There’s an interesting paradox in an exhibition of prints at the Linfield University Art Gallery. The show is modest in size, just a couple dozen pieces by six artists. But many of the works are so large — epic, even — that it would be easy to spend a long visit engaging with a single image.

The show, A Democracy of Multiples: Recent Print Publications from the Studio of Mullowney Printing, opened in October and runs through Nov. 22. It’s a tapestry of the historical context draped behind this knife-edge political moment. Perhaps even more importantly, it stands as a tribute to the power of ink on paper and how that power has functioned as a political tool — and still can.

From the show notes:

The work in the exhibition highlights the important role of print media in our culture to educate and elucidate the public at large. Throughout history, the promulgation of the printed image and word has been an integral part of the forefront of social justice issues. Revolutions and movements were driven by the vision and messaging of artists making work that challenges political norms and authoritarian governments.

Any of the artists whose work is displayed would be a “get” for a gallery’s solo exhibition. All are major artists — with exhibitions, commissions, and gallery representation around the United States — who have been featured in publications including Artforum, Frieze, and The New York Times. To have new work by all six under one roof earns this show the “must-see” label.

Etchings by Detroit-born artist Sandow Birk — along with a spectacular three-panel piece he did with his partner, Elyse Pignolet — dominate the show by virtue of their size. Other artists are Narsiso Martinez, Marie Watt, and Portland’s Demian DinéYazhi’ and Stephen Hayes.

A Democracy of Multiples also showcases the old-school labors of Mullowney Printing. Paul Mullowney opened the fine-art print studio in San Francisco in 2011, collaborating with, among others, Birk, a renowned artist he’s worked with since 2005.

High rents forced Mullowney out a few years ago, and he landed in Oregon on the eve of the pandemic. Out of a 5,000-square-foot studio in Northwest Portland that he operates with his business partner, Pacific Northwest College of Art graduate Harry Schneider, the two — along with a procession of apprentices and resident artists — use technology that dates back to the Gutenberg era, and older.

“A motto I use is, ‘Always fresh, never digital,’” Mullowney said at the opening reception in October. “We don’t do ‘command-print.’”

Visitors will first see Protect the Sacred Voice, a checkerboard collage of 55 aphorisms by DinéYazhi’ in the window. It seems appropriate: In a 2019 interview with Temporary Art Review, the Indigenous Diné artist and queer activist noted that their way into a creative life was through writing, “Poetry was my gateway into creating visual work,” they said.

The multi-font letters in various colors are displayed on hand-set letterpress broadsides, printed on a Japanese mulberry paper called kozo. More on the paper later; here’s some of the text:

WESTERN ART HISTORY IS COLONIAL PROPAGANDA

PALESTINE HAS BECOME THE LENS THROUGH WHICH I SEE THE WORLD

EMPOWER ONE ANOTHER TO EMBRACE REVOLUTION

WHO DO YOU THINK U ARE CENSORING ARTISTS & POETS

ENGLISH IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

DinéYazhi’ is among the artists who landed a residency at Mullowney. Starting in February, as part of the Hallie Ford Fellows Residency Program, they worked on these and several other pieces in the show, including one that was on view at Print Center New York last summer.

A rectangular piece, Landing of the Homophobes (Pilgrims), incorporates all-caps text in a blue font reading HOMOPHOBIC and beneath that, TRANSPHOBIC in letters that are both upside down and reversed, as if seen in a mirror. The text overlays an image in red of a dozen or so pilgrims that vanishes behind the blue lettering. Aside from the political content, the piece illustrates two key aspects of Mullowney Printing’s work.

First, the paper. Landing of the Homophobes (Pilgrims) is a lithograph printed on four panels of kozo paper, which is made from the fibers of a flowering plant native to Asia. Mullowney and his wife were caretakers at a 17^th-century Zen temple in Japan for nine years, and during that time he worked in a print studio and learned about this “gourmet” paper. His crew uses it frequently in the studio, and most of the pieces at the Linfield show use some kind of hand-pressed Japanese paper — both as a surface for printing and as a backing.

“The properties are just a lot different from what we traditionally have used here in the West,” he said. “We’re trying to support this ecosystem of Japanese papermakers.”

The other component is that it takes a village to make these things. Three others besides Mullowney are credited with the printing of Landing of the Homophobes (Pilgrims): Cassie Ferguson, Alyssa Aviles, and Mullowney’s partner, Schneider, who commented on this behind-the-scenes work at the opening reception.

“What you really don’t see here is the amount of labor that goes into making something this big,” he said, referencing one of Martinez’s relief prints of a farmer that’s a bit larger than the DinéYazhi’ lithograph. Photographs of the process may be found at the studio’s website. “Much like glasswork, printmaking is very much a community endeavor, especially when we’re making prints this size. We have teams of three and five apprentices who help make this work.”

Before getting to the largest pieces, a word about the smaller ones.

Watt, a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians who has German-Scot ancestry, has two etchings in the show. One features text encircling a spoon. The other appears to be two rows of dense, fine scribbling so messy you might think it’s an abstract work until you look closer and realize they’re actually signatures. Both, in their way, interrogate the history of racism and violence directed against Indigenous peoples.

A Spoon Is sprung from an actual spoon thought to be made from the silver coins paid to a Seneca family for their land by colonizers. The text reflects on the story and even the history of spoons.

There’s a darker story behind the other work, Nancy Bowen (Reconciliation), in which Watt wrote “Nancy Bowen” with both hands simultaneously. It’s a complicated story, which you can learn about here, but the essentials: Bowen was a Cayuga and Hodinöhsö:ni’ woman from Seneca Nation who was tried for murder in the 1930s and was basically found guilty in the press “for the crime of being Indigenous.”

