Top: Amos Paul Kennedy, who rejected the term artist for "an old man with a printing press." Bottom: Co-Op senior Trinity Stephens with Lauren Anderson and Erin Michaud.
In Erin Michaud’s second-floor art classroom at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, a kind of analog magic was unfolding. By the back windows, senior Trinity Stephens looked up from a cut paper composition, a precision blade steady in her right hand, and began to study the letterpress prints that had appeared in front of her. Where there is a woman, there is magic, read one, the letters dancing against a blue and pink background that looked like it was quilted.
Back at the front of the room, printmaker Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. lifted a length of cardstock printed with the words Always Choose Happy and began to describe the history of movable type. “I want you to imagine someone setting a dictionary by hand,” he said, with an edge of wonder in his voice that never goes away. The whole room leaned in to listen.
Kennedy, a Detroit-based printer and self-described non-artist (“I consider myself an old man with a printing press,” he told junior Nia Jackson) who uses his work as a vibrant platform for social justice, arrived on College Street as part of a four-day residency that spanned New Haven’s literary, cultural, historic and educational landscape. Hosted by Possible Futures with support from the Muslim Leadership Lab (MLL) at Dwight Hall at Yale, Kennedy’s visit brought the practice of printmaking to hundreds of New Haveners, from high school students and budding activists to practicing artists and educators in New Haven.
It leaves Possible Futures with not only work from a legendary printer-philosopher, but with a letterpress that comes from the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and will now live at Possible Futures’ Edgewood Avenue storefront for the foreseeable future. Jeff Mueller, the founder and owner of New Haven’s Dexterity Press, also lent the space moveable type and popped into several of Kennedy’s events over the weekend.
In addition to Co-Op, where students study printmaking as part of the visual arts concentration, partners on the weekend’s residency included ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), NXTHVN Fellow and curator Juanita Sunday, Deadby5am Founder Brenton Schumaker, Kulturally LIT’s IfeMichelle Gardin, the Westville-based Artists’ Bloc led by curator nico w. okoro, and members of the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, New Haven Federation of Teachers, and Connecticut Students for A Dream who gathered for a May Day art build Sunday afternoon.
“It’s amazing what Possible Futures is and how it interacts with the community,” Kennedy said last Sunday, during a second day of letterpress printing at the bookspace. Around him, no inch of the storefront appeared unoccupied: people sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch, surrounded the presses, and buzzed between the shelves, some cradling prints for Kennedy to sign. “It’s a very special space.”
“It’s always a joy to see them [people] when a print is made,” he continued. “When the words come out on paper, they can read it. Despite the fact that printing is everywhere in our society, few people actually interact with how professional printing is done. Few people have actually seen a real printing press. So it’s nice to introduce people to that.”
From Henry Street to the New Haven People’s Center and back to Edgewood Avenue, those words came to life over and over again, with a reverence for the practice of printmaking that was contagious. In part, that comes from the relative rarity of such a visit: printmaking often happens outside of the public eye, despite its long and intimate tie to political movements.
Top: Kennedy with Professor Ned Blackhawk at Possible Futures on the final day of Kennedy's residency. Bottom: The letterpress in action.
In most of New Haven’s schools, for instance, students don’t learn about anarchist printers like Jo Labadie (another Michigander, although before Kennedy’s time) or revolutionaries like José Guadalupe Posada, who keenly understood the power of a good broadside.
If they are lucky enough to see printed matter in person, that doesn’t always mean they get a chance to practice the technique, which is how that knowledge of process gets lost. Even Elm City artists who are working to keep the art form alive—Jeff Mueller at Dexterity Press, Daniel “Silencio” Ramirez at El Rincón de Papel, teachers like Maura Galante, Barbara Harder, and Shaunda Holloway passing on relief, intaglio, and transfer techniques at spaces like Creative Arts Workshop at Co-Op—are working in relative isolation.
No wonder, then, that students’ excitement felt palpable as Kennedy stepped into Michaud’s classroom, sunlight streaming through the back windows as bookspace founder Lauren Anderson and journalist, poet and printmaker Asad Chishti laid out dozens of posters across the room for students to study in detail. Make Art! one read in bold capital letters against a clean red square and cream-colored background. How Can / You Know / Jesus / When You / Can’t Write A Thank You Note? read another across the table, in large and small moveable type against a thick oxblood rectangle that pulsed with color.
