Peace Press Graphics

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change

Editors Ilee Kaplan and Carol A. Wells Essays by Lincoln Cushing, Ilee Kaplan, Henry Klein, Gregory Sholette, and Carol A. Wells

4 Peace Press Graphics, 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change

Published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the University Art Museum (College of the Arts, California State University, Long Beach) and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, on view September 10, 2011–December 11, 2011.

ISBN: 978-0-936270-57-9 Library of Congress Catalog No: 2011935874 © 2011 by University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. Authors hold the copyright for their essays. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission of the publisher.

All reasonable attempts have been made to obtain permission for images reproduced in this catalog.

Please address any oversights to the publisher:

Managing editor: Jane Neidhardt Copy Editor: Tim Fox Designer: Julie Cho Printer: Danny Zackery, Bob Zaugh, and NPA, Los Angeles, California This project was supported by the generous contributions of the Getty Foundation and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980; Instructionally Related Activities Fund; Arthur Axelrad; Bess Hodges Foundation; Institute of Museum and Library Services; Arts Council for Long Beach; Doris Duke Foundation; William Gillespie Foundation; Getty Multicultural Summer Intern Program; Constance W. Glenn Fund for Exhibition and Education Programs; Charles and Elizabeth Brooks Endowment; College of the Arts, California State University, Long Beach; Arthur Axlerad; The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation; and City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

University Art Museum California State University, Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Boulevard Long Beach, California 90840 www.csulb.edu/uam

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Center for the Study of Political Graphics 8124 West Third Street, Suite 211 Los Angeles, California 90048-4309 www.politicalgraphics.org

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113 145 156 161 173 177 184 186 190 Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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Foreword Christopher Scoates Acknowledgments Introduction Ilee Kaplan & Carol A. Wells Plates Peace Press: A Collective History Ilee Kaplan Appropriation and Image Recycling: Common Practice in Designing Political Posters Carol A. Wells Plates Red in Black and White: The New Left Printing Renaissance of the 1960s—and Beyond Lincoln Cushing “Not Cool Enough to Catalog”: Social Movement Culture and Its Phantom Archives Gregory Sholette Lessons for the Twenty-First Century from a 1960s Los Angeles Radical Printing Collective Henry Klein Plates Timeline Stories behind Selected Posters Plates Checklist Additional Peace Press Posters Not in the Exhibition Contributors Bibliography Staff List ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Foreword

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The exhibition Peace Press Graphics, 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change is a landmark exhibition for the University Art Museum (UAM), California State University, Long Beach, for two reasons. First, it has offered the museum the opportunity to be a part of the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980— the groundbreaking initiative that is supporting over sixty projects in museums and art centers focusing on the arts in Southern California.

Second, it has given UAM a chance to partner and collaborate with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) on a major exhibition about the Los Angeles-based Peace Press collective.

From my initial phone call and conversation with CSPG’s Founder and Executive Director Carol A. Wells two years ago, this exhibition has evolved from a fairly straightforward curatorial exhibition of posters produced by the Peace Press collective to a multimedia installation that places the visitor within a complex timeline of varying political perspectives on such challenging issues as race, feminism, workers’ rights, civil liberties, antinuclear protests, environmental concerns, and antiwar demonstrations. Thanks to Carol and Bob Zaugh, longtime member of Peace Press, we have been able to connect with many Peace Press members and clients to discover anecdotes and details about the poster archive and piece together an enormously complicated history of interweaving stories and timelines.

UAM project co-curator, Associate Director Ilee Kaplan, has worked tirelessly alongside Carol to make the numerous decisions required in the development of this project. Together they have organized an important and complex exhibition that maps out the history of a unique group of L.A. activist-artists who created an “alternate everything” printing and publishing business. The exhibition truly offers audiences a unique opportunity to understand the art of political protest within a larger cultural milieu.

In addition, Carol and Ilee have provided California State University students with opportunities to build skills and experiences that they are unlikely to find outside the walls of the museum. A team of graduate and undergraduate students worked with the curators to research the posters, develop the timelines, and identify images that provide additional context for poster themes and events. During the 2010 and 2011 summers, we hosted interns from the Getty Multicultural Summer Intern Program, who worked on a variety of Peace Press projects. We also partnered with faculty and student groups to present speakers, panels, and other programs on Thursday nights for campus audiences. These events cover a diverse array of topics, from the history of the American Indian movement to a workshop on civil disobedience to a discussion of Latin American politics.

Archives.”) Further, the UAM’s collections and exhibitions have long featured artists who explore social and political themes, including Lorna Simpson, Peter Goin, Graciela Iturbide, Gil Peress, and Ken Light. Peace Press, therefore, expands and enhances our museum’s ongoing interests.

A project of this size would not have been possible without the dedicated commitment of UAM Registrar Angela Barker, who managed the myriad details and complexities of loans and shipping with great expertise. In addition, UAM’s entire installation team, led by Pet Sourinthone, deserves resounding thanks for its professionalism and care. UAM’s education curator, Brian Trimble, has shown tremendous enthusiasm and creativity in providing opportunities for enhanced understanding of the exhibition.

Everyone on the UAM staff depends on Office Manager John Ciulik, whose efficient handling of day-to-day operations made a crucial contribution to the project. In addition, Accountant Shirley Brilliant steered us through the complexity of bureaucratic procedures, while our entire student staff makes every day go smoothly.

Last, but never least, we want to recognize our funders, whose contributions allow both the UAM and CSPG to serve our community with high-quality programs: Instructionally Related Activities Fund; Arthur Axelrad; Bess Hodges Foundation; Institute of Museum and Library Services; Arts Council for Long Beach; Doris Duke Foundation; William Gillespie Foundation; Getty Multicultural Summer Intern Program; Constance W. Glenn fund for Exhibition and Education Programs; Charles and Elizabeth Brooks Endowment; Arthur Axlerad; College of the Arts, California State University, Long Beach; The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation; and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Christopher Scoates Director University Art Museum California State University Long Beach

This pioneering exhibition has also allowed the UAM staff to showcase a genre that has been often marginalized in the greater arts community.

While a significant percentage of the UAM’s permanent collection is comprised of prints on paper, graphics—particularly works on paper dealing with themes of social change—are frequently denigrated in the context of paintings, sculpture, and other “fine art” installations.

(Gregory Sholette eloquently expands upon this topic in his essay, “‘Not Cool Enough to Catalog’: Social Movement Culture and Its Phantom

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Acknowledgments

It has been a great pleasure to watch this project develop in the hands of the very capable and dedicated staff at both the University Art Museum (UAM) and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG). We have been fortunate to work with an extraordinary team of curatorial colleagues who have been exceptionally generous with their knowledge, time, and attention. They provided friendly advice and accurate information at every key moment throughout the exhibition’s development.

At CSPG we want to thank Archivist Joy Novak for overseeing the management and cataloguing of the exhibition materials and for providing reference assistance to the curators; Program Director Mary Sutton for coordinating promotion and overseeing organizational programming; and Administrative Assistant Alena Barrios for tracking communications and keeping staff on schedule.

Just as Peace Press was a collective with each member serving an important role, our exhibition and catalog, Peace Press Graphics, 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, could only have happened, collectively, thanks to a group of generous and passionate people. We first must thank Deborah Marrow, Joan Weinstein, the Getty Foundation staff, and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980. In particular, we would like to acknowledge Nancy Micklewright and Katie Underwood, who guided us through the proposal process. Without the vision, generosity, and remarkable organizational skills of the Getty staff, this unique exhibition would not exist.

Of course our deepest thanks go to the artists, cultural workers, activists, and organizations who helped create the posters; everyone who safeguarded and preserved them so that future generations might learn from their powerful graphics; and the individuals who donated or loaned their work to make this exhibition possible: Laurie Battin, Paul Becker, Barbara Bick, Charles and Barbara Brittin, Marlene Bronte, Carlos Callejo, Tom Campbell, Steve Clare, Carlos and Marianna Cortez, Rick Davidson, Don Farber, Mona Field, Linda Garrett, Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry, Ted Hajjar and Carol A. Wells, Patricia Hoffman, Doug Humble, Paul Kaplan, Seymour and Millie Kaplan, Jonathan Kawaye, David Kunzle, Ruth Kupers, Rod Lane, Mike Lee, Alita and Leon Letwin, Walter Lippmann, Michael and Jill McCain, Jan Palchikoff, Ed Pearl, Lenny and Cricket Potash, Rachel Sene, Sarah Shuldiner, Laura Silagi, John Swanson, Mark Vallen, Larry Wartels, Carol Waymire, Emily Winters, Irene Wolt, Woman’s Building, and Bob Zaugh.

We are very grateful for the productive and satisfying partnership between the UAM and CSPG. In particular, we thank UAM Director Christopher Scoates for his insight and guidance throughout the project.

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Hanson deserves special recognition for her research efforts and assistance in organizing numerous aspects of the project. Many thanks also go to Christina Alegria, Mickel Breitenstein, Mary Coyne, Francine KolaBankole, Miki Fujieda, Liliana Montalvo, Hillary Morimoto, Daniel Pham, Doreen Seelig, and Shadi Seyedyousef.

