This year’s Honolulu Printmakers Collective exhibition marks the organization’s 88th year of bringing together a wide range of local artists through the fantastically diverse medium of printmaking.

A show with such longevity is rarely marked by surprises or shocks, relying instead on the selection process of an informed guest juror. This year, master printer Paul Mullowney returned to Hawaii (he directed Maui’s HuiPress from 2004 to 2009) to curate a rich gradient of local printmaking that embraces everyone from passionate hobbyists to our most celebrated collected artists.

The gallery at the Honolulu Museum of Art School is filled with 117 works by 80 artists from throughout the islands. The show is not constrained by a theme, but celebrates the diversity and flexibility of the printmaking medium, including a call for artists to work with digital printing techniques. Monica Woolsey’s “Systems” is the direct response, a screen-print-and-digital hybrid that layers close-up images of circuit boards and electronic components into a gray-scale collage.

It can be argued that digital image-making has been emulating printmaking since 1984, and has only recently caught up to the possibilities of the elder medium. Contrast Woolsey’s piece with Taylor Johnson’s “Canyon,” a woodcut of stark black-and-white that uses precise rectilinear notches to render an image of stone that might have come straight out of Photoshop 1.0. Comparing results rather than technique, Johnson’s work looks more digital than Woolsey’s.

But comparing filtered pixels to the various mixes of printmaking techniques on display is a strictly superficial operation. The combination of lithography and screen printing that produced Rachael Roehl’s “Kalalau” abstracts the mountain range, vegetation and distinct play of light and shadow that makes this Kauai view so stunning in real life. Roehl floats these images in a field of white, mixing bold, simple repetitions with intensely detailed patterns of what could be plants, exposed earth, or precipitation maps.

Many works in the show combine multiple printing techniques. Tania Arens’ “Anatomy of a Dragon,” Deborah Nehmads’ “Mindscape” series, and Julie Peterson’s “Overhead Lighting” all represent a wide range of approaches that include graphical boldness and subtle, rich textures. Alan Levy’s “Cogent” reads almost like a highly stylized graphic novel that renders external and internal emotional states across panels in tight lines, bubbles and hints of silhouettes.

Several artists explore installation. Pratisha Budhiraja’s “Anthropocene: Human Imprint” hangs a charred-looking scroll from a relief-printed branch, while Vincent Tully packages his “Blob Wall Art” screen-prints on wood as if they were on sale at some archly hip, pop art boutique. Nisha Pinjani’s striking “Mapping Home,” a hand-stitched quilt of individually printed, weathered rectangular sections shaded from light tea to charcoal, represents perhaps the furthest journey into experimentation.

In a surrealist vein, Bronson Shimabukuro’s intaglio print “The Contract” features a human being and an anthropomorphized rodent facing the skeleton of what might be a horse, a bear or an elephant. One of its bony hoofs or hands is raised above the presumed contract on the ground between them, capturing a moment in a richly detailed, utterly self-contained world.

There is also a strong undercurrent of Hawaii-specific formats and aesthetic choices on display. While artists like Regina Bode and Erika Garcia are riffing directly on Polynesian graphic traditions from tattoo to tapa, the influences of Japanese and Chinese printing are also everywhere. Several artists reference the vertical formats of hanging scrolls, and many motifs of dragons, masks, vegetation and religious imagery. The exterior of the gallery features Mullowney’s multiple iterations of Japanese Noh theater masks and emaciated Buddha figures. Similarly, Don Ed Hardy traces the origin of his image of a female head with butterfly wings to his familiarity with Asian art history.

On the whole, the 2016 HPC exhibition clearly demonstrates the high caliber of talent in Hawaii, expressed through that specific balance between chemistry, physics, technology and imagination that makes printmaking one of the strongest media being worked with in our artistic communities today.