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Graphic Liberation is an exhibition and poster-making workshop which highlights the role of graphic design in international social change movements, including civil and gender rights, labor, AIDS, punk, hip-hop, and other movements. The exhibition and workshop are organized and developed by Josh MacPhee, internationally renowned designer, design historian, and founder of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Interference Archive, and the journal, Signal.
The goal of the exhibition and workshop is to destabilize popular myths in the history of design that valorize individual authorship and novelty at the expense of contributions made by social movements that are grounded in collaboration and collective action. It counters the dominant narrative by demonstrating how graphic ideas circulate across grassroots movements and evolve through a horizontal network of exchange that often involves copying, iterating, and evolving common symbols and imagery for use in international contexts and struggles.
Included in the exhibition are a selection of books and materials from Fenwick Library and Provisions Research Center for Arts & Social Change.
Learn more on the Mason Exhibitions website.
Adjusted Margin: xerography, art, and activism in the late twentieth century by
How xerography became a creative medium and political tool, arming artists and activists on the margins with an accessible means of making their messages public. This is the story of how the xerographic copier, or "Xerox machine," became a creative medium for artists and activists during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Paper jams, mangled pages, and even fires made early versions of this clunky office machine a source of fear, rage, dread, and disappointment. But eventually, xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, street activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street. The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements. Eichhorn describes early efforts to use xerography to create art and the occasional scapegoating of urban copy shops and xerographic technologies following political panics, using the post-9/11 raid on a Toronto copy shop as her central example. She examines New York's downtown art and punk scenes of the 1970s to 1990s, arguing that xerography--including photocopied posters, mail art, and zines--changed what cities looked like and how we experienced them. And she looks at how a generation of activists and artists deployed the copy machine in AIDS and queer activism while simultaneously introducing the copy machine's gritty, DIY aesthetics into international art markets. Xerographic copy machines are now defunct. Office copiers are digital, and activists rely on social media more than photocopied posters. And yet, Eichhorn argues, even though we now live in a post-xerographic era, the grassroots aesthetics and political legacy of xerography persists.
After Silence by
Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, six gay activists created one of the most iconic and lasting images that would come to symbolize a movement: a protest poster of a pink triangle with the words "Silence = Death." The graphic and the slogan still resonate today, often used--and misused--to brand the entire movement. Cofounder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art collective Gran Fury, Avram Finkelstein tells the story of how his work and other protest artwork associated with the early years of the pandemic were created. In writing about art and AIDS activism, the formation of collectives, and the political process, Finkelstein reveals a different side of the traditional HIV/AIDS history, told twenty-five years later, and offers a creative toolbox for those who want to learn how to save lives through activism and making art.
Against the Wall by
This stunning book of photographs captures the graffiti and art that have transformed Israel’s wall into a living canvas of resistance and solidarity. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Featuring the work of artists Banksy, Ron English, Blu, and others, as well as Palestinian artists and activists, these photographs express outrage, compassion, and touching humor. They illustrate the wall’s toll on lives and livelihoods, showing the hardship it has brought to tens of thousands of people, preventing their access to work, education, and vital medical care. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Mixed with the images are portraits and vignettes, offering a heartfelt and inspiring account of a people determined to uphold their dignity in the face of profound injustice.
