About The Art

Meet-the-Artist Reception: February 15, 2025 from 1-3pm

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. was born in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1950. He is an American printer, book artist, and papermaker best known for social and political commentary, particularly in printed posters.

Kennedy obtained a BS in Mathematics in 1972 from Grambling State University in Louisiana.

He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison,where he studied under legendary book designer Walter Hamady and earned an MFA in 1997. He later taught graphic design at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University.

From an early age, Kennedy was interested in letters and books and studied calligraphy for several years. At the age of 40, Kennedy visited Colonial Williamsburg, a Virginia living history museum, and was mesmerized by an 18th century print shop and book bindery demonstration. The incident so influenced him that he studied printing at a community-based letterpress shop in Chicago, and within a year, quit his AT&T systems analyst job, which he had held for nearly two decades, to continue printmaking studies. 

Kennedy creates prints, posters, and postcards from handset wood and metal type, oil-based inks, and eco-friendly and affordable chipboard. Many of the posters are inspired from proverbs, and quotes Kennedy locates or quotes that potential clients provide.

Having grown up during the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s, Kennedy saw the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1970s, and now living in the Post-Civil Rights era, Kennedy has seen how these have shaped Black identity and has used these as inspiration in his work. His work is a blend of social commentary, folk art, and graphic design, creating resonant pieces that challenge traditional boundaries of art and politics. Kennedy isn’t afraid to push the boundaries and uses large graphic typography, bold colors and language that catch the eye and inspires others in the design field. 

Kennedy is known to use the words of popular activists like Rosa Parks and peaceful protests like the Selma to Montgomery marches to illustrate the names of lost lives during these movements. The words themselves are central to Kennedy’s work, serving not just as visuals but to convey messages that are thought-provoking and sometimes confrontational. 

Using hand presses, he produces large editions of wildly colorful typographically driven posters of inexpensive chipboard stock, posters which are often so riotously layered with vibrant colors of ink as to retain a wet iridescence and tackiness years after they are printed. His working method often involves overprinting multiple layers of text resulting in no two prints being truly identical.

The unevenness of the printing process, where some letters appear more faded or offset than others, becomes part of the aesthetic and conveys a sense of human imperfection, struggle, and resilience. This imperfect quality also adds a layer of emotional depth to his prints, which suggests that social issues cannot be neatly resolved or erased.

His work has been exhibited at a range of museums, galleries, and libraries, including the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in addition to others.

Archival Collections:

CATEGORIES: Exhibition

DATE: February 2, 2025 - March 30, 2025

LOCATION: Segall Print Gallery (Butler North)

RECEPTION: February 15th, 2025, 1:00pm—3:00pm