Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Movable type: Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. gathers community voices with his letterpress

It was freezing cold, slick, and raining sideways the fall night that letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. spoke about his work at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

It was a small crowd, maybe due to the weather, says Maggie Guggenheimer, director of external relations for Virginia Humanities, who helped bring Kennedy to town. But those who attended experienced firsthand what Guggenheimer calls Kennedy’s “radical generosity.”

At the end of the talk, Kennedy, wearing his signature uniform of denim overalls and a pink button-down shirt, looked around the room and paused. “Wait,” he said. “I think I have enough posters with me that I can give one to everyone here.”

Kennedy hurried through the rain to his nearby hotel room, and returned 10 minutes later with his suitcase; then he handed a brightly colored letterpress poster to each person in the room.

Kennedy is the first recipient of a one-month artist residency sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Book. Last week, he packed his van full of printed posters inspired by the folks he met here in November, and drove from his Detroit workshop to Charlottesville.

Throughout the month of March, he’ll lead free printmaking workshops, talks, and poster installations throughout the area, while getting to know the community, and getting the community to know itself, through the power of words.

Kennedy got into letterpress printing about 30 years ago when, on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg with his sons, he saw a print shop demonstration. “I was fascinated by it,” says Kennedy, who’d been interested in calligraphy for a number of years. When he got back to Chicago (where his family was living at the time), Kennedy found a place that taught letterpress printing.

“I took two courses that altered my whole life,” says Kennedy, who worked a corporate job at the time. Printing became his hobby, a visible accomplishment that he shared with others by handing poems and broadsides out to strangers he passed on the street. People enjoyed the gesture, which made Kennedy happy.

He now makes his living selling hand-printed posters for $25 apiece (though he gives plenty of them away, too). That’s how much he could afford to pay for one, he says, “and if I can’t afford my stuff, who can? Rich people got folk making art for them all the time,” but it’s rare that the average person has access to an affordable, original piece of art.

Through printing, Kennedy, now 70, discovered more about himself (such as the fact that money and material possessions do not make him happy), and along the way, he’s learned quite a bit about how this work helps build community.

Kennedy uses wood type—big, stylized letters—and bold, bright colors to press aphorisms, proverbs, maxims, and short quotes onto paper; the effect is eye-catching. And when he holds community workshops, he lets the attendees—the barbers, the students, the teachers, everyone who’s in the room, regardless of their perceived social status or standing—print the words that matter to them.

When people see the printed words, they start talking, says Kennedy. “They chuckle. They become reflective,” they open up to each other, to themselves.

“Overall in this civilization, the idea of community has fallen; we do not look upon community in the way we once did,” says Kennedy. “It’s time for us to bring back the idea of community. And to have a community, it has to be created and maintained. You don’t inherit it.” Community will fall apart if not properly tended, he adds. And that tending can look like a lot of things, from attending City Council meetings to going to a concert, or hanging a poster of your neighbor’s favorite saying.

In his Charlottesville residency, Kennedy is working with a number of community groups, including public schools, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Virginia, the Getting Word: African American Families of Monticello oral history project, public libraries, and local galleries New City Arts Initiative and Second Street, both of which will hold printmaking events that are open to everyone.

Posters will appear in Charlottesville and Albemarle high schools, Reid’s Super-Save Market, the downtown Mudhouse, Monticello Visitors Center, and local storefronts, to name a few. Some of the chosen phrases are funny (“Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth,” reads one currently on view at the Mudhouse), while others are encouraging (“Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind”), and instructive (“Virginians: Know Your History”).

“It’s all about words, the power of words,” says Guggenheimer, who met Kennedy during his 2018 residency at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art, where he worked with Richmond-area barbershop and salon owners to create posters for their shops.

“With the various wounds and questions our community will be considering for a long time,” says Guggenheimer, it’s imperative to engage the entire community in meaningful conversation through “accessible, welcoming opportunities,” and Kennedy’s workshops are just that.

“Creativity is a universal trait of humanity. It is special, but it is not special exclusive; it’s special because it’s inclusive,” he says. And in facilitating just one simple act that many people can do together, Kennedy encourages recognition of the creativity within ourselves so that we can recognize it in others.

Vaughan’s passing: Visionary founder of Virginia Humanities remembered

Rob Vaughan, founder of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, died March 6 at age 74, after a rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to his obituary. He leaves behind the largest, best-funded, and what a colleague calls “the gold standard” of humanities organizations in the country.

When then-UVA president Edgar Shannon tapped Vaughan, an English teacher working on his Ph.D., to explore starting a new humanities organization in 1974, he chose a man with an uncanny ability to connect the stories of all of Virginia’s communities, and to underscore the importance of those stories.

Kevin McFadden, chief operating officer of what is now called Virginia Humanities, describes Vaughan as a “builder” who “knew how to create the invisible structures that gather and unite people for a common purpose.”

McFadden worked with Vaughan for 17 years, starting out at the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is now in its 25th year and was Vaughan’s favorite program of the many created during his tenure.

Besides the better-known programs like the book fest, Encyclopedia Virginia, radio shows “With Good Reason” and “Backstory,” and the Virginia Folklife Program, the foundation supported thousands of projects, some that became institutions in their own right, such as the Moton Museum in Farmville, American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU. Those organizations were helped by grants “at a critical moment that helped each one flourish on its own,” says McFadden.

Vaughan wooed Sarah McConnell away from WINA in 1999 to host “With Good Reason,” and he took copies of the show, which interviews leading scholars, to listen to when he traveled, she says.

Every year, Vaughan delivered a lecture to the General Assembly on the history of the legislature going back to the House of Burgesses, she says. “He was not political, but he knew all Virginia lawmakers across the aisle.” And that, she says, helped achieve a “more diverse Virginia.”

McConnell describes Vaughan’s style as “entrepreneurial. He never said ‘no’ to a new program.”

Donna Lucey, author of Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, works on Encyclopedia Virginia. She also calls Vaughan an entrepreneur and says he encouraged that among his staff, and gave them plenty of autonomy. “If they had a great idea, he’d let them go for it.”

Lucey, however, saw Vaughan as “a consummate politician walking the halls of the General Assembly where he knew everyone.” In 2017, the legislature passed a resolution honoring Vaughan.

“He had that Old World demeanor,” says Lucey. “I never saw a hair out of place. Even if he wore jeans, they were pressed.”

“I want to grow up to be like Rob,” says writer Earl Swift, who wrote three books as a foundation fellow, most recently Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.

“He was smart, empathetic, generous, and elegant—a man with a hungry mind, coupled with a profound faith that the ties that bind us, as a country and as people, are vitally important subjects of study, exposition, and support,” says Swift. “There was nothing fussy about his advocacy: He saw stories worth telling among Virginians of every walk of life, and every imaginable circumstance.”

With Vaughan, it always comes back to the stories—and to books. He was in a book group of men for over 40 years.

Observes McConnell, “He was really at base a shy preacher’s kid who loved books.”

A memorial service will be held at 1pm Wednesday, March 13, at Westminster Presbyterian Church.

“I want to grow up to be like Rob.” Writer Earl Swift