Agitate! Educate! Organize! by
"We seek to inform as well as to celebrate. The best posters about American workers and the jobs at which they labor make up a visually fascinating body of work that rewards our attention. The posters were produced with a dual purpose: to entertain and to inform. They were also vehicles for working people to present themselves visually, which is rarely as straightforward as it might seem because the labor force itself is not monolithic. Nor are the posters about just paid or wage labor. They repeatedly demonstrate that labor issues include both the workplace and the outside community and often portray families and neighbors, not just fellow workers."--from Agitate! Educate! Organize! In Agitate! Educate! Organize!, Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher share their vast knowledge about the rich graphic tradition of labor posters. Lavish full-color reproductions of more than 250 of the best posters that have emerged from the American labor movement ensure that readers will want to return again and again to this visually fascinating treasury of little-known images from the American past. Some of the posters were issued by government programs and campaigns; some were devised by unions as recruiting tools or strike announcements; others were generated by grassroots organizations focused on a particular issue or group of workers--all reveal much about the diverse experiences of working people in the United States.American labor posters are widely scattered, difficult to locate, and rarely archived. Cushing and Drescher examined several thousand such images in the course their research, guaranteeing a truly representative selection. The presentation of the posters is thematic, with a brief history of activist graphic media followed by chapters on Dignity and Exploitation; Health and Safety; Women; Race and Civil Rights; War, Peace and Internationalism; Solidarity and Organizing; Strikes and Boycotts; Democracy, Voting, and Patriotism; History, Heroes, and Martyrs; and Culture. Along with the stunning color images, the text contributes to a much deeper understanding of the politics, history, artistry, and impact of this genre of activist art and the importance of the labor movement in the transformation of American society over the course of the twentieth century. For more information about this book, visit www.docspopuli.org/ArtWorks.html.
Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate by
After successfully agitating for the vote for women from the 1890s, Protestant women's organisations in Australia began to educate women at a grassroots level on effective ways of applying political pressure on a wide range of topics and social concerns. Positioning their organisations as non-party-political and separate from more overtly feminist groups, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Mothers' Union attracted women who were keen to work for change, and who were seeking to 'save' the individual as well as the greater society. These three organisations sought to agitate on a wide range of issues related to girls and women, connecting with public anxieties and highlighting particular vulnerabilities of girls and young women who lived alone in the city and had the potential to be exploited in the workforce. By the 1920s and 1930s these women's groups noted with concern the easier access to divorce and birth control in the Soviet Union and the growing influence of both Communism and 'Hitlerism' in galvanising young people. Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate explores the colourful debates and anxieties that were prevalent from the 1890s to the 1930s and the responses of the key women's organisations whose leadership and campaigns acknowledged that--outside of parliament and party politics--women's connection to political matters could be both innovative and socially influential.
Art and Social Change by
The relationship between art and social and political change is not only a highly topical area of current debate, it is also fundamental to the history of modern art. This volume gathers together for the first time the essential texts that have defined this area since the late nineteenth century. Using primary sources, case studies, and new commissions, Art and Social Change provides an overview of the historical development of art with ideas of social and political change, from utopian imaginings to active engagement. Incorporating artists’ writings and public statements, as well as critical and theoretical texts, the volume also highlights developments outside established Western art history.
Articulating Resistance by
The disciplinary understandings of contemporary Indian art are being challenged in our time by experiences, narratives, and strategies designated as activism. Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism explores this space between art and activism without letting the discourse being reduced either to a simple formulation about art in activism or activism in art. The focus, instead, is on interrogating the politics of aesthetics as well as the connections between the visual and other disciplines. Deriving its insights from methodological moves made in the fields of art history/criticism, culture studies, and visual culture, the book foregrounds the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the public world trying to bridge, in the process, the space that reaches across the academy and all that is known as activism in our time. The different sections in the book explore the complex relationship between art-producing practices and frameworks of viewing that seek alignment with the various struggles around caste, community, gender, and sexuality.
The Art of Protest by
A comprehensive introduction to the culture of progressive movements in the United States.
Beauty Is in the Street by
In May 1968, thousands of workers and students took to the streets of Paris, provoking an unprecedented wave of strikes, walkouts and demonstrations. The confrontations between police and protesters led to a general strike of eleven million workers that brought the country to a virtual standstill and nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle's government. The faculty and student body of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were among the strikers, and a number of the students met spontaneously in the college's lithographic department to produce the first poster of the revolt, which bore the declaration "Usines, Universit s, Union" ("Factories and universities unite," loosely translated). From this initiative was born the Atelier Populaire (or "popular workshop" ), a collective of print shops that produced hundreds of posters to encourage the protestors and to report on police brutality. These posters included many of the often Situationist-inspired mottos for which May '68 is remembered today, such as "Be young and shut up" and "return to normal" (accompanied by a picture of a herd of sheep). Beauty Is in the Street reproduces more than 200 of these posters in full color, which have since become landmarks in political art and graphic design. Also included is a thumbnail index of an additional 411 posters; a wealth of archival documentary photographs and new translations of firsthand accounts of the clashes between the students and strikers and the police, many published in English for the first time; and an introduction by Philippe Verm s, one of the founders of the Atelier Populaire.