The Peace Press Advisory Committee has provided a significant service without which this project would not have come to fruition. Offering recommendations, reviewing text, making connections, and sharing program ideas were just a few of the activities that the committee contributed. We deeply appreciate the work of Tom Bowman, Mickel Breitenstein, Elizabeth Hanson, Lee Harrington, Jonathan Kawaye, Henry Klein, Liliana Montalvo, Jerry Palmer, Daniel Pham, Chris Scoates, Doreen Seelig, and Bob Zaugh.

We want to especially recognize Bob Zaugh, who embraced this project and allowed us to benefit from his long-term association with Peace Press, its members, and its clients. We also want to recognize Jonathan Kawaye and Mary Peterson, who generously lent posters from their personal collection. We are grateful to Henry Klein, who not only participated in the development process, but also wrote a fascinating insider’s view of Peace Press’ history and legacy.

The story of Peace Press is the story of dedicated and passionate people who pursued their ideals. An important aspect of our research was a series of interviews of both collective members and clients. We want to thank our interviewees who generously gave us their time and memories: Paul Becker, Dinah Berland, Paul Cassidy, Don Farber, John Fitzgerald, George Gelernter, Sherna Gluck, Melinda Grubbauer, Deborah and Jeffrey Kaye, Jonathan Kawaye, Don Kilhefner, Henry Klein, Leonard Koren, Deborah Lott, Joseph Maizlish, Bonnie Mettler, Deena Metzger, Jerry Palmer, Ed Pearl, Sheila Pinkel, David Sacks, Moe Stavnezer, Mark Vallen, Carol A. Wells, Merrill Kagan-Weston, France White, Stacie Widdifield, and Bob Zaugh.

Finally, we thank you for your interest in the Peace Press story and artwork. While technologies have changed, the need for a politically active citizenry is more crucial than ever as society continues to struggle with many of the same issues that motivated the members and artists of the Peace Press collective. There can be no greater testament to the legacy of Peace Press than to carry its message from the 20 th century into the 21st .

Ilee Kaplan and Carol A. Wells Co-Curators

We are also deeply appreciative of our project consultants: Tom Bowman and Lee Harrington from the Bowman Design Group, whose exhibition design created a dynamic presentation; Jane Neidhardt and Tim Fox, whose editing skills were combined with professionalism, grace, and good humor; and Julie Cho, whose design help bring together an attractive, compelling, and informational book.

We could not have completed the research necessary for the exhibition and catalog without an enthusiastic and energetic team of volunteers and graduate and undergraduate students. They all deserve a standing ovation for their meticulous and detailed work. Associate Curator Elizabeth

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Introduction

In 1967, Jerry Palmer—a physics graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an antiwar activist­­—set out to meet the communications needs of two important radical organizations of the day: the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Resistance. After experimenting with commercial printers and silkscreening posters on the floor of the Resistance office in Westwood, California, he finally invested $250 in a box of offset printing press parts. Palmer spent that summer reassembling the machine. This rebuilt AB Dick 320 press was the beginning of Peace Press, though today Palmer says the official Peace Press story did not start until after renting numerous residences, offices, garages, and a 2,000-square-foot storefront on La Cienega for the fledgling enterprise. An “alternate everything” L.A. printing collective, Peace Press would go on to produce thousands of fliers, posters, ephemera, and other materials for both progressive and commercial clients throughout Southern California and the country.1

The late 1960s were heady times, a period when art and political agitation often joined forces to encourage social change. Palmer’s project initially met the antiwar movement’s urgent need for materials encouraging draft resistance and opposing the Viet Nam War generally. 2 Commercial printers often refused to print fliers and posters against the war, and Peace Press filled the void. Over the next twenty years, the Press would expand its interests to dozens of other causes, with its client list ranging from the Black Panther Party and the Chicano Moratorium to the Teamsters United Rank and File and the National Association for Irish Justice.

Peace Press Graphics, 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change displays more than one hundred posters and fliers, as well as ephemera, which the Press produced between 1967 and 1987. The posters document the events and ideas that affected social and political activists and permeate popular culture to this day. The exhibition thus expands on the Getty Research Institute’s broader Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 initiative by documenting the protest poster, one of the primary—but least documented—art forms of the 20 th century. The exhibition also reveals the importance of Los Angeles as a center of political activism. Because Los Angeles is too often seen through the lens of movie stars and murder trials, the city’s political contributions have been either trivialized or ignored. Yet these posters show the central role Los Angeles played in defining the key issues of the times.

The posters featured in the exhibition are now housed, primarily, at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles.

Together, they exemplify an important element of visual and cultural history: art that reflects the desire and intention to create social and political change, as well as artists who seek to affect change through both their work and their actions.

The exhibition Peace Press Graphics, 1967–1987 places political protest within a larger cultural milieu. In today’s age of digital media, context—the complex web of social issues, political concerns, and environmental crises that generate what is now humbly known as “content”—is often sacrificed for speed and efficiency of information delivery. (Ironically, this technology also allows political activists to produce materials quickly and distribute them broadly with the push of a few buttons and mouse clicks— a power not even imagined in the late 1960s.) The exhibition uses a full

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11 1—Unpublished interview of Jerry Palmer conducted by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, Francine KolaBankole, and Carol A. Wells, May 17, 2010.

2—The Vietnamese language is monosyllabic, and the divided spelling “Viet Nam” is the transliteration the Vietnamese people use. The single word “Vietnam” was utilized by the French, and thus connotes colonial status, not sovereignty. The Cuban and Vietnamese posters use the divided spelling; the U.S. posters are inconsistent. All essays in this catalog will use the divided spelling. See Carol A. Wells, “Viet Nam x 3,” in Susan Martin, ed., Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam, Cuba, 1965-1975 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press, 1996), 23.

INTRODUCTION multimedia approach including music, video, and timelines of local and national events to take visitors back to the sights and sounds of late 20th-century America and late 20 th-century Los Angeles. This pioneering exhibition also allowed the UAM staff to showcase a genre that has been often marginalized in the greater arts community. Peace Press, therefore, expands and enhances the ongoing interests of the UAM. This catalog both accompanies the exhibition and provides additional examination of posters, the story of Peace Press, print collectives in the United States, and a broader discussion about political art. In addition, it contains images of all of the known political posters produced by Peace Press, while five essays explore different aspects of the Press, the posters, and political art in general.

In the first essay, “Peace Press: A Collective History,” Ilee Kaplan—artist, associate director at the University Art Museum, and co-curator of this project—discusses the history of Peace Press. Based on more than twentyfive interviews with collective members and clients, Kaplan outlines the story of Peace Press from its beginnings with that jerry-rigged printer in a Westwood office through its peak as a print collective supporting numerous progressive groups to its final transition to a traditional business. The Peace Press story reflects the exuberance of the 1960s, the focused activism of the 1970s, and the gradual changes in attitudes of the 1980s as the collective’s idealistic members faced the challenges of middle age and personal responsibility.

Carol A. Wells, art historian, founder and executive director of CSPG and the other co-curator of this project, next investigates image appropriation, a significant aspect of poster design. In her essay, “Appropriation and Image Recycling: Common Practice in Designing Political Posters,” Wells considers the reasons that appropriation is so compelling for the creators of politically based graphics. Limited resources, the need for instant communication, and frequent time constraints all contribute to the use and reuse of particular images. Wells examines specific examples within the Peace Press archives, recalling their origins and evolution. Her essay closes with a first-person narrative detailing the author’s experiences producing her first political poster.

Archivist, printmaker, and author Lincoln Cushing explores the history of print collectives in his essay, “Red in Black and White: The New Left Printing Renaissance of the 1960s—and Beyond.” Cushing begins his essay with a quote by journalist A. J. Liebling, who wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Throughout the United States, presses were founded to support progressive ideals and actions.

Integrating the voices of collective members, who comment on their experience establishing presses, with brief summaries of their organizations, Cushing provides a national context for Peace Press.

Artist, writer, and university professor Gregory Sholette examines the relationship between oppositional art and the larger arts community in his essay, “‘Not Cool Enough to Catalog’: Social Movement Culture and Its Phantom Archives.” Sholette discusses how underground newspapers, populist Mexican woodcuts, and street art stimulated artists whose work fills “fine” art galleries and museums. He documents how mainstream artists often shed their customary styles for recognized motifs of “movement” art when presenting political ideas, and challenges us to question

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KAPLAN / WELLS both the current status and the future of arts that are inspired by and intrinsic to political action.

“Lessons for the Twenty-First Century from a 1960s Los Angeles Radical Printing Collective,” by Henry Klein, emeritus professor of art at Valley College in the Valley Glen district of Southern California, offers a personal perspective about Peace Press from one of the collective’s members.

Klein arrived at Peace Press in 1976, and his essay describes how the group’s principles clarified his own values and the ideas he wanted to pass on to his children. Klein alternates between his own experience as an artist, printer, and educator with broader issues and values that permeated the decades between 1960 through 1980 and into the next century. He identifies the legacy of the press, which, while now technically obsolete, is contemporary in the continuous struggle for social justice.

The challenges of writing the history of Peace Press are obstacles faced by all historians: what is real, what isn’t; what happened, what didn’t; what is important, what isn’t. Even when it happened is not always clear, as the failure to include the year of an event on a poster—a problem endemic to protest posters throughout the world—makes the history ambiguous. In many ways, attempting to reconstruct recent history, such as the history of Peace Press, is more difficult than writing about the distant past, because when there are more eyewitnesses, there is often less consensus and conflicting narratives emerge. In interviewing former collective members and their customers, some holes in the history of the Press were filled, while others were widened.

