Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community

The graphic arts played a groundbreaking role at Cleveland’s Karamu House, one of the nation’s preeminent Black community art centers. Initially founded as a settlement house in 1915, Karamu House became one of the best-known sites for Black American culture. Although noted today for its theater program, the institution housed a printmaking workshop beginning in the 1930s, where artists and community members alike—including a young Langston Hughes—could experiment with various techniques, playing on printmaking’s fundamental accessibility and democracy. This exploration led to the foundation of Karamu Artists Inc., a group that counted some of the most recognized Black printmakers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era—such as Elmer W. Brown, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles Sallée, and William E. Smith—among its members. While a landmark 1942 traveling exhibition celebrated these printmakers’ expression of collective and personal identity, this exhibition is the first to place Karamu Artists Inc. and its innovative use of the graphic arts within the broader context of American art during the 1930s and ’40s, such as the WPA and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.