British Posters: advertising, art and activism by
Drawing on the V&A's wide-ranging poster collection, this book traces the evolution of the poster in the hands of graphic designers and fine artists, advertising agencies, and countercultural groups in Britain since 1945. The range spans "Keep Britain Tidy" campaigns, lavishly produced Benson & Hedges billboards, punk-rock posters, hand-printed indictments of Margaret Thatcher, and public art projects on the Underground. From conflicts over the content and control of public space to posters tacked to bedroom walls, Catherine Flood examines how the poster in Britain has adapted itself to a changing technological environment and defied predictions of its demise.
But Is It Art? by
In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this book, Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples.She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying state-of-the-art web sites, along with cutting-edge research onthe brain's role in perceiving art.This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and should prove an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art.
But Is It Art? by
Nonfiction. Art. Activisim. Criticism and Theory. An anthology that explores the rise of activist public art that agitates for social change. Included are discussions of such leading and controversial artists as: the Guerrilla Girls, Gran Fury, Group Material, Women's Action Coalition, and the Artist and Homeless Collaborative.
Celebrate People's History by
The best way to learn history is to visualise it! Since 1998, Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over 100 posters by over 80 artists that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women's rights, queer liberation, labour struggles and creative activism. These essential moments are presented as a visual tour through decades and across continents, from the perspective of some of the most interesting and socially engaged artists working today. Includes work by Cristy Road, Swoon, Nicole Schulman, Christopher Cardinale, Sabrina Jones, Eric Drooke and Klutch.
Communist Posters by
From images of Vladimir Lenin promising "Land to the peasants!" to those of Mao Zedong declaring the Cultural Revolution, communist regimes have relied on powerful--and often beautifully wrought--artwork to ensure the successes of their revolutions. Because of their ease of distribution, posters in particular have figured as central vehicles of propaganda in nearly every communist nation. In this book, Mary Ginsberg offers the first truly global survey of the history and variety of communist poster art. Enriched with essays by several experts in a variety of regions, this collection showcases an extraordinary variety of communist art coming from the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and several countries in Eastern Europe. Together they show how effectively posters were used as tools of mobilization, instruction, censure, debate, and manipulation of public thought and opinion. As this collection shows, posters were used not only to promote the authority of the state and its revolutionary ideals, they were also used as a means of revolutionary protest and ways of warning against the dangers of other political regimes, such as Nazism. By their nature, these posters are ephemeral, tied to time, place, and specific events, but many have had far-reaching and long-lasting impact, in no small part due to the astonishing craft and beauty they display. In fact, many of these posters have eventually found their way into museums, due to the strength of their designs. Beautifully arrayed, the posters in this collection offer a comprehensive look at the broad range of visual works that have both expressed and fueled one of the most powerful political ideas of the modern era.
The Continuum Encyclopedia of Symbols by
Identifies the symbolic meaning of over one thousand numbers, letters, astrological symbols, alchemical terms, plants, animals, places, shapes, images, and designs.
Cultures of Violence by
Investigating art practitioners' responses to violence, this book considers how artists have used art practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence. It explores the strategies that artists have deployed to expose physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means. It examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected art interventions and how visual arts can open up critical spaces to explore violence without reinforcement or recuperation. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. Contributors respond to three questions: how can political violence be understood or interpreted through art? How are publics understood or identified? How are art interventions designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and how are they constrained by them? They discuss violence in the everyday and at state level: the Watts' Rebellion and Occupy, repression in Russia, domination in Hong Kong, the violence of migration and the unfolding art activist logic of the sigma portfolio. Asking how public debates can be shaped through the visual and performing arts and setting taboos about violence to one side, the volume provides an innovative approach to a perennial issue of interest to scholars of international politics, art and cultural studies.
