Ladies, Ladies, Ladies. Second Edition, 2024. Risograph reproduction of the original letterpress zine with a new introduction.

In 2022 I was setting up for women’s history month workshop at the International Printing Museum where participants could use antique wood type to create an empowering message for women. I thought it might be fun to go through the museum’s collection and see how many cuts of women I could find to use as visual elements in the posters. Unfortunately, what I found in the collection was the opposite of empowering. Most of the cuts were made for commercial use between the 50s and 60s, possibly earlier, and almost exclusively depicted white housewives.

We did NOT end up using the lady cuts in the workshop but the ladies continued to haunt me. I went back into the collection and pulled out every woman I could find who was on her own or doing an activity without a man. I locked them up in a press, used different fonts of metal type to write LADIES over and over, and then letterpress printed it. It was an interesting exercise in ruminating on how commercial art historically interpreted gender but it’s also a silly little zine with a bunch of disembodied ladies.

First Edition, 2022

Letterpress printed single sheet zine with metal type and antique cuts.