For the students and antiwar activists who created Peace Press, getting the message out was the primary focus, while record-keeping and archiving the work was loose and inconsistent; a 1972 fire damaged or destroyed much of the data that had been saved. While some posters include “printed at Peace Press” on them, many others didn’t. They not only inconsistently credited themselves, they sometimes omitted the “union bug,” to the chagrin of their movement customers.3 Most of the conflicting narratives were relatively minor—who did this, or who said that—but a few are noteworthy because they either question or confirm that Peace Press printed specific posters. For example, the now iconic 1970 poster of the burning of the Bank of America building in Isla Vista, California, was included in a 2005 exhibition of Peace Press posters displayed at Los Angeles Valley College.4 Everyone remembered it hanging in the shop, and at that time there had been little doubt that Peace Press had printed the poster. During the more extensive interviews and oral histories that took place to prepare for the current exhibition, however, one former member mentioned that until they obtained a larger format press, their posters were limited to 18 x 24 inches. As the Bank of Amerika poster was 22.5 x 34 inches, it could not have been printed at Peace Press. When the discrepancy was pointed out, some members replied that between remembering the poster hanging in the shop, having printed things critical of the bank’s policies, and wanting to have printed it because it was such a great poster, a memory had been created. 5 Conversely, a memory gap emerged regarding three posters produced in 1978 for the National Student Center of Thailand (NSCT). As with many of its posters, Peace Press is not credited, but in this case it was

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13 3—Union customers and many progressive organizations required the union label, or union “bug,” to appear to show labor solidarity. Organizations that knew they should use union printers but couldn’t afford them often used the statement “labor donated.”

The commitment to using union labor also had contradictions for the members of Peace Press, as during the Viet Nam War, most of the trade unions supported the war. For a detailed discussion on the history of the union bug see Lincoln Cushing’s article at http://www.docspopuli. org/articles/UnionBug. html, accessed August 1, 2011.

4—In February 1970, a rally held at the stadium of the University of California in Santa Barbara responded to national and local issues including the firing of several radical faculty members and police harassment of black student activists. William Kunstler, defense attorney for the Chicago Eight, addressed the rally to recount the horrors of the trial, including the shackling of Bobby Seale and the contempt charges against the defendants. Police harassment of students leaving the rally, including the arrests of several demonstrators, escalated into a struggle for control of the college community of Isla Vista, during which the Bank of America was burned down. The Bank of America was

the largest bank in California, had a number of branches in Viet Nam, and was a symbol of the corporate support of the war. Two months later the temporary Bank of America structure was also burned down, and a student defending the bank structure was killed by a police sharpshooter who claimed his gun fired accidentally.

Scenic checks had just become popular, and the poster reproduced this format but with a photo of the burning bank replacing the scenic landscape.

In order to link the police actions with Nazi Germany, to avoid copyright infringement, or both, the bank’s name was altered to read “Bank of Amerika.” The exhibition featuring the poster was produced and curated by Henry Klein, Carol A. Wells, Irene Wolt, and Bob Zaugh.

5—In a May 2, 2011, email, Bob Zaugh wrote: “We did print several things involving B of A later on.

‘We Only Make Loans’ was a booklet outlining how banks used the process of redlining in making loans.

The result was that the money deposited did not go back into the community based on need. Basically, if you lived in Watts and deposited your money in B of A, it was loaned out to places like Beverly Hills.”

INTRODUCTION likely a deliberate omission. In the late 1970s, Peace Press printed pamphlets for the NSCT. Henry Klein remembered it as being a very clandestine job because the students were terrified about their identities being known.6 Since neither Klein, nor others who were interviewed, remember printing the posters, it would be logical to assume that they weren’t done there. However, the NSCT posters were part of the stacks kept by the Press as samples of prior work; Jonathan Kawaye rescued them when the Press was sold in 1987. These posters are included here because their presence among the Peace Press posters, plus the fact that the Press did print for that organization, makes it highly likely that Peace Press printed them.

The third example of conflicting narratives is more complex. Although the first example, the Bank of Amerika poster, was determined not to be a Peace Press poster, and the Thai posters, while not definitively, have a very high probability of having been printed at the Press, the first edition of Deena Metzger’s Tree remains contested. No one denies that Peace Press published the book, and that subsequent editions of the poster were printed in Berkeley, but Metzger refutes the claim of several Peace Press personnel that they also printed the 1981 poster. Yet Peace Press’ name is on the poster, and the poster was also advertised in a Peace Press promotional leaflet.

These posters and their stories are included here to exemplify the obstacles faced when writing narratives about grassroots movements. At the same time, they show the significance of these movements and the importance of the political poster in documenting various organizations, issues, and struggles.

An additional obstacle, and perhaps the most challenging of all, is when there are no surviving artifacts to document an event. Despite ongoing efforts to locate samples of everything Peace Press printed, much is missing. David Sacks, a volunteer at the Press, describes three events, all from 1970, for which there are no surviving Peace Press materials: Back in the day, I volunteered some at the Peace Press in Culver City. I remember selling off my comic book collection on Bruin Walk to repay for ink and paper I had used to print fliers after the Kent State Shootings....

I also printed the flier for the Yippie! invasion of Disneyland at PP and the boycott of the movie Woodstock, aka woodschtick.7

Although the Yippie invasion of Disneyland in 1970 was one of the most quintessentially countercultural actions of the era, no known copy has survived of the 500 fliers printed at Peace Press. Fortunately, there are memories. Sacks described the bogus itinerary on the fliers: Black Panther Hot Breakfast: 9am—10am at Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House Young Pirates League: 11am on Captain Hook’s boat Women’s Liberation: 12 noon rally to liberate Minnie Mouse in front of Fantasyland Self Defense Collective: 1pm—2pm at shooting gallery in Frontierland Mid-Day Feast: 3pm barbecue of Porky Pig Late in the afternoon Yippies plan to infiltrate and liberate Tom Sawyer’s Island. Declaring a free state,

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14 6—In 1973, several hundred thousand students, joined by workers and other citizens, protested in Bangkok against three decades of military dictatorship. The military attacked the demonstrators, killing nearly seventy and wounding hundreds.

Public revulsion over the attack led to the temporary restoration of the constitution, although the financial elite remained in control. The deposed junta leaders took refuge in the United States or Taiwan. In October 1976, following escalating student protests, the Thai army and paramilitary tortured and killed hundreds of students, suspended the constitution, and resumed power. This was followed by the issuing of amnesty to prevent any of those responsible for the massacre from coming to justice; a sweeping purge of the universities, the media, and the civil service resulted. Thousands of students, intellectuals, and other leftists fled Bangkok; some left for exile, while others joined the Communist Party’s insurgent forces. The brutality of the Thai junta, coupled with the presence in the U.S. of former junta members, explains the NSCT’s need for secrecy in working with Peace Press.

7—Email from Sacks to Carol A. Wells, December 28, 2010.

In an August 13, 2011 email, Sacks described the movie boycott: “Before that movie, no movie in Los Angeles had been over $3.50 and that was for extremely limited releases with reserved assigned seatings.

And it happened very rarely, primarily for Oscar nomination sure things. Woodstock was open seating and $4.00. To me this was a clear rip-off of the youth culture and in particular of Woodstock legacy where the vast majority of the concert goers did not pay and the event had become, as least to the media, 3 free days of music peace and love. This one I created on my own. This was a more ‘recreational’ type of demonstration, sort of ‘for the hell of it.’ Our signs/posters were rather whimsical. I remember one in particular: ‘$4 is almost half a lid.’ This was not an ‘angry’ demonstration, rather just an expression of my/our disgust of the commercialization of youth culture.” Sacks was also arrested at the demonstration.

brothers and sisters will then have a smoke-in and festival. Get it on over to Disneyland, August 6. YIPPIE!

Although the schedule was a made-up fantasy, except for the Smoke-In, which did take place on Tom Sawyer’s Island, the officials at the center of corporate fantasy took it seriously; the police were prepared for 200,000 Yippies, but approximately 300 showed up. The park actually closed five hours early, the first time in park history. 8 The Peace Press posters and stories offer a window into the way many posters were produced during this period, and they provide a microcosm of the motivation and conditions behind the emergence of comparable experiences in printing collectives around the country. Peace Press provides unique insight into why the posters were made, how they were designed, and what they looked like. Throughout the country—and at Peace Press—protest posters were made by both skilled artists and those who lacked training but were moved by the urgency of a cause.

Throughout the world, posters demanded freedom for Angela Davis and other political prisoners. . . as did Peace Press. Peace Press posters are also among the countless graphics produced from the mid-1960s through the ’80s to challenge U.S. interventions from Viet Nam to Nicaragua, to oppose apartheid in South Africa, and to support national liberation movements from the Philippines to Iran. Peace Press was the print shop of choice for many in Southern California who needed materials to support the rights of people of color, women, lesbians and gays, immigrants, workers, and prisoners. Their causes ranged from the local to the global.

