It’s an oddly numbered birthday, but Megalo Print Studio in Kingston has decided to celebrate its 45th birthday with an archive exhibition of 63 works as a love letter to the print process and the people who make it.

Megalo, one of the shining lights in the Canberra visual art scene, was founded in 1980 to provide opportunities for unemployed youth through screen-printing posters and has survived through thick and thin since its early days in an old tin shed at Ainslie Village, where I visited it in the late ’80s.

The tongue-in-cheek name Megalo International Screenprint Studio, co-founder Alison Alder says, would become exactly what it says, “a studio used and loved by artists around the world.”

Its emblem, the extinct Megalosaurus, has often been used in its marketing.

The often-radical posters chronicle the activism in the community, whether it be Alder’s own poster advertising an Anzac Day non-violence march by women, a wry poster about the royal romance between Charles and Diana, a depiction of the HIV bus or a poster advertising a play by the long-lost Fools’ Gallery Theatre Company.

It’s all a reminder that Megalo was the go-to place for community art organisations to advertise their wares.

Its reach was considerably augmented in the year 2000 when the famous Studio One intaglio, lithography and relief print studio was incorporated into Megalo along with its equipment, paving the way for Megalo’ s expansion into the international print world, where it now sits comfortably.

After various different homes, it settled into the old government print facility on Wentworth Avenue, Kingston, where it now enjoys a thriving program of international residencies, editioning projects, workshops and exhibitions like the current one, to be opened on Wednesday by the ever-modest Alder.

Present-day CEO and artistic director Clare Jackson, who has been in the top job since last September, took me on a walk-through, sketching both the thematic lines, like a wall of sea-related prints, while explaining in detail of how some of the very complex prints were executed.

The exhibition covers most kinds of print, with some works purely lithographic, some a mixture of screen-printing and woodcut and others involving much more recent technologies.

Quite unintentionally, the show has also turned out to be an art who’s who, with names such as Annie Treveillian, Annie Franklin, Franki Sparke and Dianne Fogwell from the print world showing alongside figures such as Rover Thomas, Ian Abdulla, Richard Larter and Peter McLean from the wider art sphere.

It’s an intriguing insight into one of the most enduring visual forms; one that, because even people on modest incomes can collect it, has become an enduring, magical form of art.

Megalo: 45 years of print, at Megalo Print Studio, until June 8.