Nationally-known letterpress printer will give a workshop and lecture on Monday, Nov. 23

Amos Kennedy, a nationally-known letterpress printer who is Longwood University's Bishop Endowed Chair Professor of Art, will give a letterpress poster workshop and lecture Monday, Nov. 23, in Bedford Hall. The workshop will be at 3 p.m. in Bedford 119 and the lecture at 6:30 p.m. in Bedford Auditorium. In the lecture, he will speak about the projects and exhibitions he has been involved in since becoming the Bishop Chair in fall 2007. Kennedy, who lives in rural Alabama, is known for his colorful posters, many of which contain provocative messages about race relations, African-American folklore, the vulnerability of children, and community activism.

Letterpress printing involves printing text with movable type, in which the raised surface of the type is inked and pressed against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. Eventually it was replaced by offset lithographic printing, in which an inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber cylinder, then to the printing surface. "In the last 20 years there's been a revival of letterpress, which has become an art form," said Kennedy, who worked as a computer programmer in the corporate world for 20 years before switching careers. He quit his last such job, for AT&T, two years after seeing a re-enactment of a Colonial printing press in Colonial Williamsburg.

Kennedy is the second person to hold the professorship that honors Barbara Lee Bishop (1939-1991), a 1960 Longwood alumna who taught in the Art Department from 1965 to 1990 and chaired the department for 14 years. The professorship was established through a $1.3 million gift from her mother, Mary H. Bishop of Roanoke, who died in 2000.