Inkworks Press Archive

Inkworks Press was a worker-owned offset printshop dedicated to providing affordable, quality
printing to community and non-profit organizations 1974-2015.

Inkworks Press 1974-2015
Steven Heller interview 3/25/2016
"Inkworks closes shop after 42 years" Contra Costa Times 2/23/2016
Berkeley's Cheeseboard Collective helps Inkworks in hard times, article 3/26/2014
Trade magazine story on Inkworks and new digital offset press, 2011
Hear the mighty presses! Heidelberg Speedmaster feed end.
Video of Jon-Paul Bail seeing his split fountain poster being printed, 2015

Inkworks poster archive - listed by year

NEW - Visions of Peace and Justice Volume 2 (2008-2015)
Read the afterword, with illustrations - Stansbury Forum

Visions of Peace and Justice

ISBN: 978-0-930712-01-3; Inkworks Press, 2007; $30.

Available through AK Press

Lincoln Cushing,
editor and project archivist

"Professional artists and students of design, historians, sociologists and enthusiasts of poster art, all will go mad over the latest collection of political posters compiled into book form."
review by Mark Vallen, Art for a Change

"...More than stimulating illustrations. It is evidence of the power of political art and the role the political poster has played over the past several decades. It is a testament to a collective of individuals who have dedicated themselves to the movement for social change."
review by Jen Angel, In These Times

"This is more than a political art book, it is a political SOURCE book because artists, and not only self-consciously radical ones, can study it, absorb the parts that interest them and that they find useful. If I happened to be thinking of a gift book for the holidays now months ahead, this may well be the one that I would choose."
review by Paul Buhle, Monthly Review

"On it’s own, simply as history, Visions is an important contribution to a body of culture that is marginalized or dismissed by the art-for-profit establishment and it’s insipid gallery system. The book is also a compelling visual history of our class – capturing the spirit of living movements in a way that cannot happen through a history text alone.

Beyond that, the book is a tribute to the determination and vision of Inkworks itself.... It is an outstanding model of how artists and activists can join together to create a power that is far greater than the sum of its individuals.

We are bombarded with electronic images – awash in a slick and mediated popular culture that lies and pacifies. That is why the directness of the poster, mural, street theater or other agitprop art is more powerful and more important than ever. One look at these graphics reveals why art is feared by bosses and bureaucrats."

-Mike Alewitz, Associate Professor, Central CT State University

Visions of Peace & Justice is a full color book containing over 500 reproductions of political posters from the archives of Inkworks Press. Inkworks is a worker cooperative, union shop, green business in Berkeley, California started in 1974.

During the 30+ years of Inkwork’s history, the shop has functioned as a pillar of the progressive community in the Bay Area providing printing services including discounts and donations to social movements, community groups, and non-profits. This unique position has allowed Inkworks to accumulate a comprehensive and fascinating archive of beautiful political posters that have been printed on its presses compiled for the first time ever in this important historical document.

Whether it’s the American Indian Movement, Latin American Solidarity campaigns, Women‘s Liberation, community-based struggles against environmental racism, the current efforts to end the war in Iraq, or a broad range of other post-1960s US social movements, Visions of Peace & Justice records it all through the timeless powerful art of the poster.

Chapters:
Internationalism & Peace, Labor Movement, Racial Justice, Women’s Liberation, Queer Liberation, Environment & Public Health, Elections & Reforms, Arts & Culture

Essays by David Bacon, Lincoln Cushing, Angela Davis, Anuradha Mittal, Carol Wells, and others.

Docs Populi - Documents for the Public -

Updated 4/23/2021