The Brooklyn Rail

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. lives his life to the letter, or rather, for the letter. In 1988, at nearly forty years old, he took a family trip to Colonial Williamsburg and stumbled upon what would become his life’s work: the letterpress. He has since devoted himself to the craft of letterpress printing, developing a signature affinity for pressing orphan type, mismatched fonts and sizes, loud color, typographic layers, texture, and—above all—truth into a page.

Though Kennedy began with artist books, like his 1994 book Strange Fruit: Words of Protest to the Lynchings and Burnings of My People, today he is best known for his posters. His large-scale posters, 19 by 12 1/2–inches, are printed on his hand-operated Vandercook SP15 press, which he affectionately calls “Gray,” and his small 8 by 6–inch cards are printed on a Heidelberg 10 by 15 Platen press. Over his thirty-five-year career, Kennedy’s references include abolitionist literature, twentieth century Black poets (Claude McKay, Paul Laurence Dunbar), old concert posters, maps, and other national symbols—even Southern street signs, to continue a tradition of Black protest through art. As a professor at Indiana University, he used his infamous “Nappygrams” series, which featured instigative postcards stamped with a racist Black caricature he repurposed as a kind of letterhead, to speak out against racism on campus. Proceed and Be Bold!, a 2008 documentary about Kennedy, captures the events that follow after a mailed “Nappygram” resulted in the staff of the school’s affirmative action office calling the police on him, which Kennedy regarded as an absurd response and only inspired him to produce another “Nappygram.”

A spirit of improvisation, pugnacious wit, and Black pride suffuse his work, making him a truly unique character. Citizen Printer was released this year by Letterform Archive in conjunction with an exhibition of Kennedy’s prints running through 2025. It features full-color reproductions of eight hundred of his pieces and is segmented into three sections that represent cardinal thematic overtones of his career: social justice, shared wisdom, and community. When we spoke over Zoom, he opened up about why he prefers celebration of craft over art, and why he’s proud to be known as a “bad printer.”

Naomi Elias (Rail): You don’t like being called an artist. Why does the term “citizen printer” feel more accurate to you?

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: Well, “citizen printer” is not unique to me. The first time I ever heard a combination of “citizen” and an occupation was “citizen architect,” which was used to describe Sambo Mockbee, one of the co-founders of the Rural Studio in Alabama. The purpose of the Rural Studio was to allow architecture students to explore architecture in service to humanity, not to the wealthy, or to corporations. How do you build a humble home that will keep someone dry, warm, and comfortable?

I also believe that citizenship is something that is seldom talked about. I call myself a Negro. Well, I am a Negro. I was born Colored, I was raised Negro, and I was educated Black. And one of the things that people say is: “Well, why the term ‘Negro’?” I say, “Well, the term Negro was used primarily when the descendants of formerly enslaved peoples of the US, Africans, were fighting for their civil rights to become citizens.”

Rail: You say in your artist manifesto, “I print negro … I make books negro, I do not make negro books.” Could you explain what you mean by that?

Kennedy: Well, I am a Negro, so everything I do is Negro. I cannot say I’m going to make something Negro, it is just the way that it comes out because I am Negro. It is a reflection of my entire life experiences, and those experiences play upon what I make.

Rail: From your collection of antique woodcuts that carry Black stereotypes, to printing the names of martyred civil rights leaders on chipboard church fans, and your book Strange Fruit—which you’ve referred to as your opus—a lot of your work has very visible Southern roots. What does it mean to you to speak on the South, or to the South, or recall Southern history in that way?

Kennedy: Well, it is where I’m from. I’m Southern by birth and by raising, and so I do not run away from it. I do not shy away from it. I am right now contemplating getting a membership in the Sons of the Confederacy, because my family was here before the Confederacy existed. If you were in the South in the 1800s, if you were in the Confederacy, whether you were Black or white, you are a child of the Confederacy. Therefore, I am entitled to be a son of the Confederacy. For the rest of the nation, the South is something that’s picked upon, despite the fact that the South does define a lot of our culture—both musical and food-wise—and a lot of advancements have come out of the South. It is looked upon as a fairly backward part of the country. And that has been almost traditional: the trope of the ignorant Black person, or the ignorant redneck, the hillbilly. That is a trope that is played heavily upon in entertainment in this country, and so I am proud to be Southern.

Rail: Your motto is “Agitate, agitate, agitate.” You are kind of a professional agitator. Is part of the appeal of applying that you would definitely upset white racists down there?

Kennedy: Yeah—how are they going to deny me? My great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was born in 1835 in Louisiana, so we have been in the Confederacy for a long time. We were there before the Confederacy existed. The Confederacy is not a white thing. It does not just consist of white people. They were fighting over the enslavement of Africans, which constituted almost 40 percent of the population. How are you going to exclude them when you’re talking about the history of the Confederacy?

Rail: You have such a strong Black American presence in your work, but also African influences, like the mask series and the series on African proverbs that I enjoyed and showed to my Ethiopian parents, who were able to identify some of the sayings. How connected do you feel to both of them? Do you feel like they’re in conversation with each other?

Kennedy: I have a strong connection with African culture because it’s been played down by the West so much. We were taught that Africans still lived in huts and hunted with bows and arrows in the sixties, despite the fact that it was quite to the contrary. Yes, that does exist. And actually now we’re finding out that that’s a better way to exist than living in massive cities with all the waste and everything. The further away people are from the influence of Western culture, the more appealing it is to me. There are so many negative things in Western culture that are just unique to it.

