that play out in these works. I think you see them play out more clearly in these works than you do on a lot of his paintings. His paintings, you can easily look at and see, you know, color and pattern, but this is simplifying all of that you’re really getting to the heart of the subject.”

“Graphic Journey” connects dots between Picasso’s printmaking and issues Picasso was trying to figure out in his paintings, ceramics and other mediums that he was working in. “He’s using printmaking to help solve some of those issues,” Mault Mead says.

The terracotta and sea-blue gallery walls for the exhibit mirror tones found in many of the Picasso prints. Oranges, blues, sepia, yellows. The exhibit’s lighting is being dialed in for dramatic impact, Mault Mead says. “We want to create that intimacy, that excitement of looking at these on an individual basis and exploring them.”

For vivid context to “Graphic Journey,” the Huntsville Museum of Art is putting together another exhibit featuring three other Picasso prints from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as by legendary modernist contemporaries like Francisco Goya, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse and Salvador Dalí. That exhibit, featuring 35 woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and aquatints created between 1891 and 1977, is titled “The Rise of Modernism: European Prints from the Permanent Collections” and follows the same opening and closing schedule as “Graphic Journey.”

“If these artists hadn’t experimented with printmaking,” Mault Mead says,” “I don’t think we wouldn’t have gotten to like, artists experimenting with collage, we wouldn’t have gotten to artists doing like assemblage and found objects.”

Mault Mead comes to Huntsville from Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum of Art. A self-described “military brat,” her family moved around a lot. She credits having “really incredible art teachers” growing up with instilling a love for visual arts in her. Her medium of choice was printmaking. She eventually gravitated towards art education. “Learning the stories behind the artwork,” she says, “that got me really excited.”

Huntsville Museum of Art will punctuate the exhibit, which runs through Oct. 15, with a ticketed 6 p.m. July 18 event featuring a presentation on Picasso by Megan Fontanella, a curator from New York’s Guggenheim Museum. “She’s definitely an expert on Picasso,” Mault Mead says. “She’ll help present both Picasso’s works, the printmaking within his overall career, and Picasso as a man and artist.” More info at hsvmuseum.org.

Like many great past artists from many different fields, Picasso’s lifestyle is viewed through a “now” lens. In Picasso’s case, his treatment of women is troubling. The now-frequent question of separating the art from artist or whether that’s impossible to do is certainly in play here.

“As a curator,” Mault Mead says, “there are some struggles looking at Picasso in the context of today. I often had to step back and say it was a different time, it’s a different place. And it’s not necessarily excusable, but it helps you also set current issues that we as Americans face into a much more national and historic kind of context, which I think is what art does all the time.”

As a counterbalance, the Huntsville Museum of Art’s current exhibition also includes “American Identity.” Thirty portraits in traditional and contemporary renderings that pose timely questions about not just identity but representation.

The first “American Identity” piece displayed in the gallery after guests exit the Picasso and contextual contemporaries exhibits is a striking modern sculpture by Vanessa German, a Pittsburg artist Mault Mead describes as “a superstar right now.” Titled “Compassion and Equanimity/Mirror Face,” the mixed-media sculpture is comprised of materials including shells, porcelain pieces, a reflector, a knife and even Astroturf.

“I’m very much interested in accessibility,” Mault Mead says, “and making sure that all feel welcomed when they walk into a museum.”

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