Carving ourselves out
In March of 2023, I saw Hokusai’s “Under the Wave Off Kanagawa” (also called “The Great Wave”) at the Museum of Fine Arts. It wasn’t my first time seeing it in person, not even my first time seeing it at the MFA. But seeing the woodcut print again that spring reminded me of when I had tried relief printmaking in an art class in school, and how I really hadn’t done it since. It reminded me how, as adults, we so often have to actively seek out opportunities to create.
I’ve always been interested in making art, mostly drawing and painting, but after that MFA trip I went to my nearest Blick and bought some beginner block printing supplies. I’ve been hooked since. And the thing that has kept me coming back again and again to printmaking, rather than going back to my flirtations with painting, is how inherently radical it is.
Printmaking—the act of making multiple copies of a piece of art—encourages us to let go of the scarcity mindset. It says “yes, there’s enough for all of us.” It’s one of the most democratic, community-based artforms. It’s a collective form of artmaking. Communities form in print studios and printing presses.
There are a lot of different types of printmaking. You might be familiar with relief printing, linocut, or woodcut. Maybe you have a t-shirt in the back of your closet that was screen printed for your friend’s band, faded after so many washes. I only work in linocut, but it’s nice to know that there’s still so much for me to sink my teeth into when it comes to printing, in all its bodily forms.
Printmaking has a long history. Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” is from 1831, but woodcuts have been around for much longer, predating the printing press. It’s believed that woodblock printing originated in China; some scholars say in 600 AD, others saying as early as 220 AD.
While the Gutenberg press was invented in 1440, woodblock printing was also common in Europe around this time. The first printing presses in the Americas were in Mexico City and Lima, Peru. Much like the way that the printing press was used to make the Gutenberg Bibles, the printing presses in the Americas were also used for religious purposes; mainly to forcibly convert the indigenous populations to Catholicism. But printing has gone from a tool of oppression to a tool of liberation.
There are whole books on the history of printing, and I have about 1,500 words, so I’m going to stick with printmaking as it has to do with protesting, revolutionary work, and queer history.
One of the earliest instances of queer printmaking is a woodcut c. 1496: Albrecht Dürer’s “The Bath House,” currently housed in the Met. Aubrey Beardsley, an artist inspired by Japanese woodcuts, was a leading figure in England’s aesthetic movement of the late 1800s. At the turn of the century, there was a group of mostly women artists known as the Provincetown Printmakers (another superb MFA exhibit from 2023); they even developed a method of white line woodblock printing called the Provincetown Print technique.
Artists in the ‘20s in America and Europe were getting into printmaking as well, for example: Berlin lesbian printmaker Jeanne Mammen and Harlem Renaissance artists Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent.
One of my absolute favorite printmakers (though she made other types of art) is the Black and Mexican-American artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), who made artwork about activism and her ancestry. I’d recommend looking up “Sharecropper” (housed at the MoMA).
Printmaking is deeply intertwined with activism. Printmaking allows for mass communication through posters, protest signs, and newsletters. In the ‘60s, Chicano artists staked their claim in the history and cultural impact of printmaking. Many Chicano artists/activists channeled their skills into innovative printmaking that made statements about the social movements of that time.
In the 1980s, the Gran Fury artist collective formed as a branch of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Gran Fury designed the now-iconic pink triangle “Silence = Death” poster, made in 1987 through an offset lithograph process. Stephen Andrews (b. 1956) printed on non-traditional materials, like latex and pig skin, to comment on the impact of the AIDS crisis (Visual AIDS archive).
In the History Projects collections (Boston’s LGBTQ archive), you can find printed posters from ACT UP Boston advertising marches, a poster for the “gay dance” put on by the Student Homophile League from 1972, and issues of the Gay Community News. Throughout LGBTQ archives and collections across the country, you can find materials in their collections related to some form of print. The ONE Archive at the USC Library, GLBT Historical Society, and Lesbian Herstory Archive all have an expansive collection of periodicals and self-published works.
And speaking of self-published works, we can’t talk about printmaking without talking about zines. It’s believed that the first zine was created in the 1930s; a science fiction pamphlet called “The Comet.” Vice Versa, thought to be the first LGBTQ zine, was published in 1947 under the pen name Lisa Ben (anagram for lesbian).
As LGBTQ/feminist bookstores gained popularity in the ‘70s, they served not only as community spaces but places where you could buy zines and periodicals (other than through the mail). Zines were handed out at bars, coffee shops, record stores, and the underground music scene.
There are so many places to find LGBTQ zine collections, especially online—LCC Zine Collection, the Digital Transgender Archive, QZAP (the Queer Zine Archive Project), the UK-based Queer Zine Library, ACT UP NY’s website. Just by searching “zine” on any of these online collections would bring you to thousands of hand-made, radical works of love.
Sometimes, in the world of indie presses, the lines between artwork, printmaking, zines, and publications get blurred. Be Oakley, a queer printer and the creator of the GenderFail press, has stated that they pull inspiration for fonts directly from protest signs from gay liberation marches.
Some present-day printmakers who are doing really thought-provoking work: Ron Abram, Didier William, Mickalene Thomas, Delita Martin of Black Box Press, two-spirit Anishinaabe and Korean-American artist Jamie John, the political work of Carlos Barberena (of Chicago’s Bandolero Press), Atlanta artist Kiara Gilbert, and groups like Black Women of Print. And some of my absolute favorite prints of all time can be found online through the Queer Ancestors Project.
Another of my favorite aspects of printmaking is the resourcefulness and sustainability of the practice. You can print on just about anything—an old shirt, a rag, notebook paper. Printmaker Sarita Hernández, of the Marimacha Monarca Press in Chicago, discusses in an interview the Chicano artistic practice of rasquache, or being resourceful by creating with the bare minimum.
Printmaker Gabriela Martinez will often use foam instead of a linoleum block when she’s teaching; a block can be made of lots of different things. And once you have the tools you need for printmaking, it’s not as expensive as other forms of art (painting, etc).
As I mentioned earlier, Chicanx artists have always made a large impact on the field of printmaking. Nicólas González-Medina’s work incorporates political messages, such as their widely circulating “Defend DACA” print. “I really love how the medium of print can transgress and go through so many different spaces of activism,” says Sarita Hernández.
Block printing isn’t clean. It’s not crisp (usually, unless you’re really good or want a certain look). Most art is body-oriented, to some degree, but there’s a sort of catharsis to the repetitive lines of removal. In the words of the printmaker Gabriela Martinez, printmaking involves “collaborating with material constantly.” And of course, there’s what writer Barbara Sjoholm called the “sheer butch glamour of printing” (“She Who Owns the Press: The Physical World of Early Feminist Publishing”).
And there’s a permanence to it. Every mark you make on a linoleum block cannot be painted over or erased. It’s hard to glue back a piece of linoleum once you’ve carved it out. There’s no going back.
In an increasingly digital world, print materials feel like a rarity. Maybe the love for physical ephemera in the queer community was the desire to have a physical item that says “I was there,” when society so often tries to erase those histories.
It all feels like a heavy-handed metaphor for carving out the person I want to be. Creating a version of myself that I like, discovering myself when the marble is chipped away. Carving out the person that I want to be. Creating exactly what I get to look like and how I can exist at my own hand.
Sam Correia is the Reference and Community Engagement Librarian at the Duxbury Free Library. Their work focuses on outreach, equity-based programming, accessible resources for all, and radical librarianship. They are passionate about LGBTQ history, community archiving, and collective liberation.