On the wall behind Kennedy, artworks told a story of young artist-activists in real time: still-bright-but-aging posters of Rosie The Riveter and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy shared wall space with new student designs that read ICE Out in clear, declarative letters. At the back of the room, a tangle of fabric sunflowers seemed of a piece with a large, butter-toned print from Kennedy that read Proceed And Be Bold in type that seemed to dance in space.
Nia Jackson.
At the front of the room, Kennedy turned to students, and began to speak about his own practice, which he came to 30 years ago “kind of by accident” after seeing letterpress printing on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Before that time, he had studied mathematics and held down a day job, much like Anderson before owning the bookspace. But when he returned from the trip, he started taking classes at Artist Book Works, a book arts program in Chicago. One letterpress class in, he was hooked.
“Nobody cared if I made it or not. They figured, I was a grown person, I could do what I want to,” he said to students. “And so I’ve just been printing and having fun.”
Students perked up, some still shaking the sleep from their eyes, and hung on to every word. Kennedy had been there for maybe six minutes, and already it was becoming clear that the morning would be as much about the philosophy of living as it was about the process of printmaking.
After his classes in Chicago, Kennedy went back to school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to pursue a degree in graphic design, which he cheekily referred to as “so-called art.” By then, he had a letterpress shop in his home, with equipment that allowed him to print.
And then three years into a job as an art professor at the University of Indiana (“They let me into a university!” he said with a wry smile at Anderson, who was an academic for years before taking the leap into owning a small business), he realized that teaching was not his gospel.
“It took a long time for me to realize that all the experiences I had before I became a printer were not failures, but places where I learned, that now I can apply to printing,” he said. “I’ve been printing for about 30 years, and I’m still learning things, because there’s just new information out there to find. There’s new ways of doing things.”
His posters were and are often inspired by well-known proverbs, maxims, quotes that snag his attention and phrases that he picked up through friends and family members. “I consider that folk wisdom,” he said. “These things that are passed on from one generation to the next … I try to preserve that information as part of my life growing up, and pass it on.”
In the classroom, students had started to study the words set out in front of them, taking note of the way that Kennedy has used visual culture to practice social justice. Over decades of learning, the artist has called on the wisdom of both living culture-bearers and those who have passed on, from Langston Hughes, Eartha Kitt, and Nina Simone to Rachel Carson to translated proverbs from the Cree and Oglala Sioux Nations.
A whole series of his prints, for instance, pays homage to libraries and librarians, whose work has put them unexpectedly on the front lines of defending democracy. Another champions members of the LGBTQ+ community, and particularly Black Trans people. Another still pushes back against federal immigrations enforcement, with the simple message Fuck ICE! Or Abolish ICE! in big letters that seem to bounce in place.
For these, he often uses found or repurposed objects like maps from visitor centers, which sometimes drive home the reminder that borders are completely arbitrary, and predicated on a concept of land ownership that once did not exist.
“Hopefully, in the future, these will be around for people to see and read and take wisdom from,” he said of the pieces.
Kennedy with Nia Jackson and Nyota-Uhura Jackson.
In Detroit, where he is currently based, Kennedy is often in his studio, a revitalized garage filled with letterpress and printing equipment that he refers to as the Pile of Bricks, six or seven days per week. Since his move to Detroit 14 years ago, the 3,000 square foot space has become both a print shop and a sanctuary, where he’s able to experiment with technique, share knowledge, and donate some of his work to local bookstores and mutual aid hubs.
To sustain his practice, he keeps his costs of living low: he uses free or low-cost materials. He doesn’t own a car, a small miracle in the Motor City, where basic necessities can be spread miles apart. When he’s not printing, he uses digital services like Canopy, sourced through the Detroit Public Library, as his main form of entertainment. He chose to set up shop in Detroit because the rent is relatively inexpensive.
When he made the decision three decades ago to embark on printing, he continued, he knew that life would look different. The trade off was worth it. As someone who had been interested in calligraphy and book arts for years, the leap into letterpress was a kind of creative homecoming he hadn’t known would happen.
It still is: Kennedy’s practice, from a sharp eye to his use of bright, ebullient layers of color and designs that revel in their geometry, sustains him. As he spoke, students listened attentively, a surprised Oh! or Huh! audible every so often. Chishti, who helped arrange the visit with Anderson and MLL Director Abdul-Rehman Malik, buzzed around the room, snapping photos and looking over prints that now stretched across the tables, some gem-toned in the sunlight that came through the windows.
