MORENCI — Letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy doesn’t consider himself an artist. It’s too stuffy of a word in his opinion.
He does make art, however, insisting that art is something you make that you like.
The fans of his creations have a different opinion of his artistry, with one of them stating that Kennedy is an artist who happens to use letterpress equipment.
Kennedy’s book “Citizen Printer” shows a large sample of the colorful posters he’s created using handset wooden and metal type.
Kennedy will speak at 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, at Morenci’s Stair District Library when the printer visits as part of the Library of Michigan’s Notable Books author tour for 2025.
Printing wasn’t a craft that Kennedy thought much about until he visited Colonial Williamsburg while on vacation and walked into the print shop. He was transfixed.
He says the experience snuck up on him, hit him on the head and dragged him off. At age 40, he left his systems analyst job with AT&T and jumped into a new vocation — one without the guaranteed weekly paycheck.
Leaving behind his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Kennedy earned a master’s of fine arts from the University of Wisconsin, and became a master printer.
“He knows how to print, he just doesn’t always choose to play by the rules,” said Caren Heft of the University of Wisconsin’s Stevens Point branch, speaking in a documentary about Kennedy called “Proceed and Be Bold!”
Although Kennedy was trained as a fine printer, said Clifton Meador of Columbia College in Chicago, he takes letterpress as a point of departure and begins to create. Kennedy turns letterpress printing almost into a fluid medium like painting.
Kennedy, age 74, grew up in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and the Black Nationalism era of the 1970s. He witnessed how this shaped Black identity and uses it for inspiration in the posters and postcards that come off his press. Many of his posters use the words of popular activists and thinkers of the past and present.
Kennedy prefers to describe himself as a “lowly Negro printer” and his posters sometime make people feel uncomfortable.
“He takes the past and he smacks it into the present,” said Gina Ulysse, a professor at the University of California–Santa Cruz. “Deal with it or hide.”
He continues to “agitate for a world that is welcoming and nurturing.”
Kennedy is never happier than when he’s at work in his print shop — currently running the Detroit Branch of the School of Bad Printing — and he offers a short formula for happiness: “Just declare yourself crazy and go off and do what you want to do.”
Visit Stair District Library to view a collection of letterpress equipment from the State Line Observer office, and try your hand at setting some type.