In a world gone digital, print media is talked about like an endangered species on the brink of extinction. Paperless is the name of the game in most industries, as they work feverishly to stay current. Amos Kennedy, on the other hand, isn’t ready to write an obituary for print, just yet.
“When I was in my 20s,” He told a journalism class at MCLA on September 20th, “the big thing was, ‘We will be living in a paperless society,’ but right now we generate more paper than we did when I was in my 20s.”
Kennedy came to North Adams from his hometown of Detroit on October 24th to talk more about his artform of choice: letterpress printing. He started his visit at MCLA that day to gives remarks at the opening of an exhibition of his work in the second-floor gallery of Bowman Hall, before heading to Mass MoCA that evening. There, Kennedy, along with Professor Melanie Mowinski, hosted a book signing and conversation in Mass MoCA’s R&D Store.
Kennedy and Mowinski are long-time friends and collaborators, as well as letterpress printing afficionados, addicted to the process of “putting ink on paper and having a good time and playing with it,” as Mowinski lovingly refers to it. She’s a professor of art at MCLA, who loves sharing the magic of printing with students.
This won’t be Kennedy’s first visit to MCLA. Mowinski credits Kennedy’s first visit as an epiphany for her, as a printmaker.
“I came from a very meticulous, perfection-based type training,” she said. “Everything had to be pristine. Everything had to be so perfect, and the word ‘perfect’ was thrown around all the time. We’re striving for perfection. You couldn’t have any smudges or [anything] messy.”
Kennedy’s visit introduced her to a new attitude that totally shifted her mindset and approach to printing, for the better.
“He came in and there was ink dripping somewhere, and you were just throwing things into the press with magnets, and we were like ‘Let’s just print stuff, let’s just get excited!’ and it completely changed the way I print.”
Mowinski isn’t the only person who sees the value of the work Kennedy does. His prints are on display in over 6,000 homes and businesses in America. Yet, Kennedy was a relative late-comer to the medium. He had been entrenched in a corporate career for years, before seeing a live demonstration of letterpress printing and becoming entranced. At 40 years old, Kennedy left the corporate world behind, making a new name for himself as a self-proclaimed “humble negro printer” who is now internationally recognized for his work.
That go-for-it attitude that Kennedy brings to printing started with redefining what failure really means. “When something doesn’t work out for me, that just shows I have limited vision,” he said. “[But] because it didn’t work out for me, my vision has been expanded; it is an experience.”
Just as he doesn’t worry about failure, Kennedy isn’t really concerned with perfection, either. “Perfection is an allusion that you chase and will never catch,” he said. “What you made is perfect, because you made it. The making is perfection in itself.”
That disregard for a rubric or standards is what keeps his work interesting, he believes. Becoming bogged down by convention can be a death knell for creativity.
“The best thing that I could have is a bunch of people who have no idea what letterpress paper printing is to take a course under me,” Kennedy said, “because they will do things I will never think of.”
Both Kennedy and Mowinski are adamant that print is, and will continue to be, relevant for many years to come, despite the push for paperless. Print is ubiquitous, as an art form and as a way of informing the masses.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry,” Kennedy said. “When we talk about print what you have to remember is that everything in the grocery store, every box in the grocery store, is printed. Print is everywhere. …This is an extremely important way to disseminate information.”
His message rang true for the students conducting the interview, most of whom were journalism or communications students, looking to break into an industry that exists solely thanks to the invention of the printing press, which enabled the distribution of pamphlets and fliers. These precursors to newspapers, also printed on letterpresses, created space for journalism to exist, for news to be shared.
Mowinski hasn’t lost sight of that, which was part of the reason she organized the series of workshops and conversations around print that Kennedy will be featured at. “Print Isn’t Dead is my celebration of this medium that is really the reason why all of you are in this room right now…that print medium letterpress technology is even more, I think, important than computers,” she said.
Whether your path takes you towards letterpress printing, journalism, art, or in an entirely different direction, Kennedy shared some parting advice with the students present.
“You have a gift that you want to share with the universe, and if you are fortunate enough to share that gift with the universe, then it really helps you to be more in contact with the universe we live in,” he said.
Of course, no matter where life takes you, both Kennedy and Mowinski implored students to keep print close in their minds. “If print were to die, we would lose that little bit of magic,” Mowinski said.
