c9 – Contemporary Printmaking brings together artists from Missouri and its 8 bordering states whose practices are shaped by the landscapes, histories, and communities of the central United States. Grounded in a region defined by labor, agriculture, industry, and migration, the works in this exhibition use printmaking to reflect on how place informs identity and lived experience.

Printmaking’s core qualities of reproduction, layering, and circulation serve as powerful tools for examining regional narratives that are often overlooked or fragmented. Through traditional, digital, and hybrid processes, the artists engage with cultural memory, vernacular imagery, and personal histories tied to specific geographies. Repetition and variation echo the rhythms of the region itself, where patterns of land use, social structures, and storytelling recur across time and state lines.

Together, the works in c9 assert printmaking as a connective practice that bridges rural and urban experiences, past and present, and individual and collective histories. The exhibition highlights how contemporary printmakers rooted in this region expand the medium while giving form to the complex, evolving identity of the Midwest and its surrounding states.