David King: designer, activist, visual historian by
Exploring an unjustly overlooked figure in 20th-century British visual culture. This book offers a comprehensive overview to the work and legacy of David King (1943-2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain's Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism. He developed a particular interest in revolutionary Russia and began amassing a collection of graphic art and photographs--ultimately accumulating around 250,000 images that he shared with news outlets. Throughout his life, King blended political activism with his graphic design work, creating anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi posters, covers for books on Communist history, album artwork for The Who and Jimi Hendrix, catalogues on Russian art and society for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and typographic covers for the left-wing magazine City Limits. This well-researched and finely illustrated publication ties together King's accomplishments as a visual historian, artist, journalist, and activist.
Design As Democracy by
Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Book Award. How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table, we open up the possibility of exchanging ideas meaningfully and transforming places powerfully. Collaboration like this is hands-on democracy in action. It's up close. It's personal. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, Design as Democracy shows how to design with communities in empowering and effective ways. The flow of the book's nine chapters reflects the general progression of community design process, while also encouraging readers to search for ways that best serve their distinct needs and the culture and geography of diverse places. Each chapter presents a series of techniques around a theme, from approaching the initial stages of a project, to getting to know a community, to provoking political change through strategic thinking. Readers may approach the book as they would a cookbook, with recipes open to improvisation, adaptation, and being created anew. Design as Democracy offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.
The Design of Dissent, Expanded Edition by
The Design of Dissent is a global collection of socially and politically driven graphics on issues including Black Lives Matter, Trump protests, refugee crises, and the environment.
Fear, Reverence, Terror by
We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy!, scaring us, dazzling us. Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso's Guernica, the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David's Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political--an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question. Praise for Ginzburg "Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity."--London Review of Books "Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound."--Publisher's Weekly
Getting up for the People by
Getting Up for the People tells the story of the Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca (ASARO) by remixing their own images and words with curatorial descriptions. Part of a long tradition of socially conscious Mexican art, ASARO gives respect to Mexican national icons; but their themes are also global, entering contemporary debates on issues of corporate greed, genetically modified organisms, violence against women, and abuses of natural resources. In 2006 ASARO formed as part of a broader social movement, part of which advocated for higher teachers' salaries and access to school supplies. They exercised extralegal means to "get up," displaying their artwork in public spaces. ASARO stands out for their revitalizing remix of collective social action with modern conventions in graffiti, traditional processes in Mexican printmaking, and contemporary communication through social networking. Now they enjoy international recognition as well as state-sanctioned support for their artists' workshops. They use their notoriety to teach Oaxacan youth the importance of publicly expressing and exhibiting their perspectives on the visual landscape.
Graphic Agitation by
From the revolutionary Sixties to the present day, this book explores the many ways graphic art and design have addressed social and political issues. The book covers a broad range of subject areas including war, peace, national politics, ecology, health, civil rights and sexual politics. It features the work of some of the world's best known personalities and studios, such as Grapus in France, Klaus Staeck in Germany, Seymour Chwast in the USA and Wild Plakken in Holland, as well as the powerful graphics of anonymous protest. Images of anger and emotion, humour and satire appear throughout, as symbols of power, peace and persuasion.
Graphic Agitation 2 by
Graphic Agitation 2, a follow-up volume to the hugely successful Graphic Agitation, is a survey of social and political graphics since the early 1990s. It illustrates and contextualizes work produced in relation to key themes such as environmental movements, the rise of corporate power, identity branding, wars (in the Balkans and the Gulf War) and human rights - all of which have been prominent news items over the last few years. The graphic design projects discussed in this book are all of the 'digital age' but they are not all digital-based. The author deals with the impact of digital innovations on traditional methods of social and political protest, and also looks at how they work together. This innovative mix of media is both appealing and informative. The medium in which the work is created is often central to the political aim - for example, web-based for rapid dissemination of ideas worldwide or simple ink and paper when the conditions (e.g. times of war) demand it. This book is heavily illustrated with a combination of the most up-to-date digital media - such as screen grabs from interactive websites - and traditional methods, such as images of protesters demonstrating about road building with hand-drawn postcards and T-shirts. The visuals help the reader to understand the themes covered and also to reinforce them: some of the images are provocative, some are witty, and others highly informative. While this is a book for people working in visual media, it is equally appealing to any reader interested in the subjects discussed with its combination of journalistic and narrative information and visual coverage. The work shown is by both non-professional and professional designers such as Jonathon Barnbrook, James Victoire, Paul Hamilton and Makoto Saito. Some of the work is provocative, but the book itself is not out to provoke; it is an objective representation of graphic excellence and wit: the result is visually, psychologically and intellectually stimulating.
Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century by
A new edition of a seminal book on the history of graphic design in the twentieth century by one of the leading authorities in the field. The story of graphic design is one of the most exciting and important developments in twentieth-century visual culture. From its roots in the expansion of printing, graphic design has evolved from a means of identification, information, and promotion to a profession and art in its own right. This authoritative documentary history begins with the poster and goes on to chart the use of text and image in brochures and magazines, advertising, corporate identity, television, and electronic media, and includes the effects of technical innovations such as photography and the computer, as well as the digital revolution. With over 800 illustrations fully integrated with the text, this indispensable account is uniquely clear, comprehensive, and absorbing. For this latest edition, Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century has been updated with a new preface and additions to the bibliography, ensuring its continued usefulness to students and designers alike.
Latin American Posters by
With more than one hundred political posters made between 1960 and 1990, this book documents the sociopolitical history of Latin America during a period of intense radicalism and upheaval. Essays by leading Latin American scholars discuss how these icons of popular struggle united the masses and influenced political and social reform.
Mexico and Modern Printmaking by
Mexico witnessed an exciting revival of printmaking alongside its better-known public mural program in the decades after the 1910?20 revolution. Major artists such as Jos?? Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo produced numbers of prints that furthered the social and political reforms of the revolution and helped develop a uniquely Mexican cultural identity. This groundbreaking book is the first to undertake an in-depth examination of these prints, the vital contributions Mexico's printmakers made to modern art, and their influence on coming generations of foreign artists. Along with a thorough discussion of the printmaking practices of Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and others, the book features some 300 handsomely illustrated prints??many previously unpublished. Essays by distinguished scholars investigate the dynamic cultural exchange between Mexico and other countries at this time. They analyze the work of such Mexican artists as Emilio Amero and Jes??s Escobedo, who traveled abroad, and such international artists as Elizabeth Catlett and Jean Charlot, who came to Mexico. They also discuss the important roles of the Taller de Gr??fica Popular, a flourishing print workshop founded in Mexico City in 1937, and the Weyhe Gallery in New York, which published and distributed prints by many of these artists during the 1920s and 1930s. Together, the prints and essays tell the fascinating history of Mexico's graphic-arts movement in the first half of the 20th century.]]>
The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia by
During the late Soviet period, the art collective known as the Mitki emerged in Leningrad. Producing satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance art, this group fashioned a playful, emphatically countercultural identity with affinities to European avant-garde and American hippie movements. More broadly, as Alexandar Mihailovic shows, the Mitki pioneered a form of political protest art that has since become a centerpiece of activism in post-Soviet Russia, most visible today in groups such as Pussy Riot. He draws on extensive interviews with members of the collective and illuminates their critique of the authoritarian state, militarism, and social strictures from the Brezhnev years to the present.
Off the Wall by
In this lavishly illustrated work, Zeina Maasri tells the tumultuous story of the struggle for Lebanon through the poster wars which raged on its streets. From 1975 to 1990, different factions in Lebanon's civil conflict flooded the streets with posters to mobilize their constituencies, undermine their enemies, and create public sympathy for their cause. Showcased here for the first time, the posters display a dramatic clash of cultures, ideologies and meanings.Maasri shows how the iconography of the posters changed throughout the war, and links this to changing political identities and imagined communities. She explores the factions' different aesthetic influences; from modern Arab visual culture to Latin America and revolutionary Iran. Combining in-depth knowledge of the local context with fascinating insights into the semiotics of visual media, "Off the Wall" is a highly original contribution to our understanding of visual culture, civil conflict, and the politics of the Middle East.
