Exhibition Opening: Ink as Witness

Join us for the opening reception of our newest exhibition at the Chicago Justice Gallery featuring the work of Chicago's printmakers and area zine libraries! Kindly RSVP by following this link to help us plan our food order.

Ink as Witness: Chicago Printmaking Collectives, Alternative Media, & the Politics of Social Justice 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

We are pleased to offer this program in coordination with UIC's printmaking exhibition at Gallery 400, Press and Pull: A Legacy of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

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