Taft Research Center, University of Cincinnati
This week, I’m visiting Cincinnati as a guest of the Taft Research Center. Their 2025/26 theme—Period—explores how we mark time, structure history, and pace ideas for different audiences. A period can signal an ending, a pause, a boundary, or a cycle. It can condense experience into something understandable, while also hiding what exceeds language or record. When multiplied, the mark becomes an ellipsis—suggesting continuation, omission, breath.
For those of us working in print and community practice, these questions are familiar. Much of our work takes place in the spaces between official narratives: in conversations, workshops, small editions, shared labor, and temporary gatherings. What gets documented? What remains informal but meaningful? What persists through repetition rather than permanence?
A Community Agreement
Conversation with Julia Warner
As part of the visit, I’ll be in conversation with Julia Warner (Creative Director at Cereal Box) about printmaking as a craft and as a method for community engagement and building. Instead of presenting finished projects, we’ll focus on the process—how collaborative work develops over time, how trust is built, and how design can support collective action without overshadowing it.
We’ll discuss recent projects centered on mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, and consider how artists and designers can contribute to what might be called minor archives: small, distributed records of lived experience that rarely enter institutional collections but hold deep cultural memory.
Print functions here not only as an object but also as infrastructure—something that can bring people together, circulate knowledge outside formal channels, and materialize relationships. Whether through publications, workshops, or shared production spaces, the focus remains on building durable networks rather than one-time outcomes.
The format will be conversational, allowing space for questions and exchange. We’re interested in what emerges when audience members bring their own experiences into the room, broadening the discussion beyond our individual practices.
About the Speakers
Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and publisher, and founder of Flatlands Press (2007–present). His work spans experimental printmaking, artist books, collaborative publishing, and mutual aid initiatives.
Julia Warner is Creative Director at Cereal Box, specializing in book design and small-edition publishing with a focus on material experimentation and narrative structure.
Traveling for conversations like this reinforces something we return to often at Flatlands Press: community is not a fixed place but a set of relationships sustained over time. Each gathering becomes both a continuation and a beginning—a small mark in an ongoing sequence.
More soon from Cincinnati.