Paper Politics by
A stunning presentation of print art which showcases the themes of social injustice and global inequality as an inspiration for this deeply politicised medium. Political communication has a long history with printmaking - here, Josh MacPhee selects poignant artworks with the intent to engage readers in a political conversation. The collection features artwork by over 200 international artists in an eclectic collection of work by both activist and non-activist printmakers. However, there work is linked by a thread of reacting to monumental trends and events
Paths Toward Utopia by
10 collaborative picture-essays that weave poetic words with intricate yet bold images. This collection aims to challenge readers into thinking of community action in a positive light. Depicting what it would be like to live, every day, in a world created from below, where coercion and hierarchy are largely vestiges of the past and showing some of the practices that prefigure the self-organisation that would be commonplace in an egalitarian society. A stirring read that mines what people do in their daily lives for the already-existent gems of a freer future.
A People's Art History of the United States by
Most people outside of the art world view art as something that is foreign to their experiences and everyday lives. A People’s Art History of the United States places art history squarely in the rough-and-tumble of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day. Author and radical artist Nicolas Lampert combines historical sweep with detailed examinations of individual artists and works in a politically charged narrative that spans the conquest of the Americas, the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, western expansion, the suffragette movement and feminism, civil rights movements, environmental movements, LGBT movements, antiglobalization movements, contemporary antiwar movements, and beyond. A People’s Art History of the United States introduces us to key works of American radical art alongside dramatic retellings of the histories that inspired them. Stylishly illustrated with over two hundred images, this book is nothing less than an alternative education for anyone interested in the powerful role that art plays in our society.
Perspectives Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century by
The relationship of art to politics has always been an uneasy one, and never more so than in the 20th century. Governments have sought to control, censor, or bend art to their own purposes; artists have resisted and subverted such efforts. But what happens when artists work on behalf of a political program? When does art become propaganda? Is art tainted, diminished, or elevated by its political content?Toby Clark argues that propaganda art appears in many guises, and that the desire to persuade is not always at odds with aesthetic aims. He examines these many forms: the state propaganda of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's Soviet Union; democratic governments' representation of enemies in wartime; and anti-government protest art around the world, uncovering the complex rhetoric, high beauty, and ambiguous role of art that dwells in the political realm.
The Politics of Design by
Many designs that appear in today's society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and languages. With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of the meaning and impact of their work? An image or symbol that is acceptable in one culture can be offensive or even harmful in the next. A typeface or colour in a design might appear to be neutral, but its meaning is always culturally dependent. If designers learn to be aware of global cultural contexts, we can avoid stereotyping and help improve mutual understanding between people. Politics of Design is a collection of visual examples from around the world. Using ideas from anthropology and sociology, it creates surprising and educational insight in contemporary visual communication. The examples relate to the daily practice of both online and offline visual communication: typography, images, colour, symbols, and information. Politics of Design shows the importance of visual literacy when communicating beyond borders and cultures. It explores the cultural meaning behind the symbols, maps, photography, typography, and colours that are used every day. It is a practical guide for design and communication professionals and students to create more effective and responsible visual communication.
Posters for Peace by
By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians-including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon-exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy-even in a time of war.
Power and Progress on the Prairie by
A critical exploration of how modernity and progress were imposed on the people and land of rural South Dakota The Rosebud Country, comprising four counties in rural South Dakota, was first established as the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1889 to settle the Sicangu Lakota. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, white homesteaders arrived in the area and became the majority population. Today, the population of Rosebud Country is nearly evenly divided between Indians and whites. In Power and Progress on the Prairie, Thomas Biolsi traces how a variety of governmental actors, including public officials, bureaucrats, and experts in civil society, invented and applied ideas about modernity and progress to the people and the land. Through a series of case studies--programs to settle "surplus" Indian lands, to "civilize" the Indians, to "modernize" white farmers, to find strategic sites for nuclear missile silos, and to extend voting rights to Lakota people--Biolsi examines how these various "problems" came into focus for government experts and how remedies were devised and implemented. Drawing on theories of governmentality derived from Michel Foucault, Biolsi challenges the idea that the problems identified by state agents and the solutions they implemented were inevitable or rational. Rather, through fine-grained analysis of the impact of these programs on both the Lakota and white residents, he reveals that their underlying logic was too often arbitrary and devastating.
