Pressing Matters:
Collaboration, Community, and Printmaking in the Rustbelt
Made by pressing a carved, inked surface onto paper, prints have been made for over a thousand years in nearly every corner of the globe. Nevertheless, prints remain a surprisingly understudied facet of art history, particularly in art of the United States. My proposed book project, Pressing Matters, sheds light on the understudied history of Cleveland printmaking from c. 1930 to the present. By focusing on communal, grassroots modes of artistic production, I demonstrate how collaborative art making and collecting can be a crucial way to cultivate and preserve culture, even in times of severe economic hardship. Ultimately, recovering this lost episode in the history of printmaking repositions the Rust Belt as a vital center, rather than a marginal periphery, in the history of American art.
The broader significance of Pressing Matters is twofold: this book will be the first to examine the role of collaboration as a foundational aspect of art and community-building in the twenty-first century. Like murals and large-scale sculpture, prints are generally the result of shared labor. Often inexpensively made and easy to distribute, however, prints are unique in their ability to quickly reach broad audiences. I argue that prints embody a similar commitment to co-creation, public address, and community collaboration as better-studied public monuments, albeit in an entirely different set of mediums. Second, this project constitutes a groundbreaking methodological turn that will be of interest to all those in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Pressing Matters incorporates six years of data gathered from nonprofit arts organizations, including oral histories, interviews, and survey results. This direct, community-based research is here synthesized for what it can tell us about how art fosters healthy community development. By employing the tenets of publicly engaged humanities, an approach that emphasizes community-based partnership, inter-community expertise, and co-produced knowledge, I reveal a compelling direction for Art History that productively bridges divides between campuses and cities.