“What’s your creative process?” asked senior Nyota-Uhura Jackson from where she sat quietly towards the back of the room. At the desk where he was seated, Kennedy held up one of his most popular prints, a poster that reads Ladies No Fighting In The Bathroom on a rose-pink background. At the top, the words Tee’s Lounge / The 21st Century Juke Joint announced themselves in large print and smaller type. This is a Grown Folks establishment, read a banner at the bottom, flanked by rows of stars on both sides.
Sometimes, Kennedy explained, a proposed text finds its way to him—just as it did at Tee’s Lounge when he was living in small-town York, Alabama (population just short of 2,500) several years ago, and girl fights started unfolding in the women’s restroom. Sometimes, he pores over text until the right phrase or sentiment jumps out at him, and he can imagine it arranged on the page. Sometimes, a friend will just say something that sticks.
He then starts mapping out the size and order of the moveable type he wants to use—which he sets in reverse, because a print is a mirror image—and the colors and shapes that he wants to layer beneath it, often in the service of the text.
“How do I do that? I just do it,” he said. “Sometimes I overthink things … but I want each one to be as unique as each one of us is.”
“It’s my press,” he added a beat later, with a twinkle in his eye. “I get to do what I want. I get to play.”
From where she sat in the middle of the classroom, Jackson was still chewing on Kennedy’s suggestion that he was not an artist at all, but simply an “old man with a printing press.”
“I personally would see you as a Black artist,” she said. “How would you see that yourself?”
Assad Chisthi and Babz Rawls-Ivy on the final day of Kennedy's residency.
Kennedy let the question sit in the air for just a moment. Then he jumped into the kind of answer that had fellow students and teachers, in a city that is as segregated as it is chronically underfunded, smiling to themselves as he spoke. “We cannot be a monocrop,” he said. “I like to think of us all in terms of our humanity.”
When he hears the word artist, he went on, he thinks about the heavy baggage that now comes along with the term. For him, that word connotes someone who might sell a work for $10 million in New York City. “But the drawing that my son brought home from school, it pleases me more than that,” he said.
“As long as you are creating, you are fulfilling your purpose in life,” he said. “Because you are part of the world … you can have a thought and make it physical.”
“How do you feel about the disappearance of physical media?” Jackson followed up. This time, Kennedy didn’t even take a beat.
“It ain’t going nowhere!” he replied. He turned the clock back to his own time in high school, when a different wave of new technology was announcing itself. “This is a part of our culture. It will always be here somehow … old technology will not go anywhere.”
“That’s how I feel about some people who have iPods now!” Jackson hopped back in.
From where she was standing with a copy of Kennedy’s book, Citizen Printer, Anderson chimed in, pointing to the number of people who have ditched music streaming services like Spotify—which for months ran ads for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—for record stores like GRAILS on Chapel.
The shift translates to dollars that stay local, supporting small business owners who are often artists themselves, Anderson said. Kennedy nodded knowingly, taking it all in. That’s the thing about so-called “social” media, he later said—there’s nothing genuinely social about it.
Stephens, who had spent most of the class listening intently, was one of the first students to head to the front of the room as Kennedy gave students a chance to pick out prints, and then took time to sign each of them.
“I actually feel super special!” Stephens said. Prior to her time at Co-Op, she attended at STEM school in Bridgeport, meaning that art classes just weren’t part of the curriculum. Even four years into visual arts classes, she’s still surprised and delighted by the presence of working artists (or old men who happen to have printing presses, as Kennedy would prefer it) in her classroom.
“Where I’m from, I don’t see a lot of artists. Even at my old school, I had to teach myself [art]. I usually feel inspired when I get to see other artists,” she said.
“It’s really valuable to have Mr. Amos because he has a lot of experience and provides unique perspectives,” added Nyota-Uhura Jackson, who is headed to Yale University in the fall. “I’ve really enjoyed having him here.”
So, it turns out, did hundreds of New Haveners. Over the four days Kennedy was in the city, at least three generations of Elm City residents (and at least one furry companion, in beloved bookspace dog, Sugar) came out to print with Kennedy, from the Edgewood Avenue bookspace to a May Day art build at the New Haven People’s Center.
“Magical is really the right word, because it was,” Anderson said after the weekend had ended, crediting Malik, Mueller and Chisthi among many others for making it possible (she added that having the poet Marilyn Nelson there Sunday, for her birthday, was a whole other level of goodness). “It was absolutely magical. There’s a high level of serendipity and synchronicity in what happens when good spirits are communing with each other.”
“For all of these things, you kind of throw it together, and then you think, ‘Oh gosh, what if no one comes?’” she continued. “But of course people come! In a stretch of four days, Amos saw so many people in New Haven and felt the magic.”