Annual Appeal

Annual Appeal 

kerry davis 
director, cleveland print room
December 2025

Recently, a friend asked me a question that continues to surface in my mind:

"Why give to the arts right now, when there is the threat of hunger, fear, and deep fracture? When so many Clevelanders are struggling and disenfranchised? Why Cleveland Print Room in a moment like this?"

It is a real question. 

I return often to the images that have shaped our collective understanding of who we are and who we might still become: the suffragettes marching in white down Pennsylvania Avenue;

Singer Marian Anderson juxtaposed the Lincoln Memorial in defiance of exclusion; Dorothea Lange’s portrait of a mother and her children during the Depression; the sanitation workers in Memphis holding signs that declaring  I AM A MAN; the steelworkers balanced on a beam high above New York;  Emmett Till’s open casket; Birmingham in 1963, the students at Kent State in the aftermath of gunfire; the raised fists on the Olympic podium in 1968; the lone protester standing before tanks in Tiananmen Square; and so many others.

Lens-based media shaped the 20th century and continues to shape our sense of reality.

They did not solve our problems. But they moved us. Together. They hollered out the truth when many were committed to ignoring words. They pushed us to see one another. 

It remains one of the most democratic tools we have. In a time when our attention is compromised, the simple act of looking closely, slowly, and together is a reckoning of its own. 

Teaching young people to document their streets, their families, their joy and their struggle is a way of preparing them to participate fully in civic life. Providing artists and neighbors with equitable access to the means of making images is an act of faith: that their stories matter, that they belong to our shared future, and that the archive of who we are will include all of us. 

We tell these stories so that we can live. And we will live to tell these stories. 

Cleveland Print Room has spent this past year doing that work, with burgeoning permanent space and an immovable sense of purpose. We have convened, created, and opened new doors where we could, and carved them out where we couldn’t.

We have continued to honor the image as a tool of democracy and a vessel for imagination. We have done it because we believe that culture is not a luxury reserved for calm times, it is a lifeline in chaotic ones. And artists must continue to make and have voices. It is critical. 

You believe this work matters. If you believe images to move us toward compassion and perhaps even righteous indignation, to help us clarify and reevaluate our own worldviews.  I invite you to support CPR’s annual fund. 

Your gift is not just to a building project or a program. It is an investment in the people who are learning to look bravely at the world and to shape it with integrity and artistry. It is a stand for access, for equity, for beauty, and for the enduring power of truth. 

We are grateful for every person who chooses to build this with us. Thank you for standing alongside us, especially now. 

Resolute,

kerry
director, cleveland print room