Current Exhibition

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Ink as Witness: Chicago Printmaking Collectives, Alternative Media, & the Politics of Social Justice opens on September 25, 2026! Join us for our opening reception that Friday, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Kindly RSVP here.

Ink as Witness examines how contemporary artist collectives carry forward the enduring social, political, and collaborative traditions of printmaking in Chicago. Inspired by the legacy of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the exhibition positions today’s collectives as direct descendants of a history in which printmaking functioned as both an artistic practice, a means of collective action, and a vehicle for alternative media. Across generations, artists have turned to print not simply to produce images, but to build communities, circulate information, preserve histories, and create accessible platforms for voices often excluded from institutional narratives.

Robert Blackburn joins the legacy of others alike, including Margaret Burroughs, Carlos Cortéz, and José Guadalupe Posada. This exhibition traces a continuous lineage from the activist-centered print pedagogy, community print collaborations, and visual representations for independent media presses of the twentieth century to the interdisciplinary artist collectives working today. Through prints, posters, publications, zines, books, and ephemera, Ink as Witness reveals how contemporary artists continue to embrace printmaking’s principles of collaboration, shared authorship, mutual aid, and public engagement. These collectives expand the definition of print by integrating publishing, installation, and community organizing into practices that respond to ongoing struggles for racial justice, labor rights, housing equity, migration, environmental justice, and cultural self-determination.

Participating Collectives include:

Instituto Gráfico de Chicago

• Carlos Barberena
• Alex Velázquez Brightbill
• Salvador Jiménez
• Atlan Arceo-Witzl

Chicago Printers Guild

• Ben Blount
• Nia F.G. Easley
• Eric Von Haynes
• Angela Davis Fegan

JustSeeds Artists’ Cooperative

• William Estrada
• Aaron Hughes

At our opening reception, we will also debut our growing Chicago Justice Gallery library, featuring books and zines that highlight the histories, movements, and alternatives to mainstream media that connect in different ways to themes in the prints featured in this exhibition. Stay a while and read with us!

We hope you will join us on opening night, Friday, September 25, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM!

Ink as Witness runs from September 25, 2026 to July 9, 2027.

It is free and open to the public.

OPEN GALLERY HOURS:

• Tuesdays by appointment
• Wednesdays, 12:00 – 5:00 PM
• Thursdays, 12:00 – 5:00 PM
• Fridays, 12:00 – 5:00 PM
• Extended hours on first Fridays! From 12:00 – 7:00 PM

CLOSURES:

• November 23-27, 2026
• December 21, 2026 – January 1, 2027

Alex Velázquez-Brightbill is a visual artist and printmaker whose work explores identity, motherhood, immigration, and cultural heritage through personal storytelling. Her Mexican heritage and experience as an immigrant who moved to Chicago as a child inform her exploration of cultural hybridity, displacement, memory, resilience, and belonging.

She primarily works in hand-carved linocut, chine-collé, collage, and artist books. She is drawn to printmaking’s physical and experimental processes of carving, layering, and transferring images. More recently, she has begun exploring lithography, expanding her approach to mark-
making, texture, and image-making while embracing the balance between control and unpredictability inherent in printmaking.

Nature and animals often serve as symbols of transformation and connection; the moth, which flies toward the light, represents hope. Her recent work explores deeply personal and often underrepresented experiences, including IVF, motherhood, and breastfeeding. Through printmaking and artist books, she transforms these experiences into layered visual narratives that connect personal stories with cultural memory, resilience, and hope.

Angela Davis Fegan was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She is the co-owner of Too Much Press in Bridgeport and teaches papermaking at SAIC. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery, SPACES (OH), Co-Prosperity and NEIU’s Fine Art Gallery. She has held residencies at the Hambidge Center (GA), Revolve (AVL), Project Row Houses (TX), Women’s Studio Workshop (NY) and Penland School of Craft (NC). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell and Super Sad Black Girl by Diamond Sharp. Her lavender menace poster project has been written up by Hyperallergic, Pop Sugar, Go Magazine, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.

Atlan Arceo-Witzl is a biracial Mexican-American visual artist, second-generation printmaker, and third-generation educator based in Chicago, Illinois. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Skidmore College. He has worked as a teaching artist in various programs and institutions while also maintaining a personal freelance and art practice. A short list of collaborators includes Pilsen Housing Cooperative, Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, Studio Elaine Mosaic, Chicago Tool Library, Chicago Printers Guild, Spudnik Press Cooperative, Field Notes, Code Switch Podcast (NPR), and the Chicago Reader. Exploring everyday rituals, icons, symbols, and communication, his works redefine midwestern identity as a hybrid of ancient and contemporary life. Pieces employ a satirical cartoon style infused with the flattened aesthetics of mesoamerican and Mexican folk art alongside an admiration for hand-painted signs. Printed ephemera, passing phrases, political movements, and palpable relics of the past are combined into graphic images championing a diverse liberated future.

