Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters designs and facilitates participatory printmaking, visual literacy, and self-advocacy projects for under-resourced youth groups in East Cleveland and the Clark-Fulton neighborhoods.
Funded by a Social and Racial Justice grant from the Expanding Horizons Initiative, Case Western Reserve University, Pressing Matters is began its inaugural cycle during the 2021-22 academic year.
Partnering with area non-profit Zygote Press and the Cleveland Institute of Art, the project has created an interdisciplinary consortium of CWRU faculty and students, CIA faculty and 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 was recently profiled by Humanities for All, the premier showcase for publicly engaged humanities!
To learn more about the second year of Pressing Matters, check out this article in CAN Journal!