It is sobering to think that we are still dealing with the same issues … unpopular wars, nuclear power, the environment, healthcare, political prisoners, homophobia, and sexism. It is also striking how some things have changed. In our post-September 11th society, could the Tourist Guide to Target L.A.—which lists all the nuclear reactors, nuclear waste and weapon stockpiles, as well as major bomb shelters, think tanks, and military sites from Canoga Park to Costa Mesa—be printed without a visit from Homeland Security? Would a poster placing a target over the Ayatollah Khomeini have been rejected for being racist? Would a print shop whose members wouldn’t print anything they disagreed with be able to simultaneously print posters celebrating the founding of Israel and expressing solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people?

The exhibition and catalog document the breadth of the posters printed at Peace Press, from hand-drawn expressions of anger and passion to slick concert advertisements. This project is both a celebration of many voices that combined to communicate ideas and an indictment of the injustices that continue to plague the world. Those who were old enough to experience those times are invited to remember; those for whom this is “history” are encouraged to appreciate the legacy of Peace Press and the art of social activism.

Ilee Kaplan Associate Director University Art Museum and Carol A. Wells Founder and Executive Director Center for the Study of Political Graphics ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

15 8—For the complete backstory of the Yippie invasion of Disneyland, see: http://davelandweb. com/yippies/, accessed August 5, 2011.

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impulse. . . runs through a wide range of political arts and, indeed, may be considered one of the defining characteristics of California’s contribution to political art in this country.”3

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

—Vladimir Mayakovsky

Voices for Social Change

California, in the late 1960s, was a place of contradictions: Disneyland and Haight Ashbury; defense contracts and love-ins; People’s Park and Century City. On one hand, California had been home to numerous progressive groups and ideas since the early 1900s. As Steven McGroarty commented in 1921: “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.”1 Voices from the Chicano movement, Black Panther Party, gay liberation movement, environmental activism, and women’s movement, among many others, contributed to an atmosphere of foment, protest, and change. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the aerospace industry, the significant presence of the military and related defense industries—a result of California’s strategic location on the Pacific—as well as the long history of discrimination against the large immigrant labor populations, including Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans, had led to the establishment of a powerful conservative enclave. According to Susan Landauer: The region was characterized by a violent clash of contending forces—between a strong and growing political Left and an increasingly powerful Right supported by immense financial interest. Most important, it was the very friction between these forces that became the essential catalyst for agitation, providing...the “antagonistic moment”...that typically ignites an avant-garde.2

Landauer goes on to say that the combination of the political climate, the relative abundance of university teaching opportunities for artists (who, then, did not have to rely on art sales to survive), and a regional culture that welcomed new ideas and topical commentary created an environment where art for social change could thrive.

In particular, Landauer identifies working collectively as a significant aspect of artists’ process during the mid-20 th century. “The communitarian

Important examples of works produced by collectives in the 1960s include a number of large-scale projects and groundbreaking performances: the fifty-five-foot Peace Tower, built under the direction of Mark di Suvero, was surrounded by individual antiwar paintings; the half-mile-long mural Great Wall of Los Angeles, organized by Judy Baca, was produced by more than four hundred neighborhood youths, forty artists, forty historians, and a support staff of more than one hundred; Womanhouse, a site-specific project examining the prevailing stereotypes of the housewife, was created by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro along with twenty-one students in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts; and the performance group Asco—known for its guerrilla theater pieces—developed from the frustration of its members (Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez) after repeated rejections to perform their work in traditional venues.

Peace Press was born within this infusion of art and political agitation. First developed as an alternative to commercial presses whose owners often objected to printing fliers and posters opposing the Viet Nam War, Peace Press became a hub for progressive groups and cultural organizations including the Black Panther Party, the Chicano Moratorium, Teamsters United Rank and File, and the National Association for Irish Justice. In addition to fliers, handouts, and books, Peace Press produced more than 170 posters that reflected the youthful spirit of the times in topic, language, and design. The Press staff consisted of young activists who welcomed a diverse group of colleagues that included women and people of color. Newcomers were taught the skills required for the business, such as layout, paste-up, and camera work.

The approach to all of the Peace Press artistic endeavors was collaborative—design teams worked with, and sometimes trained—clients to jointly develop ideas.

The posters—now housed, primarily, at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles—exemplify an important element of visual and cultural history: art that reflects the

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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34 1——Steven McGroarty as quoted in Susan Landauer, “Countering Cultures: The California Contest,” in Peter Selz, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, San Jose Museum of Art, 2006), 3.

2——Landauer, “Countering Cultures: The California Contest,”5.

3——Ibid., 14.

4——Unpublished interview of Deena Metzger conducted by Ilee Kaplan and Francine KolaBankole, June 18, 2010.

5——Unpublished interview of Don Kilfhefner conducted by Ilee Kaplan and Doreen Seelig, April 24, 2010.

6——Ibid.

7——See The Independent: The Newspaper of the NYC Independent Media, September 21, 2006, http://www.independent. org/2006/09/sdstimeline/, accessed July 11,2011.

8——Don Eggert, “Cazadero Confluence,” Plain Rapper, vol. 1, no. 2, February 10, 1969. In an email to the author sent on March 2, 2011, Bob Zaugh said the following about the Resistance: Certainly David Harris was the public face of the Resistance, but ultimately, the acts taken by the resisters were taken alone, and consequences were faced alone. Many in the Resistance took these actions and then defended themselves in court without attorneys. This meant that the actions would not be diluted by some legal rhetoric. This is what I did and not only many others but specifically at least five people from Peace Press.

Once Jerry Palmer bought the AB Dick and got it up and running it was moved

desire and intention to create social and political change, as well as artists who attempt to affect change through both their work and their actions.

Beyond providing a needed service for groups that were often marginalized and beleaguered, Peace Press represents a distinct and meaningful cultural moment that had remarkable influence. By pursuing activities focused on social change, Press artists created a profound legacy of meaningful work that comments on political issues and forms a foundation upon which contemporary artists have continued to build.

Peace Press tells a unique story about an important strand of art history in Southern California.

First Impressions Peace Press had consciousness. Peace Press was committed to standing behind people who wanted to make change, who were trying to introduce new ideas into the culture. It was a great asset to us. I was very happy to be published by Peace Press. —Deena Metzger4 It’s very important that we create organizations that have a political consciousness; that have a sense of service to the community; that have a sense of social change; and that those organizations be supported by the rest of us. —Don Kilhefner5

During the Viet Nam War era, many rallying cries polarized the American public. Whether viewed as a stand against Communism, an economic strategy, or a war that the “rich wage and the poor fight,” the Viet Nam War stimulated grassroots activism that inspired social change in numerous aspects of American culture. Draft resisters, farm workers, feminists, African Americans, Chicanos, and Asian Americans formed unions, collectives, and committees dedicated to civil and social rights. Professionals and students joined together to challenge the status quo. Communities banded together to resist outside developers and unwanted city policies.

All of the groups needed a voice, a way to communicate with their constituencies and the general public. In those pre-Internet days, print was an accessible format for distributing information. However, during a time when computers were room-sized rather than lapsized, when quick-print and copy shops were not found on every block, organizations had to

35

rely on commercial printers—businesses that often refused to print materials for progressive groups. Whether they feared harassment from government agencies or simply disagreed with the groups’ politics, many printers would not produce the fliers, brochures, and other publications needed for social change activities. For example, Don Kilhefner, an early gay rights activist, described the situation for the homosexual community: Gay people were routinely arrested just for walking a little funny on the streets, or maybe for men touching each other, or being at dances together. We felt that one of the things we needed was consciousness about what to do when arrested. I devised this little brochure and took it to two printers thinking that this would be a quick deal.

Both of them refused to print it. They said, “We want nothing to do with homosexuals—Gay Liberation, you sound like a radical organization.” Business people would follow their political views and have nothing to do with us whatsoever. We even had situations here in Los Angeles of funeral parlors not allowing gay people to be buried by them because they were gay. We actually, on two occasions, had the viewing in a gay bar with the casket up on the bar and then from there, took it to the cemetery. That’s what we were up against in 1969.6

Peace Press was founded based on the communication needs of two Los Angeles groups: Students for a Democratic Society and the Resistance. SDS grew out of the fifty-year-old League for Industrial Democracy to become a nationally recognized anti-Viet Nam War movement that inspired support on numerous college campuses. SDS was particularly prominent through the late 1960s.7 The Resistance focused on opposition to the draft. Members of the Resistance offered counseling to young men who were drafted, distributed information about options to the draft, and supported those who chose public civil disobedience to end the war.

Many of these activists went to prison for their choices.8 The “Alternative Everything” Press

The story of Peace Press takes us from an under-furnished office in Westwood, California, next door to the John Birch Society, to a fully equipped printing business in Culver City. A

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

into the Vietnam Summer offices in Westwood where the Resistance ultimately took over and began paying the rent. We were backed by many from the religious community including Clergy and Laity Concerned. We took care of the rent, taught ourselves how to print, and began putting out our own statements about the war and our Resistance newsletter.

There was also heavy involvement by SDS. But when the Peace Press moved, it always moved to a Resistance location even though SDS continued to use Peace Press.

The Resistance, therefore, was crucial to the launching and continuation of Peace Press. However, politically, the Resistance was heading to a dead end as a growing organization because to belong meant that you had committed political acts that would most likely end up resulting in prison time, therefore you would be through at Peace Press. One by one people learned how to print, did their actions, and went to prison.

A main position of the Resistance was nonviolent direct action through thoughtful acts of civil disobedience. That tradition actually stayed with Peace Press and in the late ’70s and early ’80s various Peace Press people were jailed for civil disobedience. John Fitzgerald, Gene Mandish, Mick Harragin, Merrill Kagan come to mind as those who were arrested.

