Detroit printer presents career retrospective in book form

Posted

For those who view the printed word as an art form, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.’s new book, “Citizen Printer,” is a tour de force.

The book, published in what is called raw form, appears unfinished and even smells like it was printed yesterday in a 19th-century printer’s backroom. It’s nearly 300 pages, filled with more than 800 reproductions of Kennedy’s printing work and photographs of the artist. It’s available for $40 to $60 online and in bookstores.

Kennedy’s mediums are broadsheets and posters. It’s almost a lost art. Commonly called letterpress printing, he spreads ink onto a block of text that has been locked in place and presses the block against a sheet of paper to create a print.

His prints are more complex than you might expect, often layered with multiple runs through the printing press. He focuses on text, using display type in non-linear ways and mixing fonts and sizes. At its essence, Kennedy’s book is “a collection of words” according to noted author and digital artist Austin Kleon, who wrote the foreword.

In an opening splash page, Kennedy states that the goal of his work is “to use printing to express negro culture. To do to printing what the blues and spirituals did to music.”

One of Kennedy’s most popular bodies of work is his reproductions of slave-era abolitionist posters warning former and escaped slaves to be on the watch for “slave catchers.” He often uses disturbing imagery of the Jim Crow era in his work, which he pulls from his vast collection of woodcuts, or carved wooden blocks used for printing.

While teaching graphic design at Indiana University, Kennedy riled some folks with his printing. He would send illustrated “nappygrams” — postcards printed with statements on social and political issues — around campus. One, titled “Affirmative Action Is a Joke,” elicited a phone call to campus police. He followed up with a poster denouncing that the police were called on him.

“Citizen Printer” is also a memoir of sorts, detailing Kennedy’s art career down to his printing uniform of denim coveralls and pink shirts, which he sees as representing Black sharecroppers and dandy social activists of the civil rights movement.

He came to his art form late in life, at nearly 40, after quitting his AT&T analyst job and going back to school for his master of fine art. He initially thought he would make his living printing art books, but because of cash flow, he moved into printing posters where the turnaround was more suitable to his bottom line. A native of Alabama, he works out of a nondescript concrete building in Detroit.

Lately, prestigious museums have started collecting his work, including the Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens, Ohio and Poster House in New York City. To supplement his income, he leads several letterpress workshops a year.

Kennedy openly admits he was influenced by the music posters of his youth advertising Black musicians of the rock ‘n’ roll and blues eras. His work is unique in its focus on text, but it is also reminiscent of the famous print shop Hatch, which cut its teeth advertising country concerts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Kennedy found success soon after moving to Detroit, creating posters for a variety of venues and social justice causes. One series, “Mapping Justice,” honors martyrs of the civil rights movement, like Detroiter Viola Liuzzo, who was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 for her participation in the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The posters are printed on road maps of Alabama, Wisconsin and other major states in the civil rights movement.

In a statement on his work, printed in bold type toward the end of the book, Kennedy writes, “I print because it is the most productive thing I can do for my community. It’s how I show up. Don’t ask me to run anything or organize anything, but I can print 100 posters for your food drive or festival or lecture.”

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here

v


Connect with us