This spring, I worked with the Portland Museum to reprise our annual community printmaking project CeLOUbrate Print. Sustaining the heart of our programming, we again hosted free traveling woodcut workshops, culminating in a day of collaborative printing, during which these community woodcuts (hand-carved wooden stamps) were inked up and driven over with a steamroller to print them.
We expanded our project to include a panel Carrying the Message: The Power of Local Press, archival exhibition Line Byline: The Community Makers & Messengers of Louisville Print History, and zine documenting the collaborative research of both. Across CeLOUbrate Print’s programming, past and present, the common thread running throughout has been access.
For our workshops, we explored adaptive avenues with the Kentucky Center for Accessible Living, such as our new electric rotary tools and Velcro cuffs to grip them, funded by Arts for All Kentucky. I also began experimenting with casting resin assistive grips for our hand-carving tools, making the handles easier to hold and less strenuous to use. Though we continue to pursue adaptive techniques, we are thrilled to see how these and future community-responsive accommodations can open up inclusivity for our workshops.
Organized by Chad Kamen of UofL Archives & Special Collections and their mentee Piper Greeby, our panel featured: Aukram Burton (The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage), Jose Neil Donis (alDía en América), Spencer Jenkins (Queer Kentucky), and Mary Johnson (The Disability Rag). As such, we prioritized the audiences served by these publications through live Spanish translation, ASL interpretation, and video preservation.
Our archival exhibition included bilingual English-Spanish gallery texts, thanks to our translators Raimundo and Sergio Cabrera with funding from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. The American Printing House (APH) for the Blind counseled us on museum accessibility, teaching us about tactile stickers and text tagging for screen readers. Using the latter, we drafted a gallery guide of curatorial texts, artifact descriptions, and navigational cues, as accessible online or in physical braille packets, thanks to our friends at APH.
Our forthcoming zine, written by my mentee Emilie Zengel in collaboration with community members, will be released at our exhibition’s closing reception on Friday, August 29th. This publication will be available online in English, Spanish, and screenreader-accessible versions in addition to a limited print run of English and braille bound editions.
With direct community support, we have been able to invite new audiences to printmaking, bringing them together in a shared making process—this experience has made several things plain. We need art, in all its beautiful imperfections and humanity. We need each other, in unwavering advocacy and kindness. And to see both of those through, we need to break down intersectional systemic barriers for our neighbors. As a medium of amplification, what mode of creative expression could be more poetic for these ventures than printmaking?
Many thanks to the folks at the Portland Museum for everything they do to support CeLOUbrate Print’s programming alongside their existing work in the community—with particular acknowledgments for the time and labor of my esteemed collaborator William Smith—as well as our sponsors, collaborators, and community participants who made this experience so enriching.