This tradition started when some of them came to see me get arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1978.

Although many saw civil disobedience as a ridiculous stance to confront imperialism and aggression I think that history has shown that the willingness to put your own freedom and life at risk through nonviolent action is what has actually toppled regimes and brought social change.

A COLLECTIVE HISTORY

collective that began with young political activists producing brochures on a jerry-rigged press by trial and error evolved to seasoned printers publishing books and four-color posters, fliers, and brochures for businesses and community groups throughout Southern California.

Jerry Palmer, one of the founding members of Peace Press, and Sherna Gluck (now emeritus professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, who, during the 1960s, helped run the Los Angeles Resistance office) have described the numerous addresses of the early Peace Press facilities.9 As a result of frequent harassment by the FBI, city officials, and members of the Los Angeles Police Department, the press’ location alternated between office spaces, garages, and apartments located from West Los Angeles to downtown. Around 1969, Palmer rented a storefront on La Cienega. As collective members began to acquire more presses, cameras, and other equipment, they also improved their skills and began to acquire more commercial accounts in addition to the political projects.10 The Press’ reputation began to attract people like Henry Klein and Bonnie Mettler, who not only had strong political ideals but also printing and visual arts training.

On January 9, 1972, the La Cienega storefront burned down. It is unclear whether the cause was sabotage or a faulty heater, but sabotage was suspected. Bob Zaugh (at the time, the member with the longest tenure at Peace Press) described a poignant scene of the damaged workroom: a plate with the still recognizable face of Angela Davis positioned, ready for printing the next day, on the half-melted press bed.11 Thanks to Joe Schwartz, photographer and printer, and Ken Stone, fine arts printer and son of writer Irving Stone, Peace Press moved to temporary quarters and was running again just forty-eight hours later. After receiving an insurance settlement of about $18,000, the collective then moved to a 3,000-square-foot building on Willat Avenue in Culver City. This site served as the home of Peace Press for the next fifteen years.

After the Viet Nam War ended, the collective added “alternative everything” book publishing to its services. The Press published over thirty titles on topics ranging from literature to ecology, politics, philosophy, psychology, health, and herbs; authors included Deena Metzger,

Howard Fast, Timothy Leary, David Luna, and Janette Rainwater. The instructional manual Complete Guide to Growing Marijuana, of which 250,000 copies were printed, was probably the best-selling publication. In addition to its work with progressive community groups, Peace Press printed posters for Fox Venice Theater, contemporary music concerts, and, among other presenting companies, the renowned Ash Grove founded by Ed Pearl, a club that featured American folk music.

In the mid-1980s, according to John Fitzgerald and Jonathan Kawaye, after considerable deliberation the collective decided to sell the business.12 A promising buyer backed out at the last minute. Meanwhile, National Promotions and Advertising (NPA) hired Peace Press to print promotional posters for rock and roll concerts. Gradually, NPA took over more and more of the shop’s time and priorities until, as Fitzgerald stated, “it was no longer Peace Press and NPA, it was just NPA.” Peace Press thus went the way of many organizations founded in that exciting and volatile mid-20th-century period. However, Peace Press left a series of practices and a body of work that remain relevant and warrant continued consideration today.

Members of the Peace Press collective struggled to find the balance between supporting social change causes and operating a business; between working with trained technicians and hiring political activists; and between volunteerism and paying a decent wage to collective members. The Press’ initial intention was to support an antiwar political agenda. Other goals evolved. Bob Zaugh describes how Peace Press began to change: For the first couple of years, it was a labor of love. People came in and they put in three, five, six hours at a time, and they got no pay. Bonnie Mettler worked for $5 a week for a year. Times were different then.

I was homeless. You could be homeless then and be comfortable. I lived in a Volkswagen van, in the sand, and in a garage for at least a year. I didn’t notice at all. I went to Peace Press every day. For about three or four years, Jerry Palmer, who had financed Peace Press, got a straight job. He was a genius. He paid for equipment and we would donate our labor. He put up these big charts on the wall and showed us how we could,

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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36 9——Unpublished interview of Jerry Palmer conducted by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, Francine Kole-Bankole, and Carol A. Wells, May 17, 2010.

10——Unpublished interviews of Jerry Palmer (previously cited) and Sherna Gluck conducted by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells, March 23, 2010).

11——Unpublished interview of Bob Zaugh conducted by John Ciulik, Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells, February 2010.

12——Unpublished interviews of John Fitzgerald (conducted

by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells, August 12, 2010) and Jonathan Kawaye (previously cited).

theoretically, make a living doing this. That was a problem for some people like Irene [Wolt] who couldn’t fathom making a living at what we were doing. She felt that we should continue to volunteer. That’s pretty much when she left. Others of us thought that instead of having a side job, serving coffee or something, and then volunteering at Peace Press, you make this your job. Then you can become adept at your skills. You would learn how to print, how to design. That’s the direction we chose.13

Often members of the collective would do projects for community groups for the cost of materials or even for free. To support meaningful causes, Peace Press members would agree to produce projects without a client to initiate them.

Henry Klein tells the story about two posters produced and paid for by Peace Press in 1974 in support of two Native American activists: Paul Skyhorse and Richard Mohawk were both American Indian Movement (AIM) activists.

Eastern Woodland Indians from the Mohawk Tribe, they headed out to California in order to get other tribes to become more active in the Native American rights movement as a whole. This was just after the confrontation between the FBI and the Native Americans by Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota. Paul and Richard had spoken in Los Angeles and they had taken a cab from there to Ventura County, to AIM Camp 17. The cabdriver was subsequently murdered. I’m not sure exactly why; I presume for the fare.

But, in any case, an FBI informant said that Paul and Richard had done it.

It was such a big nasty case in Ventura County that there was a change in venue and Paul and Richard were moved to a jail in Los Angeles. While in jail, Paul was beaten and, I think, brain damaged as a result of the beating. Peace Press became very caught up with their defense. We did everything pro bono for them including designing and printing two posters. We went to their rallies and tried to do whatever we could to support them. Ultimately they were freed because the FBI was unwilling to let the evidence out.

There was very good evidence to suggest that the person who accused them, the FBI informant, was the person that actually killed the cab driver.14

37

New Peace Press hires worked for six months on probation. After that first six months, they became voting members of the collective. The core of the decision-making process was a weekly meeting on Thursday mornings. Often volatile, these meetings allowed the members to explore a range of issues, including which jobs to take and how each project aligned with the Press’ ethical standards. Klein described those meetings:

13——Unpublished interview of Bob Zaugh.

Some of our clients would tear their hair out because they would come down to the shop on a Thursday, wanting to do a job and there was nobody there to talk to them. We would leave one person in the front office so they could come in, but that was about it.

Meanwhile, we were having a knock-down-dragout fight in the back room around our lunch table over what we were going to do and what we weren’t going to do.15

15——Ibid.

Zaugh and Klein described an example of the collective’s efforts to only engage in projects that agreed with its members’ political beliefs: We helped start WET Magazine, the magazine of gourmet bathing—devoted to various ways of getting wet: hot tubs, spas, bathhouses, and bathroom appliances. The publisher was a pretty well-known artist and graphic designer, Leonard Koren. He was part of the muralist group, the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad. Each magazine was treated differently in terms of its layout and design. It got to be something that was very important to graphic designers here in L.A., and they would do it pro bono just for the opportunity to play.16

As Klein further described, We financed Leonard by giving him the credit to get this thing going. A lot of the people who had ads in the magazine were our other customers. One of them did an ad that was a takeoff on the [19th-century Edouard Manet painting] Luncheon on the Grass. They had a naked woman with three clothed men. It was an updated take with photo models. Our big press operator was a woman at the time. She totally objected to this image as being sexist. So we said that we couldn’t print this. Although he wasn’t happy about it, Leonard went back to the company and they came up with a solution. They left the area blank. You could see the outline, but

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

14——Unpublished interview of Henry Klein conducted by John Ciulik, Elizabeth Hanson, and Ilee Kaplan, March 5, 2010.

More details about the case can be found on page 157.

16——Unpublished interviews of Bob Zaugh and Henry Klein.

A COLLECTIVE HISTORY nothing inside of it. That’s what we printed in the magazine.17

When asked about his experience with Peace Press, Leonard Koren responded: The relationship was good. It got to a point where the material in Wet was construed by a few of the workers at Peace Press as being sexist. There was imagery of women that I think some people found demeaning.

Peace Press was a cooperative and there was a kind of consensus that they tried to achieve in doing things. I decided that I either should change the subject matter in a couple cases of the magazine, or maybe find another printer. It was all very amicable; there were never any bad feelings. I understood their point of view, but I disagreed with the way they interpreted things in this sense, that what I was doing was not in any way demeaning. I was coming from a different frame of reference and the context I was operating in, which was very specific, didn’t have any of the same negative values that they perceived. So we went our separate ways. But I am eternally grateful to Peace Press for their graciousness and generosity and hospitality.18

Peace Press members created an environment that reinforced their political ideals. They did not recognize Columbus Day or Veterans Day as holidays. Instead of religious holidays like Christmas, they celebrated the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter and summer solstices. Everyone had his or her birthday off and on the next day enjoyed a party at the shop. The bathrooms were not labeled “men” and “women.”

