Ottawa Grant Revives Lost Printing Art Downtown
A local artist's rare 75-year-old printing press is getting new life thanks to competitive city funding, creating limited-run prints of Ottawa landmarks.
Cody McCallum just landed one of Ottawa's most competitive grants—the Ottawa 200 bicentennial award—and he's using it to do something quietly revolutionary: bring back the art of hand-pulled printing in a city that's mostly forgotten how to do it.
McCallum hunted down a rare 75-year-old printing press, the kind of machine that requires skill, patience, and an almost meditative understanding of pressure and ink. Most people see a printing press as a relic. McCallum sees it as a gateway to something real—something tactile and imperfect in an age of endless digital reproduction. The city gets it too, which is why the Ottawa 200 grant landed in his lap.
This summer, McCallum will release a limited run of prints celebrating Ottawa cultural landmarks. Not tourist posters. Actual art—the kind of work that makes people stop and look because it exists as a physical object, not a screen image. The prints will be sold through a mini vending machine scattered around the city, turning the whole project into a kind of urban art hunt. Walk past the right corner, feed some coins, and you might end up with a piece of the city's story made by hand.
It's the kind of project that reminds you why public arts funding matters. Not everything needs to be scalable or viral to be worth doing.