Ben Blount is a Detroit born artist, designer and letterpress printer best known for work that explores ideas of race, identity and the stories we tell ourselves about living in America. He uses typography and language to create work that moves through the realms of graphic design, print culture and activism. Blount earned a MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Graphic Design from Washington University in St. Louis. His work is included in the collections of the Newberry Library, Chicago Field Museum, Harold Washington Library, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Blount works, prints and plays at MAKE, his storefront studio in Evanston, Illinois just north of Chicago and west of Lake Michigan.

Carlos Barberena (b. 1972, Nicaragua) is a contemporary printmaker based in Chicago, recognized by his relief prints that reflect on sociopolitical and cultural tragedies. His art consistently explores cycles of repression and resistance, and their connection to the Diaspora he has experienced—navigating periods of dictatorship, revolution, erasure, renewal, hope, and repression.

Barberena has received various awards, including: “IAM Artist Catalyst Award” Intuit Art Museum, Chicago, IL; ”The Otis Philbrick Memorial Prize” – Boston Printmakers: 2023 North American Print Biennial; “The Elizabeth Catlett Memorial Award”, MAPC, University of Iowa; Second Prize: 13th International Contemporary Print Biennial of Trois-Rivières (BIECTR), Québec, Canada; The “National Printmaking Award” Managua, Nicaragua.

Barberena work is included in collections such Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Museum of Mexican Art; Chicago History Museum; among others.

He is a core member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago.

Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, publisher, and educator with more than 15 years of experience leading Flatlands Press, an independent imprint recognized for innovative design, collaborative publishing, and community-based projects. He serves as President of the Chicago Printers Guild, is a member of the Zinemercado team, and is a Lecturer of Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in offset production and risography.

His work is held in the collections of the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection in Chicago, the Center for Book Arts in New York, and the Illinois State Museum, and has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Elephant Room Gallery.

Across his artistic, educational, and community-based work, he is committed to using print, design, and collaborative publishing as tools for connection, access, and civic engagement.

Salvador Jiménez-Flores (b. 1985, Jalisco, México) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the politics of identity, double consciousness, colonization, migration, “the other,” and futurism through socially engaged installation, public art, and studio-based practices. His interdisciplinary practice spans ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and community-based projects, examining questions of cultural memory, belonging, resilience, and transformation.

Jiménez-Flores has received numerous honors, including the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, support from the New England Foundation for the Arts, and Threewalls’ RaD Lab + Outside the Walls Fellowship. His public art practice includes major commissions and projects supported by the Richard Hunt Award, ArtPrize, and Grounds For Sculpture.

Jiménez-Flores is currently Professor and Chair of Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his work as an artist and educator connects material experimentation, cultural inquiry, and community engagement.

Nia Easley (MFA) is a Chicago-based artist, designer, researcher, and educator. Her artists’ books are housed in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC, at DePaul University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa special collections, Wellesley College, the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium library. She is a 2017 recipient of the ThreeWalls RaD Lab grant, a 2018 recipient of the ThreeWalls Outside the Walls grant, a 2021 recipient of the Ideas Beyond Formats grant, and a 2024/25 recipient of the Artists in Public Schools grant. Easley is also a member of Unsettlement Music as a contributing artist and dramaturg.

Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, and anti-war veteran. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform the materials and habits of state violence, and imagine liberation in defiance of militarized norms. He develops projects that utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence. Hughes works with a range of art and activist groups including Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

William Estrada is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art Education and an Assistant Professor at the UIC School of Art, and was a teaching artist at Telpochalli Elementary School for 23 years. Estrada’s approach to both art and teaching is centered on collaborative discourse. He encourages a critical re-examination of both public and private spaces by engaging with existing images, texts, and the political landscape. His roles as a teacher, artist, and cultural worker are intertwined. He draws on academic literature, educational settings, and personal interactions to report, record, reveal, and amplify lived experiences, aiming to foster radical imagination.

His significant contributions to the field have been acknowledged through numerous awards and fellowships, including the Inaugural 2023-2024 Imagine Just Fellow, the 2023-2024 NALAC Catalyst for Change Fellow,  was named “The People’s Art Teacher” in The Reader’s People Issue 2023, a 2024-2025 cohort member for the Mural Arts Initiative’s Strength Through Solidarity Initiative, a recipient of the 2024 3Arts Next Level Award, was the subject for the Mobile Street At Cart Project-Localish which won a 2025 Emmy Award, a 2026 Shedd Aquarium Artist In Residence, amongst various other awards.

Estrada’s current research focuses on developing community-based, culturally relevant projects that critically examine power structures related to race, the economy, and cultural access in contested spaces. He aspires to envision and work toward a more equitable collective future through intentional, sustained collaborations with individuals in their communities.