Rather, they were called “North” and “South.”

Music played constantly, and a family of rabbits lived in a hutch located in the reception area.

As a fringe benefit, the Press hired cooks to make lunch for the entire membership each day.

Cooks included professional chefs like Maude Simmons, who still caters for the movie industry; artists like Nancy Youdelman; and activists like Paul Cassidy, who started as a cook and later worked as a printer. They provided a daily lunch that allowed everyone to relax within the Peace Press facility. Communal lunches, parties, camping trips, and other outings encouraged an extraordinary bonding among the Peace Press members that inspired lifelong friendships and partnerships.

The Press encouraged and supported acts of civil disobedience. Collective members came to work at Peace Press while involved with trials regarding draft resistance and after they had returned from serving prison sentences for that cause. Zaugh tells the story about Greg Nelson, who refused to be drafted: When we started, many of us were preparing to go to trial for resisting the draft.

Going to trial without attorneys meant prison. [Greg] was non-registered and one of the youngest people tried in court. He saw the movie Beckett, where Beckett forces the powers-that-be to come in the church to get him. So, Greg, sent his mother to the court on the day of this trial. She read a statement that he was not going to show up in court, he was going to claim sanctuary. We printed up these fliers and he took sanctuary in the church down on 78th and Figueroa.

He chained himself to the altar. A bunch of us chained ourselves to him with priests and rabbis on national television. The Feds had to come in with big bolt cutters, cut him out, and take him away to court. He went to prison. When he got out, he came back to Peace Press.19

After the war ended, civil disobedience activities focused on other issues, including nuclear power and the environment. Artist and Peace Press client Don Farber, in a September 13, 2010, interview, described his inspiration for the Alliance for Survival logo. He based his design on an illustration in a tattered natural history book from his childhood produced decades before the first moon landing. The artists depicted a scene as if the viewer were standing on the moon and looking at earth. This cosmic view underscored the Alliance for Survival’s concerns regarding longterm damage from nuclear power.

In addition to the poster printed by Peace Press, the logo was used on T-shirts, letterhead, and signs during demonstrations.

As the business grew in sophistication and technical capabilities, more members joined who had strong skills as printers but less interest in the collective’s political goals and practices. Jonathan Kawaye described this trend: There was a sense of community in the beginning. Everybody was part of some political organization and doing the marches, things

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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38 17——Unpublished interview of Henry Klein.

18——Unpublished interview of Leonard Koren conducted by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells, June 7, 2010.

19——Unpublished interview of Bob Zaugh.

of that nature. When I came in, it was more of a commercial printing facility than a true political venture. Therefore, in the later stages, it was hard to get people involved. I’m sorry to say that most pressmen aren’t politically active and you only get, basically, people who want jobs. During the latter stages of Peace Press, we needed skilled labor. We needed these people whether they were politically active or not.

There was a conundrum because there were the people that had been there for many years, still trying to strive for these political agendas. You also had people that were very lukewarm, not wanting to deal politically because they weren’t political. It caused a little bit more friction during the later stages. At my first general meeting, there was a long discussion about publishing and how there was a demand. The head of publishing said that he wanted “20 percent of the publishing or I’m walking out.” A few people replied, “So get out of here then!” He said, “OK, I will!” [Everyone, after probation, received the same salary.]20

John Fitzgerald, who joined Peace Press around 1980, described the differences in the collective’s structure: We were still in the facility in Culver City and almost all of the old Peace Press employees were still there. But as far as the decision-making, rather than being a formal collective where they had weekly meetings, the decisions were made basically by this partner who had bought in from NPA and the leadership of the old Peace Press. It was more like an executive committee rather than a full cooperative, like a typical business model. But it was still Peace Press. We had the kind of respect and relationships with each other that were a lot more equal and there was still a lot more consciousness about the political agenda of some of these clients.21

Although the Peace Press collective transformed into a more traditional business, it left a multitiered legacy that will be explored through the works discussed throughout this catalog, as well as the comments of those who were involved with the Press during its existence.

39 The Legacy of Peace Press

Several of the interviewees for this project pointed out the irony of Peace Press: how the skills that were so laboriously acquired to produce printed materials are now completely obsolete. Much of the work in print shops is now done by computers. In fact, today’s activists don’t need commercial printers at all. They can “publish” on their laptops and make hundreds of copies inexpensively at a local copy shop. Further, for many contemporary activists, communication occurs through online social network sites that require no printing at all.

However, according to Carol A. Wells, posters are still being produced and still contribute to the ongoing political dialogue. Wells is convinced that the current poster renaissance is due, in part, to the Internet.22 Fitzgerald added his opinion about the continuing value of the printed page: I think that the act of handing somebody a leaflet is a personal thing. People don’t grow political or reach any kind of political understanding because they read about it. It’s because they heard about it from a person. There’s that moment of handing somebody a leaflet and you have a physical, personal contact with another person. I’ll go ahead and do the research on the web, but it starts because people touched you. The social media, Facebook, is wonderful because it has helped us reconnect. But we needed to be already connected. The primary experience has to be personal and real. The medium that makes it happen is ink on paper. You see a poster and you know that someone had their hand on it, did some real work to make it happen. When you see a poster that’s really well designed or something done by hand like a linocut, that’s what stops traffic, makes people think.23

When asked about the legacy of Peace Press, Henry Klein replied: Where I see the relevance of Peace Press is a demonstration of what people can do as a raid against the massive machine of corporations. Whether they do it by means of the Internet or blogs or YouTube, there are many ways of going about it. Peace Press was a demonstration that you can have an effect— you can make a choice and find the means. I

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

20——Unpublished interview of Jonathan Kawaye.

21——Unpublished interview of John Fitzgerald.

22—See Carol A. Wells, “Why the Poster in the Internet Age?” in The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Justice, and the Environment ,1965–2005 (Boston: Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2005, 11–13).

23——Unpublished interview of John Fitzgerald.

A COLLECTIVE HISTORY think that in itself is extremely important.

As a business concept, the idea of a collective, where shared decision-making and issues of morality can be raised in a work place, is something that people can embrace.

When Merrill Kagan-Weston came through the press and talked about how Peace Press has continued to inspire the printing business that she and her husband run, the model is a viable one. It’s something well worth thinking about and replicating in the workplace.24

In a more personal vein, Melinda Grubbauer related: My husband, Peter, passed away three years ago. Every day, I would stand in the hospital, outside the intensive care unit, and have talks with his doctor. We stood right next to a poster for the Venice Family Art Collective that Peace Press printed. It was comforting for me to see that poster there because it was one little touch of familiarity in that sterile environment.25

Appropriation and Image Recycling: 41

40 24——Unpublished interview of Henry Klein.

25——Unpublished interview of Melinda Grubbauer conducted

by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells, August 20, 2010.

26——Unpublished interview of Don Kilhefner.

Carol A. Wells

Peace Press has provided lasting impact at several levels: the creation of materials that document the political issues of the late 20 th century; the existence of an alternative model for conducting business according to ethical principles; and the enrichment of the lives and careers of collective members who worked at the Press during its twenty years of activity.

Don Kilhefner pointed out the “valuable, critical role” that Peace Press played, especially its support of such militant organizations as the Gay Liberation Front: Peace Press holds a special place in my heart that will never go away.... When no one else would deal with us, Peace Press always had an open door—very gay friendly, very lesbian friendly, very woman friendly, very social change friendly.26

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

Common Practice in Designing

APPROPRIATION AND IMAGE RECYCLING

Good design that is economical and quickly produced is so rare in commercial advertising that it is often said that one can have two of the three but never all three. In the world of grassroots social activism, there is rarely enough time or money, but the design must grab viewers’ attention and the message must be clear and immediately understood. While some political posters are made with sufficient lead time, the majority are made in response to a crisis or emergency, resulting in little time for reflection or graphic originality. Limited resources within social movements often necessitate art that is donated or done quickly. Although the majority of social movement posters made during and since the Viet Nam War era were made by people with an arts background, few were trained graphic designers.1 Where subtlety, authorship, and uniqueness are highly valued in the fine arts, these qualities are not critical factors for an effective protest poster.2 Subtlety can actually weaken the impact of a protest poster. If a poster’s meaning isn’t immediately understood by someone walking or driving by, it is not an effective design.

The use of one artist’s image in another artist’s work—or image appropriation—is a widely accepted practice that is only occasionally debated in the fields of fine arts, advertising, and protest graphics. In 2008, Shepard Fairey used Mannie Garcia’s Associated Press photo of Barack Obama, without permission or attribution, generating a controversy about appropriation and fair use of images. Although legally settled, the incident continues to be debated. 3 Had Fairey not produced an iconic poster that played a role in changing U.S. history and the history of graphic design, little attention would likely have been paid to his unauthorized use of another’s work. In fact, the practice of straight-out copying the art of others goes back thousands of years. The Romans copied the Greeks, and early Christian manuscripts used earlier Christian manuscripts as templates.

Edouard Manet’s manipulated but intentionally recognizable Renaissance appropriations for Déjeuner sur l’herbe demonstrated his claim of artistic freedom while exposing the hypocrisy of the 19th-century Parisian art establishment. The work also promoted Manet into one of the 19th-century’s art superstars. Creative appropriations later catapulted Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol into 20 th-century art superstars.

