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The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the repository of fine art prints created by the New York City-based print studio Brand X Editions.

Since 1979, Brand X has produced work by some of America’s most prominent artists, including Chuck Close, Helen Frankenthaler, Rashid Johnson, KAWS, Mickalene Thomas, Robert Indiana, John Wesley, Jennifer Barlett and Alex Katz.

“Some of those artists are already in our collection. Many of those artists we want in the collection,” said Louis Marchesano, the PMA’s deputy director of Curatorial Affairs. “This is a way that we can increase the diversity and number of important artists in the collection.”

According to the arrangement made between the PMA and Brand X, 350 archival prints created by Brand X have been transferred to the Art Museum. Also, over the next 10 years one copy of every new print the studio creates will be given to the Art Museum.

It’s a win-win for both institutions, said the founder of Brand X, Robert Blanton. He gets to have the work he has been doing for 46 years preserved in perpetuity at museum standards.

“It’s an undreamed-of privilege, to me, that they wanted to do this,” he said. “This is an opportunity that I thought would never come around for Brand X.”

Marchesano is showcasing the museum’s new collection with “Brand X Editions: Innovations in Screenprinting,” an exhibition of about 90 pieces.

Brand X specializes in screenprinting, or silkscreening, the same basic technology used to make graphic T-shirts but elevated it to extremely high levels of sophistication. The large print greeting visitors to the exhibition, Rashid Johnson’s “Untitled Large Mosaic,” is monumental in size, approximately 5 feet tall and 9 feet wide, resembling a tile collage.

Brand X often experiments with new techniques to achieve what artists want or to help them understand their own vision. Marchesano said “Large Mosaic” was printed with 293 separate colors, each applied as individual passes, layered with a dizzying number of nuanced blending techniques.

“They worked on for 3 1/2 years or 4 years with Rashid Johnson,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most complex screen prints ever made.”

One of the galleries in the exhibition is solely dedicated to another large-scale print, a self-portrait by the late Chuck Close. It is a layering of 91 colors, forming cells of a mosaic grid that collectively resemble Close’s face. The room has six preliminary proofs showing the stages of building the image.

“Chuck, when we first started working with him, he was very anti-silkscreen,” Blanton said. “He thought all you could get was thick, pasty colors.”

Blanton and his team of chromatists, or color specialists, showed Close that silkscreening was similar to oil painting, where nuanced effects can be created by layering color over color.

“I love silkscreen because, to me, it’s very much like glazing in oil painting,” said Tamsin Doherty, a Brand X chromatist. “You’re suspending pigments at different depths on top of each other. There are actually physical depths.”

Brand X made a convert of Close, who ended up embracing silkscreening wholeheartedly.

“A huge convert,” Blaton said. “We ended up doing — I’ve forgotten how many, half a dozen or eight of these large silk screens. This last one was finished just a few years before he passed on.”

“Innovation in Screenprinting” is the first of a handful of exhibitions Marchesano is planning to curate from the Brand X collection. One of the featured artists, Joel Mesler, will soon be the subject of a solo show based, in part, on the prints he made with Brand X.

Mesler said collaborating with Brand X has taught him about his own work.

“I come to them with several different potential ideas and then we kind of just schmooze it out and sit around and talk about possibilities,” he said. “I’ll start with one idea, and when it goes best I get out of my own way and they lead me to the promised land.”

Deborah Kass, who made the bright yellow “OY/YO” sculpture outside the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, is also a regular at Brand X. She is represented in “Innovation in Screenprinting” with four pieces, including a diptych of “OY/YO,” the yellow letters on a deep blue background.

She said even seemingly simple prints, like yellow block letters on blue, can be the most complex to get right.

“They came out with this incredibly rich blue and I’m like, ‘How?’” Kass said. “They said, ‘Well, it’s six blues.’ They know stuff I don’t know.”

“There’s no one better at this than Brand X,” she said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting” will be on view until Nov. 16.