OUR HISTORY
WePress Community Arts Space Society (WEPRESS) was founded in 2016 by a group of long-time artists, collaborators and community organizers, in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver on the ancestral unceded and occupied traditional territories of the Xmuthqueyem, Skwxwu7mesh and selilwitulh Peoples. These artists began our organization with a collective operating model. While this collective leadership was meant to be unconventional, and remove hierarchies, as of 2024 we’ve transitioned to more defined roles and a co-directorship model to create clearer accountability and working processes.
The goal of our founding collective was to create a dedicated space for arts-based community development where local artists in Vancouver’s DTES and Chinatown neighbourhoods could access space, equipment, and training. WePress began in the Sun Wah Centre in Chinatown, with the support of Gallery Gachet, Community Arts Council of Vancouver (CACV), and the Vancouver Foundation. We were able to acquire hard-to-access equipment, including the historic Woodwards letterpress and type collection, sold to us by CACV for $1 in 2017, and a 3D printer. In November 2017, WePress moved to the ground floor of the Beacon Hotel with Gallery Gachet, under a lease with BC Housing (now Community Impact Real Estate).
Over the years, we expanded our art workshops and training, and developed projects built by and for the participants from the neighbourhood. This includes working to reduce barriers and offering a welcoming environment for the communities we serve. This is done through measures like physical accessibility considerations, language interpretation, meals or snacks, free/low-cost and culturally relevant art education, person-to-person outreach, as well as carefully considered partnerships with organizations and groups that have existing meaningful relationships with individuals we wish to reach within the DTES.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marked a significant turning point for our organization, prompting us to develop innovative approaches to arts accessibility. We created our Art Kit program, distributing arts supplied with artists-created instructional zines directly to community members, and began a project now called the Radical Care Residencies, to support artists experiencing economic precarity.
Since then, we have refined and expanded all these initiatives, reaching over 5000 DTES community members throughout various programs over the years.
Today, WePress is led by a team of two directors: Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa (Creative Development Director), veto monteiro (Artistic Engagement Director), and a Communications and Outreach Manager, Semillites Hernández Velasco. WePress continues to evolve while remaining deeply committed to our founding vision of creating and nurturing art spaces for those systematically denied opportunities to meet their own survival and fulfillment needs.