Appropriations are even more common in protest graphics than in the fine arts, and poster artists have freely appropriated from other art forms—especially from other posters—since the earliest political posters were made.

The most famous and widely distributed U.S. political poster ever produced—Montgomery Flagg’s 1917 depiction of Uncle Sam pointing at the viewer and saying, “I Want You for the U.S. Army”—was openly modeled after a 1914 British recruitment poster showing Lord Kitchener in a similar pose.4 That the Soviets produced an almost identically posed recruiting poster in the 1920s demonstrates that effective design for a cause took priority over originality.

Image appropriations in protest posters also link struggles of the present to struggles of the past. As most protest posters are made for a specific event and are then discarded, image recycling keeps effective graphics from disappearing. Appropriation can take various forms: reusing an entire poster unchanged; changing or adding only the event time, date, or place; or incorporating recognizable images into other designs. As the posters printed at Peace Press frequently appropriated available images—whether designed by the collective’s own artists or by outside organizations—exam-

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

WELLS

42 1—The term “graphic design” was first used

by William Addison Dwiggins in 1922. See Alan and Isabella Livingston, Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) and Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Pearson Education, 2009).

See also http:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Graphic_design, accessed August 13, 2011.

2—Although protest graphics are often unsigned, produced by collectives, or anonymously, well-known artists such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso, Claes Oldenberg, and others frequently designed political posters for diverse peace and justice movements.

3—On January 1, 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported a settlement of copyright claims between the Associated Press and Fairey. Two days later, WSJ corrected the article, saying that the AP’s claim against Fairey’s Obey Clothing—which markets merchandise bearing the Barack Obama “HOPE” image, the subject of the lawsuits—was still pending.

4—According to the Library of Congress, more than four million copies of the poster were printed during World War I (http://www.loc.gov/ exhibits/treasures/ trm015.html, accessed June 6, 2011), and it was revived for World War II and the Viet Nam War, and continues to be used today. Flagg used his own face for that of Uncle Sam (adding age and the white goatee), he said later, simply to avoid the trouble of arranging for a model.

The 1914 recruitment poster depicting Lord Kitchener, then British Secretary of State for War, above the words WANTS YOU was the most famous image used in the British Army’s World War I recruitment campaign. Alfred Leete designed the poster.

ination of these appropriations provides important insights into the overall production of protest posters.

One form of appropriation, often referred to as subvertising (as opposed to advertising) or culture jamming, reproduces, alters, or recontextualizes familiar advertisements to make a political point. 5 Although subvertised posters have been popular since the Viet Nam War, only two examples are known to have been produced at Peace Press. In the 1970s, the New American Movement commissioned Peace Press to reproduce a 1932 advertisement for Scot Towels.6 The poster/ad shows a scowling worker trying to dry his hands and asks the question, “Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?” The second poster reproduced a 1953 Life Magazine ad featuring Ronald Reagan promoting Van Heusen shirts (see page 161 for both posters). Peace Press reproduced this poster several times during Reagan’s presidency. Although neither of these posters altered the original ad other than to acknowledge that it was a reprint and added a line about the original printing date, both ads are basically unchanged.

What has changed, and what qualifies them as subvertisements, is the ironic comparison that results from placing them in a contemporary context. This reverse anachronism subverts the original intent by making both posters into absurd, “truth is stranger than fiction” artifacts, and visually ridiculing the once-serious claim that quality paper towels can keep workers from being attracted to communism, or that an actor/salesperson is qualified to be president.

43 5—See Subvertisements— Using Ads & Logos for Protest, an online poster exhibition produced by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, at www.politicalgraphics.org.

6—The New American Movement (NAM) was part of the New Left, and was also a client of Peace Press.

NAM was founded in 1971 following the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969. Victor Cohen writes about NAM’s origins and founding of the Socialist Community School in Los Angeles in 1975.

See Victor Cohen, “The New American

Movement and the Los Angeles Socialist Community School,” The Minnesota Review, Fall/Winter 2007, no. 69, (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Carnegie Mellon University), 139-51. The article is also available online at http://www. theminnesotareview. org/journal/ns69/ index.shtml, accessed August 13, 2011.

Although the poster is undated, it was most likely produced after 1975 and well before 1983, when NAM merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become The Democratic Socialists of American.

In addition to being an important but under-recognized and often undervalued art form, protest posters are also primary historical documents containing information that may have been common knowledge at the time the poster was made, but decades later has been obliterated or forgotten. Posters include references to countless demonstrations that never received press coverage, political prisoners that did not obtain the stature of Angela Davis or Leonard Peltier, and small, local organizations that only lasted a short time. But lacking a high media profile does not invalidate their importance as part of a larger peace and justice movement. On the contrary, to write a more balanced history it is imperative that these movement footnotes are remembered and documented whenever possible.

This task is a challenge on many levels, not least of which is the lack of dates on posters—the year was considered unnecessary because the time was now. Sometimes not even the city or country is identifiable.

Movement printshops like Peace Press operated on a shoestring, and even if they had the vision to save samples of everything they produced, they often lacked the resources to adequately archive and document their work. These posters may have been produced in the hundreds or thousands, but few have survived. If they weren’t destroyed by the elements or by those who disagreed with their messages, they suffered benign neglect by those who produced them. Surplus posters were often printed over to test out the next poster run, or tacked to the wall, blank side out, and used to take notes during meetings. The fact that the people who made the posters neither expected nor intended them to last past the specific demonstration, meeting, or concert also encouraged the practice of appropriation. Although many posters are highly creative and original, many others recycle effective graphics. With limited time and resources, and a product that is only expected to last a short time, original design was neither a need nor a priority, but disseminating information clearly and succinctly was always the goal.

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Support The Harriet Tubman Prison Movement, early 1970s.

See Checklist, p.175 (image on p. 114).

APPROPRIATION AND IMAGE RECYCLING

The poster made for the Harriet Tubman Book Center in Los Angeles exemplifies both the role of appropriation and the importance of posters as primary historical documents (see page 114). Few references exist regarding the Harriet Tubman Book Center, and the Peace Press poster may be one of the few posters they produced—with no other known examples, it may even be the only poster they produced. In 1971, the bookstore was part of an Ad Hoc Committee on Prisons and Political Prisoners, including the Angela Davis Defense Committee, which held a demonstration of three hundred people at the L.A. Federal Court building on September 14, 1971.7 The demonstration was one of many held throughout the country in response to the murder of Black Panther George Jackson by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971, and the subsequent uprising at Attica Prison in upstate New York.8 In 1972, the Harriet Tubman Book Center helped fundraise for the Ruchell Magee Committee for Black Prisoners.9 Although this Peace Press poster cannot be directly connected to either of these events, the poster clearly expressed the organization’s mission.

The unknown designer combined two historic images to illustrate more than a century of struggle that continued to resonate in the prison issues of the day: a 19th-century woodcut of Harriet Tubman as a scout during the Civil War, and an often reproduced 1954 linocut by Adolfo Mexiac from Mexico’s renowned Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP).10 The Tubman woodcut was first published in 1869 as the frontispiece of a book on her life.11 Although the poster reverses the image and simplifies the details, it closely follows the outlines of the original woodcut, showing Tubman holding a rifle and standing in front of a row of tents.

Mexiac’s Libertad de Expresión (Freedom of Expression) shows an indigenous Mexican youth gagged with a chain padlocked across his mouth. It was initially designed and produced in 1954 to protest the CIAorganized overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and the simultaneous expansion of McCarthyism and anticommunism into Mexico.12 On the padlock, “Made in U.S.A.” is written in English, referring both to the U.S. intervention in Guatemala and to the U.S.-sponsored attacks on democracy and free speech taking place in Mexico at that time. In 1968, Mexican students reproduced the graphic to publicize grievances against their government and to challenge the image projected to the world through the Mexico City Olympic Games.13 Libertad de Expresión was subsequently circulated widely through an offset portfolio protesting the attack by Mexican troops on students ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics, in which hundreds of students are said to have been killed in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. The official logo and type font of the 1968 Olympics are reproduced in the 1968 edition, which is also reproduced in the Peace Press version.14 The use of these two images in the context of Los Angeles and the U.S. in the 1970s evoked the emerging Chicano, black, and women’s liberation struggles, as well as the attack on free speech experienced by those protesting the Viet Nam War. Just a couple of years earlier, the image of a gagged and shackled Bobby Seale, a Black Panther leader and defendant in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial,15 had been broadcast throughout the world.16 The poster’s demands for the rights of prisoners—minimum wages, transportation to prisons for relatives and friends, and free reading

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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44 7—See http:// www.themilitant. com/1996/6034/ 6034_35.html, accessed June 6, 2011.

8—On September 9, 1971, there was a prisoners’ uprising at Attica, New York. Sparked by the murder of George Jackson and motivated by terrible prison conditions, approximately half of the prison’s 2,200 prisoners seized control of the prison, taking thirty-three staff hostage. After four days of negotiations, during which authorities agreed to most but not all of the prisoners’ demands, Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent in the state police to suppress the prisoners’ revolt. When the uprising was over, forty-three people were dead, including thirty-three prisoners and ten correction officers and civilian employees.

