We Are All In This Together

We Are All in This Together, presented by Interference Archive with the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, is an exhibition that uses the collection of Interference Archive and materials produced by the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative to explore artists’ solidarity with social movements.

There is a long tradition of artists as organizers. Artists participate in social justice through their creativity communicating demands and goals with visual works, with their labor in producing multiples, and through creating consumable items for fundraising. We Are All in This Together illustrates the moments when artists have rolled up their sleeves to do the work of organizing. More than providing political commentary or personal response to topical events, many cultural workers use their trade and skill set in solidarity with social, economic and environmental struggles. This exhibit will use Justseeds prints produced in solidarity with contemporary campaigns such as Standing Rock, Close Rikers, Black Lives Matter, Call for Boycott Divestment Sanctions, and the Wisconsin uprising, situated beside ephemera from the Interference Archive that reflect those social movements.   

This exhibition is organized by Interference Archive’s Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Bonnie Gordon, Melissa Sions, Nora Almeida, and Kevin Caplicki, Interference Archive co-founder and member of Justseeds. Interference Archive is an all-volunteer, grassroots archive of social movement cultural ephemera based in Brooklyn, NY. This work manifests in an open-stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs including exhibitions, workshops, educational visits, talks, and screenings. The Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 29 artists committed to social, environmental, and political engagement. With members in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods who share a belief in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action.

PRINTWEEK 17 We Are All in This Together 
October 23–25, 2017

Printmaking opens spaces of collaboration, community, and exchange. Contemporary practices yield a range of prints, from traditional fine arts prints and books to mass-produced pamphlets, zines, fliers, broadsides, and posters. PRINTWEEK 17 We Are All in This Together celebrates the long tradition of printmakers using their skills in solidarity with social movements. This series of events invites the community into the Purchase College print shop to explore the many possibilities: to be a maker (e.g., take a workshop), a participant (join a collaboration, protest or performance), a member of the audience (attend artist talks and the open house), a connoisseur (acquire prints: trades, freebies, and an auction).   

Monday, October 23, 3pm: Propaganda party organized by Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative followed by a roundtable discussion 
Tuesday, October 24, 3–6pm: Wayzgoose open house
Tuesday, October 24, 3–5pm: Student exhibition opening
Wednesday, October 25, 5pm Favianna Rodriguez public lecture
Wednesday, October 25, 6:30pm: Another Protest Song: Karaoke with a Message, Angel Neverez and Valerie Tevere 

All events are free and open to the public. Unless otherwise noted, they will take place in the Printmaking Studios, Room 1009 in the Visual Arts Building of the School of Art+Design, Purchase College.

About the School of Art+Design
The School of Art+Design, part of the School of the Arts at Purchase College, SUNY, offers premiere programs that prepare students for careers in the visual arts and design, as well as lives informed by aesthetic experience. The school honors tradition, encourages experimentation and collaboration, develops critical thinking, and embraces new concepts, materials, and technologies. A faculty of working artists is committed to creating a supportive climate in which students are passionate about learning to see, to think, to make and to reflect. Our students are leaders in cultural production throughout the world.

School of the Arts exhibitions and programs in the Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery are supported, in part, by the Purchase College Foundation and through an endowment from Richard and Dolly Maass.

For more information contact:
Eleanor King, Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery
T 914 251 7885 / eleanor.king [​at​] purchase.edu