ARTIST STATEMENT
I use printmaking to question the assumption that knowledge must be made legible, reproducible, and portable in order to be preserved or valued.
By working within printmaking, a medium deeply connected to the preservation and circulation of recorded knowledge, I use print to examine the limits of its own archival logic. This inquiry is also connected to the historical consequences of privileging written and printed knowledge. Systems that recognize books and archives as authoritative repositories have often devalued or rendered invisible cultures whose knowledge is maintained through oral tradition, land-based practice, embodied experience, and other forms of transmission.The work asks what kinds of knowledge has been lost or devalued when written and printed forms have been treated as the primary measure.
In the late 1800s, a printing press arrived in Aiyansh, British Columbia, Canada, in the Nass River Valley. The man who ordered it from England had never used a printing press. Piece by piece, over many months, he assembled the press, taught himself to use it, and began publishing a newsletter letterpress-printed onto paper. He wrote his newsletter to share news of Aiyansh with people back in his hometown and to teach the people around him his language and ideas. He aimed to change people with information and stories.These same interests first drew me to print media—the legacy and power of the printed object, tactile techniques, and the challenge of combining ideas and images.
My relationship to print changed one day while I was standing in the The State Archive of Siena, Italy, looking at books that were hundreds of years old. Some were unremarkable account books, ordinary records of everyday life, but they had been carefully preserved and passed down for generations.
Standing among these books, I began to think about my Indigenous family in British Columbia. If we had a library, I wondered, where was it? Where were our archives? Where was the physical repository of the knowledge my ancestors had accumulated across generations?
That question fundamentally changed how I understood the medium in which I work. As I expanded my research into the history of print and Indigenous knowledge, I encountered the complicated role that printed materials played in colonial projects. Bibles, catechisms, hymnals, newsletters, dictionaries, and other missionary publications were used to translate and codify Indigenous languages that had previously been primarily oral. These technologies could appear to preserve language while simultaneously removing it from the social, cultural, and geographic relationships in which it lived. In the context of missionary and colonial projects, print and literacy were not neutral technologies: they could participate in the suppression of Indigenous languages, cultural practices, and systems of knowledge.
My ancestor Wilhelmina Derrick was born in the Nass River Valley, BC, she was nine years old when the printing press arrived in the land my family called home. The man with the printing press changed many things in the Nass Valley forever. He was there to spread his religion, and he and others like him systematically damaged my Indigenous family’s culture and knowledge archives.
My practice now considers renewal as a process of reclaiming, reframing, and transforming print's relationship to knowledge. I am not attempting to erase the history of print's role in colonialism, but to work within and against that history, to consider what happens when a form once used to codify and displace knowledge becomes a vehicle for reconnecting with it.
BIOGRAPHY
Amanda Lee is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in printmaking, book arts, and photography. Her images and installations evoke a sense of poetic minimalism, inspired by sacred texts, transcendentalist paintings, and manuscripts. She creates art that investigates the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems with print media and book art theory.
Lee earned an MFA at Indiana University, Bloomington, and was the recipient of the inaugural Virginia A. Myers Visiting Artist / Visiting Assistant Professorship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa. She has presented work internationally in Scotland and Hong Kong and has had several solo exhibitions at SG Gallery in Venice, Italy. Lee was an artist in residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Willapa Bay AIR.
An avid teacher, Lee is Assistant Professor in Painting + Printmaking at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design. She previously held faculty positions at University of Minnesota, Utah State University, the University of Georgia, and University of Arkansas. She has been a visiting artist and taught workshops at Kent State University, Loyola Marymount University, the University of Alberta, and Penland School of Crafts. Lee has received several awards, including an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant and a public art ‘boot-camp’ fellowship and commission from the City of Seattle.
Her family left their traditional home in the Nass River Valley, BC, in the mid-1900s and settled in Seattle, WA, as Urban Indians.
NEWS
FLOW 2.0 Public Art Commission with Seattle Public Utilities
Wallingford, Seattle, WA
Installed Augues of 2026
Fresh Perspectives: Young Curators Shape Seattle’s Art Collection
Seattle, WA, Fall of 2025
https://powerlines.seattle.gov/2025/02/04/fresh-perspectives-young-curators-shape-seattles-art-collection/
Visiting Artist
Oklaholma State University, Stillwater, OK
October, 2025
Curator, Cimarron National Works on Paper Exhibition
Oklaholma State University, Stillwater, OK
August - October, 2025
Whiteley Center Visiting Scholar
Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington, Friday Harbor, WA
Summer, 2024
Event Scores for the End of the World
Seattle Art Book Fair
May 11, 2024
Unverified and Unreasonable
SGCI Conference 2024, Providence, RI
April 6, 2024
Huntington Library Short-term Fellowship Recipient
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles, California
Fall, 2023
Essential Workers: A Visual Narrative
Self Help Graphics and Art, Los Angeles, California
February 25 to March 30, 2023
Blurring the Lines: Exploring the Frontiers of Photography and Printmaking
Remarque Print Workshop & Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico
July 8 to August 28, 2022
Smart Objects / Flattened Images
Well Well Projects, Portland, Oregon
September 3 to 25, 2022
The Feminist Biennial
Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
September 24 to November 5, 2022
Los Angeles Printmaking Society National Exhibition
Mixografia, Los Angeles, California
October 15 to November 12, 2022
Erratics Portfolio
Saltgrass Printmakers, Salt Lake City, Utah
Traveling 2022 to 2024 - https://artsandmuseums.utah.gov/erratics/