ABSTRACT
Once home to both the Talon Zipper Company and a thriving tool-and-die industry, Meadville experiences all the human tensions stemming from its depressed housing market, aging population, and out-migration of young people from the community where the state has become the major employer. The town thus stands witness to tangible and intangible wounds signifying the accumulating pressures of historical and personal grief. At Allegheny College, another major community employer, professor and artist Steve Prince was looking for a way to use the process of art to bring people together across the town-and-gown divide that produces some of the tensions—creative and otherwise—informing many college communities. In a presentation to the Meadville Neighborhood Center, Prince proposed the idea of The Big Zipper. It is a massive woodblock print collaboration that uses Meadville's zipper and tool history as a metaphor for community connectedness. It performs the art of drawing renewal from loss, and establishes a foundation for building a sustainable community that nurtures the individual in the context of the group.