If you ask somebody of your parents’ age from Germany, “Give me a German proverb,” it may be hard. But if you ask someone from Ethiopia of your parents’ age to say a proverb, they could probably rattle off two or three, because proverbs were used every day. They were repeated, because proverbs are ways of dealing with the world, or looking at the world. That German would be able to sprout a passage from Nietzsche that says the same thing that the proverb said in ten words, but everybody understands the proverb because it’s ten explainable words.

Rail: That’s a through line in your work, a desire for accessibility, and your interest in brevity comes from that right?

Kennedy: Correct. Also, I’m lazy. I don’t want to set a lot of type.

Rail: You say that, but I think you’re aware of how much more powerful it is to speak in briefer words.

Kennedy: I remember hearing a quote that said, “Words are only confusing when you use a lot to say a little.” And there is some truth to that. If you can keep it to a minimum of words, people will understand it.

Rail: Letterpress printing is a very slow art. Do you think of the slowness of your art as an act of resistance itself—to the breakneck pace of capitalism?

Kennedy: It’s a slow art, but it’s a fast craft. I practice the craft, not the art. Art is the thing that has become an industrial commodity, and it has all these tropes with it. It’s slow, it’s intentional, it’s blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the craft is just the doing of it. A good example of this is you have these super artists who will make these massive structures, but they don’t make it, they have craftspeople to make it. So, it’s like, “How did you make that sculpture that’s twenty feet tall?” “Well, I went to a welder and I gave the welder directions, and I sat there with them and I told them, ’’Oh, put a little more there, put a little more there.’’ “Oh, so you didn’t actually make it. You designed it, you sketched it. But then when it came to the making, you went to a craftsperson.”

It’s interesting because when you make it an art, the things that I do can sell for hundreds of dollars, but when I make it a craft, it can barely sell for 25 dollars. So, I prefer being a craftsperson, where the average citizen in this country can afford my work, rather than be an artist where only ten percent can afford it.

Rail: You consider your former professor, Walter Hamady, part of this first wave of letterpress artists, and yourself part of a second or third wave. Do you feel like you have successors, and do you think about that?

Kennedy: Well, there will always be successors, whether I think about it or not. The popularity of it will continue to wane, but it will never get to zero. There will be those practitioners. Actually, the interest in letterpress printing and book arts consistently grows with each generation coming through the university. The awareness is growing, so the number of people is growing.

And the thing is that when Walter came along, there were only about three universities that had a letterpress printing component to them, as far as academics. And from Walter, there were a series of students that went out, got positions in art departments, and created a little niche for letterpress printing. So their students picked it up and learned it. And also there was this rapid growth of community letterpress print shops that allowed the average individual to take a course. So, there’s been this growth.

Rail: You do national workshops annually. Are you trying to spread the word about printing?

Kennedy: No, that’s something I do to eat every month and have a place to live. [Laughs]

Rail: You are an imperfectionist. There’s different scales and sizes and a million layers in your work, and maybe evidence of your thumbs and yourself in it. And that seems different to how someone trained in the art would approach it. How did you develop that as a philosophy?

Kennedy: Out of laziness. It’s much easier just to fuck up than it is to do right. I am also a victim of a really strong indoctrination to industrialization, and the uniformity of industrialization that took place in the fifties and the sixties. So, I still have issues with things like “Everything is supposed to be straight,” and “Everything is supposed to be neat,” and “All of them are supposed to look the same.” I just enjoy the madness. I seek that. Each poster is supposed to be unique. So, my perfection is to make work that mimics imperfection as much as possible.

Rail: Well, there is one thing about you that is uniform, and that is your literal uniform: the denim overalls and the pink shirt. Where did that come from?

Kennedy: That just comes from a good combination of pink and navy. And also in the documentary [Laura Zinger’s Proceed and Be Bold!], my mother said, “You know his latest thing? A pink shirt and overalls.” And so I said, “Okay, Helen A. Kennedy, I’m going to do that. I’m going to do that just to spite you.” And I did. I wear it all the time. The thing is that everybody wears a uniform, whatever they do. I was asked by middle schoolers why I wear pink shirts and overalls, and my response was, “Because I can’t go around naked.”

Rail: Transitioning a little: you run the Detroit branch of the School of Bad Printing. How did that come about and what is it that the school does?

Kennedy: It came about because we wanted it to come about. A friend of mine was making a joke that it was the Amos Kennedy School of Bad Printing, because among certain “fine printers,” what I do is considered “bad printing,” and it’s a badge that I wear with pride. But I’m not the only person in the world that prints this way. Other people identified with me off of digital media, and so we just said, “Wherever you are, that’ll be a branch of the School of Bad Printing.” And so, we have one here in Detroit, we have one in Australia, we have one in Buenos Aires, we have one in the Netherlands.

Anybody can be a bad printer. Just tell people, “I’m a bad printer.” You have to self-declare. As opposed to being a fine printer, if you say you’re a fine printer someone’s going to come along and say, “Well, that ‘E’ has just a little too much ink on it, so you need to touch that up.” But if someone says they’re a bad printer, you say, “Yep, you’re a bad printer. Mm-hmm.”

Rail: As a former bookmaker, what do you think of the construction of your monograph Citizen Printer?

Kennedy: They did an excellent job on that. Just the physical object is enough to be interesting. Gail Anderson and Joe Newton were the graphic designers on it, so they led the design of it, and I believe that what they did highlights the work that I do to the maximum. There is an integration between the book and the work inside of it that you want to have. It’s difficult to pull that off because it’s so much easier to follow the route of most monographs in art. But they stepped outside of the boundaries, and they did an excellent job with it. I’d put a couple on my bookshelf because they stand out.