Congratulations to Professor Benay and Professor Ciampaglia, who have won a 2021 Expanding Horizons grant for Social and Racial Justice. Learn more about their project Pressing Matters: Printmaking, Self-Advocacy, and Community Activism in East Cleveland by visiting the EHI website here.

Pressing Matters will design and facilitate participatory printmaking, visual literacy, and self-advocacy projects for under-resourced youth groups in East Cleveland and the Clark-Fulton neighborhoods. Partnering with area non-profit Zygote Press and the Cleveland Institute of Art, our project will result in the creation of 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 will create dialogues with and open communicative pathways for under-resourced populations in greater Cleveland.