Last week I had the privilege of chairing a panel at PRINT: MKE, this year’s gathering of the  Southern Graphic Council International, in Milwaukee, WI. We convened an all-Kansas panel on the theme of “Occupy Art,” designed to bring attention to what’s happening in our state under the current administration. Stephen Goddard, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, provided background on “Printmakers, Free Thinkers, and Other Radicals in Kansas.” Dave Loewenstein spoke on his involvement with the nation-wide Occupy and Occuprint movements, as well as on his agitational protest work about arts funding in Kansas. Ashley Laird shared her recent series of drawings on issues of reproductive rights, as seen in last year’s “Turning Back the C(l)ock” exhibition, and I finished with some brief discussion of the “Art Lives!” exhibition, before we were able to open it up for discussion among audience members, who shared about Occupy work happening in their own states and offered ideas for next steps. In many ways, Wisconsin is in a similar boat as Kansas, and I was excited to learn about on-going creative political collaborations such as the Overpass Light Brigade.