¡Printing the Revolution! by
"In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period's social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. ¡Printing the Revolution! explores the rise of Chicano graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice. More than reflecting the need for social change, the works featured in the catalogue and exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism, and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, to appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking. This exhibition is the first to unite historic civil rights-era prints alongside works by contemporary printmakers, including several that embrace expanded graphics that exist beyond the paper substrate. While the dominant mode of printmaking among Chicanx artists remains screenprinting, the installation features works in a wide range of techniques and presentation strategies, from installation art to public interventions, augmented reality, and shareable graphics that circulate in the digital realm. The exhibition is also the first to consider how Chicanx mentors, print centers, and networks nurtured other artists, including several who drew inspiration from the example of Chicanx printmaking. Featured artists and collectives include Rupert García, Malaquias Montoya, Ester Hernández, the Royal Chicano Air Force, David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, Sandra Fernández, Juan de Dios Mora, the Dominican York Proyecto Grafíca, Enrique Chagoya, René Castro, Juan Fuentes, and Linda Lucero, among others. ¡Printing the Revolution! features more than 100 works drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's pioneering collection of Latinx art. The Museum's Chicanx graphics holdings rose significantly with an important gift in 1995 from the renowned scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Since then, other major donations and an ambitious acquisition program have built one of the largest museum collections of Chicanx graphics on the East Coast"--
Protest! by
An authoritative, richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms. Spanning continents and centuries, Protest! presents a major new chronological look at protest graphics. Beginning in the Reformation, when printed visual matter was first produced in multiples, Liz McQuiston follows the iconic images that have accompanied movements and events around the world. She examines fine art and propaganda, including William Hogarth's Gin Lane, Thomas Nast's political caricatures, French and British comics, postcards from the women's suffrage movement, clothing of the 1960s counterculture, the anti-apartheid illustrated book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, the "Silence=Death" emblem from the AIDS crisis, murals created during the Arab Spring, electronic graphics from Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, and the front cover of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Providing a visual exploration both joyful and brutal, McQuiston discusses how graphics have been used to protest wars, call for the end to racial discrimination, demand freedom from tyranny, and satirize authority figures and regimes. From the French, Mexican, and Sandinista revolutions to the American civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and the Women's March of 2017, Protest! documents the integral role of the visual arts in passionate efforts for change.
Protest: the Aesthetics of Resistance by
A treasure trove for all who still protest. "Make Love Not War", "Soyez realistes, demandez l'impossible," "Keine Macht fur Niemanden," "We are the 99%": The history of the last fifty (or 100 or 150) years has been accompanied by a constant flow of statements, of practices, of declarations of dissatisfaction with regard to prevailing conditions. When something is able to reach from the margins of society into its very center - something mostly unorganised and unruly, sometimes violent, rarely controllable - it forges ahead in the form of a protest. This takes place in (real or virtual) spaces and is accomplished by (likewise real or virtual) bodies. The spaces and the bodies to which the protest relates are the spaces of politics and society. It masterfully and creatively draws on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, thereby opening up a space that eludes control. From a position of powerlessness, irony, subversion, and provocation are its tools for pricking small but palpable pinholes into the controlling system of rule. The publication "Protest" presents and reflects on present and past forms of protest and looks at marginalised communities' practices of resistance from a wide variety of perspectives. Social, culture-historical, sociological, and political-scientific perspectives. Social, culture-historical, sociological, and political-scientific perspectives play as much of a role here as approaches that draw on image theory, popular culture, cultural studies or contemporary positions from the arts. In the process, the books takes into account in particular such present-day developments as the virtualisation of protest, how it has been turned into the fictional, and its exploitation in politics by power-holders of all shades. SELLING POINT: * On the politics, mediality, and aesthetics of protest cultures 150 images
Revolucion! by
The poster was the popular art form in Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, when the government sponsored some 10,000 public posters on a fascinating range of cultural, social, and political themes. Revolucin!, produced with unprecedented access to Cuban national archives, assembles nearly 150 of these powerful but little--seen works of popular art. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the posters rallied the Cuban people to the huge task of building a new society, promoting massive sugar harvests and national literacy campaigns; opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam; celebrating films, music, dance, and baseball with a unique graphic wit and exuberant colorful style. With an introduction illuminating the rich social and artistic history of the posters, and rare biographical information on the artists themselves, this striking volume offers a window into the story of Cuba--and a truly revolutionary chapter in graphic design.