Similar in size to the Watt images are three landscape monotype prints by Hayes, a painter represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland. They’re from a 40-piece series he did in July titled A Democracy of Images and are printed on Somerset cotton rag paper.

The prints Water, Big River (Colorado), and Spirit House are on the wall to the left as you enter the Linfield art building — difficult to miss, although I always have to remind myself that exhibitions here sometimes spill into the entry hall, and it’s not always obvious that artwork is part of a larger whole. That’s especially true for Hayes’ paintings, which don’t exhibit the obvious political and social content of the rest of the show.

In glass cases farther down the hallway, you’ll see the ingredients for some of the finished artwork: DinéYazhi’s wooden letterpress type, two etched copper plates for each of Watt’s pieces, and five hand-carved woodcut blocks from the show’s largest piece, which took Birk and Pignolet more than year to complete, American Procession. Seeing these meticulously carved materials used to press black ink onto hand-crafted paper deepens  appreciation for the artists’ accomplishments.

This is particularly true of Birk’s four solo pieces, thanks to his inclusion of the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Bill of Rights, and the Seneca Falls Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments of 1848, written mostly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, asserting the equality of women in a patriarchal society. The text, engraved in the surface of enormous imaginary monuments, is only a smidgen larger than what you’d find in a book. Think about it. Birk carved all those sentences backwards.

The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments appears on a piece whose title acknowledges political work that remains. Excavating the Foundation of the Unfinished Temple of Human Rights is a direct gravure copperplate etching printed on Japanese gampi and then backed with Sekishu kozo.  

Three of Birk’s four imaginary monuments include document text; the illustrated Bill of Rights looks like a page ripped from a meticulously drawn graphic novel.

But the fourth piece (no dimensions are given, but I’d be unable to even reach the top edge of it) is all imagery. White Out: A Monumental Arch to American History was inspired by Renaissance-era German painter Albrecht Dürer’s Triumphal Arch, which was commissioned by a German emperor for his palaces. Reportedly one of the largest prints ever produced, it celebrated the ruler’s ancestry, deeds, accomplishments, even his land. For Birk, this was the template for an astonishingly detailed collage of the nation’s history that features only Indigenous, Black, Asian, Filipino, and Latino figures.

The staggering, brutalist structure is topped on the left by athletes Muhammad Ali, Eric Reid, and Colin Kaepernick, framed by the Watts Towers; on the right, Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos pump their fists next to a sculpture of a fist that soars above them.

Beneath them, Birk has assembled nearly 150 individual pictures — some simply a portrait, others illustrating events and the people connected to them. Spend a while perusing this huge sheet of Japanese paper and you’ll learn things.

Some panels focus on individuals, for example, a Black doctor, Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first open heart surgery in Chicago in 1893. Others illustrate historical moments, including the birth of jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, or the fact that there was a sprawling urban center in what is now New Mexico between 800-1300 C.E., built by Indigenous Pueblo and Chaco peoples.

Many panels highlight the arts. My favorite depicts Cuban immigrant Desi Arnez, who  in the 1950s conceived the three-camera sit-com and syndication reruns, basically birthing modern American television.

On the opposite wall, Birk’s American Procession visualizes the political divide in two very long rectangles, each featuring about 60 mostly recognizable figures from American history. On the left, Democratic Party leaders, including Kamala Harris and the Obamas lead a line of marchers ending with Tisquantum (aka Squanto), a Patuxet tribal member and liaison between the Mayflower pilgrims and the region’s Indigenous population. Marchers from the right are led by Donald Trump (Birk and Pignolet created this offset relief woodblock work in 2017), who is framed by a semiautomatic rifle aimed directly ahead and four hands flying up in an Hitlerian salute. The rear of that parade is brought up by Blacks, led in chains.

The centerpiece displays a crumbling arch surrounded by imagery of American decay, violence, and artifice: polluted skies, an electric chair, and a facade of the U.S. Capitol on a wagon, as if it was all just for show.

The exhibition’s four pieces by Oaxacan-born Martinez show the other end of the spectrum from famous people — anonymous farm workers. According to Mullowney’s press notes, the Los Angeles artist works in “a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials [that] makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the ‘American farmworker,’ itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.”

This display includes relief prints Martinez completed during a three-week residency at Mullowney last spring, including one that features him standing with a collection of vegetables, masked and his right fist clenched in the air.

Press notes on Mullowney’s website explain that the print Real Superhero was inspired by James Luna’s Take a Picture with a Real Indian, commissioned by the Whitney Museum in 1991. “In 2023, Martinez created and performed a work titled, Take a Picture with a Real Hero ’…. Similar to Luna’s piece, Martinez presents himself as a tourist attraction, inviting people to take photos with him. Real Superhero addresses issues of identity and stereotypes.”

Mullowney said his company doesn’t exclusively create politically themed work, but when approached by the university, he felt the themes addressed in A Democracy of Multiples were perfect for the zeitgeist.

Their larger mission, he said, is breathing life back into analog.

“We’re well aware that we need to keep these traditions alive,” he said. “I mean, we’re working with 15^th-century technology, and older. There’s definitely a resurgence among young people who gravitate to analog processes, we see that a lot. This generation was born with iPhones in their lives, and creatives are keenly aware that they want to have less of that in their life and more hands-on, tactile work. There’s definitely a huge interest with a lot of young, passionate people; they’re very passionate about it.”