Overview

Pressing Matters designs and facilitates participatory printmaking, visual literacy, and self-advocacy projects for under-resourced youth groups in Cleveland. Partnering with area non-profit Zygote Press, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s community-arts hub, the Pivot Center, our project fosters an interdisciplinary consortium of faculty, students, and community partners. Prints offer relatively inexpensive, widely disseminated access to information, ideas, and images. The history of printmaking has in turn been a history of revolution and of racial and social identity formation. With the advent of digital technologies, however, printmaking has become difficult to access—most high schools and many colleges (including CWRU) do not own presses. Providing access to this medium is but one facet of our initiative. Through the unification of scholarship, teaching, and community engagement, Pressing Matters creates dialogues with and opens communicative pathways for under-resourced populations in greater Cleveland. Pressing Matters is funded by a Social and Racial Justice grant from the Expanding Horizons Initiative, Case Western Reserve University.

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Image: Luis C. González, Fiesta del Maiz, 1979, screenprint on paper, 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2020.47.2, Open Access.