Rubber Soul by
Rubber-stamping as an enticing form of popular art
Sam Is Not My Uncle by
Uncle Sam with his hands cut off; the head of the Statue of Liberty impaled on a bayonet; a trash can decorated with the Stars and Stripes: these are some of the striking images with which Cuban propaganda has represented the United States over the past half-century and more. Ever since Fidel Castro came to power, hundreds of billboards and posters have alluded to the enemy of the revolution: the US government, with its military might and the CIA at its service. Sam Is Not My Uncle gathers for the first time a selection of these works, most of which have never before been published in book form. It offers an overview of the images that Cuban propaganda has used to reference different issues and episodes that have marked US-Cuban relations since 1959.
See Red Women's Workshop by
"Girls are powerful": the '70s feminist posters of See Red Women's Workshop A feminist silkscreen poster collective founded in London in 1974 by three former art students, the See Red Women's Workshop grew out of a shared desire to combat sexist images of women and to create positive and challenging alternatives. Women from different backgrounds came together to make posters and calendars that tackled issues of sexuality, identity and oppression. With humor and bold, colorful graphics, See Red expressed the personal experiences of women as well as their role in wider struggles for change. Written by See Red members, detailing the group's history up until the closure of the workshop in 1990, and with a foreword by celebrated feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, See Red Women's Workshop features all of the collective's original screenprints and posters. Confronting negative stereotypes, questioning the role of women in society, and promoting women's self-determination, the power and energy of these images reflect an important and dynamic era of women's liberation--with continued relevance for today.
The Social Movement Archive by
"Examines the role of cultural production within social justice struggles and within archives. Contains reproductions of political ephemera, including zines, banners, stickers, posters, and memes, alongside 15 interviews with artists and activists who have worked across a range of movements including: womens liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black liberation, anti-war, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights, and prisoner abolition, among others."--Provided by publisher.
Walls of Freedom by
Walls of Freedom is a powerful portrayal of the Egyptian Revolution, telling the story with striking images of art that turned Egypt's walls into a visual testimony of bravery and resistance. This survey of Egyptian street art is also enriched by images of the revolution taken by acclaimed photographers and activists. Spanning major Egyptian cities like Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, it is a day-to-day reflection of the volatile and fast-shifting political situation.
Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in 3 Acts by
In 2017, the Whitney Biennial included a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the lynched body of a young black child, Emmett Till. In 1979, anger brewed over a show at New York's Artists Space entitled The Nigger Drawings. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Harlem on My Mind did not include a single work by a black artist. In all three cases, black artists and writers and their allies organized vigorous responses using the only forum available to them: public protest. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts reflects on these three incidents in the long and troubled history of art and race in America. It lays bare how the art world--no less than the country at large--has persistently struggled with the politics of race, and the ways this struggle has influenced how museums, curators and artists wrestle with notions of free speech and the specter of censorship. Whitewalling takes a critical and intimate look at these three "acts" in the history of the American art scene and asks: when we speak of artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, who, exactly, is free to speak? Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, food and culture; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; how museums shape our views of each other and the world; and books. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, as well as in publications including the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Garage, Bookforum, Momus and Art Practical. D'Souza is the editor of the forthcoming Making it Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader.