All but four died from gunfire by state troopers and soldiers. In 2000, after twenty-seven years in the courts, the State of New York agreed to pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit, filed by inmates and families of inmates killed in the retaking of Attica prison, for civil rights violations by law enforcement officers. See David W. Chen, New York Times, Aug. 29, 2010; and Jennifer Gonnerman, “Remembering Attica,” Village Voice, September 4, 2001. (www.villagevoice.com/2001-0904/news/rememberingattica/, accessed August 5, 2011).

9—See Black World/ Negro Digest 21, no.4 (Chicago.: A Johnson Publication, 1972), 73. In the “Perspectives” section (notes on books, writers, artists and the arts), it is noted that the Harriet Tubman Book Center was fundraising for the Ruchell Magee Committee for Black Prisoners by selling their publication Break the Chains for ten cents.

Thirty-nine years later, Magee is still in prison.

10—The Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) was an artists’ print collective founded in 1937 that used art to advance revolutionary social causes.

11—It has subsequently been used for the cover of a 2006 book on Tubman (Thomas B. Allen, with illustrations by Carla Bauer, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: How Daring Slaves and Free Blacks Spied for the Union During the Civil War [Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006]); a 1995 e-coloring book, (http://library. thinkquest.org/10320/ Girl.htm, accessed June 6, 2011); and as a fabric design (http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/74655, accessed June 6, 2011).

materials—are still unrealized and continue to be demanded in posters produced four decades later.

The designer of the Harriet Tubman Book Center poster attempted to unite the radically different styles of the two appropriated images by approximating but not duplicating the serif, all caps lettering style of the TGP poster. It is curious that the Mexiac print is an exact reproduction of the 1968 version, including the Olympic logo, while the precise detailing in the 19th-century woodcut of Tubman has been replaced by a simplified sketch that reverses the image.

Heroes, Martyrs, & Villains

As in the genre at large, many Peace Press posters focused on specific individuals, both heroes and villains. President Nixon was the primary villain, and political prisoners comprised the majority of heroes and martyrs. Some were internationally known, such as Angela Davis and the Soledad Brothers. Others, such as Richard Mohawk and Paul Skyhorse, may have been well known at the time, but are primarily remembered now because posters keep their causes and memories alive. Angela Davis was a well-known dissident, but after her arrest she became a cause célèbre.17 Free Angela Davis posters were produced throughout the U.S. and internationally, including Amsterdam, London, Paris, Havana and Moscow.18 Peace Press produced more posters about Angela Davis than of any other person—at least four feature her, and she is included in several others.

In Rupert Garcia’s 1971 silkscreen, Angela Davis’ face dominates the poster and her iconic Afro hair style bleeds off the top and side edges of the paper. Davis’ face was at that time so familiar that her name doesn’t even appear, only the words, in Spanish, Libertad para los Prisoneros Politicas (Freedom for Political Prisoners). Without asking Garcia’s permission, Peace Press produced at least two separate black-and-white posters using his signature high-contrast portrait, but the Press added Davis’ name and how to get involved in freeing her and other political prisoners.19 Rupert Garcia, Libertad para los Prisoneros Politicas, 1971, Color silkscreen, 26 x 20 inches, Courtesy of the artist, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and Magnolia Editions, Oakland, CA. ©Rubert Garcia For appropriations of this image, see Save Our Sister and Save Our Sister Day, p.80.

12—Adolfo Mexiac describes what motivated him to design the poster in a five-minute video interview. See http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JfOWkbYIXk, accessed June 6, 2011.

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45 13—Consistent with the lack of serious research on political posters, the history of this iconic and often used poster is seldom acknowledged. For example, an online description of the copy in the collection of the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum, London, has many factual errors. The original donors obtained it in 1968 from the Mexican student headquarters just days before President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz brutally crushed the student uprisings. The V & A’s description of the chains as a reworked Olympic logo and the U.S.A on the padlock as a reference to President Diaz Ordaz are inaccurate, as the poster was made fourteen years earlier and had nothing to do with the Olympics or Diaz Ordaz. As additional proof of the lack of substantive research on protest graphics, the majority of institutions that own a copy of this poster date it from 1968 without any reference to the 1954 original.

See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O101389/poster-libertad-de-expresionfreedom-of/, accessed June 6, 2011.

14—This image continues to resonate with diverse social movements. In the 1970s it appeared in a number of Chicano posters and is also featured in a 1978 anti-American Soviet poster. See Colin Moore, Propaganda Prints: A History of Art in the Service of Social and Political Change (London: A & C Black, 2010), 165. It also was used

by Mark Vallen in a 1984 flier reproduced on page 30 of this volume.

15­ —The trial followed the 1968 Chicago police riots against demonstrators protesting the Viet Nam War during the Democratic National Convention. It was a known as the Chicago Eight, and subsequently as the Chicago Seven after Bobby Seale was separated from the other defendants.

16—The Center for the Study of Political Graphics has numerous posters showing Seale bound and shackled.

He also appeared in other Peace Press posters, including Our Fight is Here Not in Vietnam! (c. 1971) and Free All Political Prisoners (page 115).

17—Davis was tried and subsequently acquitted on charges of being an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide.

18—Angela Davis is not the only U.S. political prisoner to receive extensive international attention. Since the U.S. government denies the existence of any domestic political prisoners, it is not surprising that many posters in solidarity with U.S. political prisoners are printed internationally.

From Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s to Mumia Abu Jamal now, there is often more international than domestic support for U.S. political prisoners.

19—In a conversation with Rupert Garcia in 1997, he said that he had never been asked for permission for his image to be used in the Peace Press poster, but after seeing it on a wall in L.A., it did not bother him because it was for the cause.

APPROPRIATION AND IMAGE RECYCLING

Celebrate the Victory of the Indochinese People, n.d. See p.180.

ROTC Must Go!, 1970. See Checklist, p. 173 (image on p. 24).

Iconic Photographs Reflecting the Times

Documentary photographs are popular with political poster-makers because they provide powerful images that have the additional advantage of evoking a story already familiar to many viewers. The same historic photographs featured in Peace Press posters are also used in protest posters produced throughout the country and internationally. Posters are always designed with a specific audience in mind, and the intended audience for antiwar posters is not limited to those already opposed to the war; they are also aimed at those who might be convinced. For this reason, many U.S. antiwar posters feature women and children as victims, and rarely show soldiers in combat. In contrast, posters produced at the same time in Viet Nam by the National Liberation Front emphasize heroic Vietnamese soldiers, both men and women. Unlike the U.S. posters, Vietnamese posters do not show civilian victims, as their purpose was to recruit soldiers and inspire patriotic fervor—just like the U.S. government posters during WWI and WWII. Although armed soldiers were rare in U.S. posters, armed Vietnamese women combatants were far more common than male combatants.20 One notable exception is an iconic photo of a Vietnamese soldier with a gun victoriously held high in his raised fist. This image appears in three Peace Press posters—and countless other U.S., Cuban, and European posters.21

WELLS

46 20—In many posters supporting national liberation struggles, from Viet Nam to South Africa, armed women, often with babies, were used to evoke the idea of self-defense, whereas armed men would be interpreted as aggressors. This pattern is discussed in Carol A. Wells, “Plakate zu Frauen und Krieg in der Dritten Welt” (“Posters of Women and War in the Third World”), in the exhibition catalog Kunst & Krieg 1939–1989 (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1990), 81–86; and in Carol A. Wells, “Images of Women in War,” Iris, A Journal About Women 33 (Summer 1995): 34–38.

22—Conversely, graphics designed by Emory Douglas, Black Panther Minister of Culture, were reproduced in Cuban posters. See Sam Durant, ed., Black Panther–The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (New York: Rizzoli 2007), 100-101.

23—The Cuban poster can be seen at http://www.docspopuli. org/CubaWebCat/detail. np/detail-342.html, accessed June 6, 2011.

The same photo also appears in an undated Black Panther Party poster, Free Huey Now!.

21—It is interesting, in light of the appropriation of Rupert Garcia’s image of Angela Davis, that Garcia also appropriated photography, using the face of this same Vietnamese soldier in his Fuera de Indochine (Out of Indochina) produced for the first national Chicano Moratorium that took place in Los Angeles in 1970.

Cuba produced some of the most forceful and innovative political posters of the time. They were also widely distributed and adorned many movement offices, from the Black Panther Party to Students for a Democratic Society. It is thus not surprising that Cuban graphics were often appropriated into U.S. posters.22 In 1967, Cuban artist Jesus Forjans produced the poster Now!, using a powerful photo of a police officer threatening a black youth with a baton. The poster, made for the Havana-based Organization in Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), decried police abuse and supported the civil rights movement in the U.S. The photo from the Cuban poster was then incorporated into a 1970s poster printed at Peace Press, promoting The Call, the newspaper of the Marxist-Leninist October League.23 Peace Press also printed Davka, (1970–1977), a literary magazine produced by Jewish students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Davka focused on social activism and was “part of the larger movement Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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of Jewish rediscovery among American Jews, at a time when ethnic pride in general began to gain currency.”24 Peace Press also printed a poster reproducing Davka’s Summer 1971 cover, which featured a 1943 photo of captured women resistance fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The enlargement of this particular cover into a full-size poster reflected both the burgeoning women’s liberation movement as well as the magazine’s support of expanding female roles in Jewish ritual. That the magazine opposed the war in Viet Nam and often critiqued the Jewish establishment made it a perfect fit with Peace Press.

Only one poster of Che Guevara is known to have been printed by Peace Press, and it appropriated Alberto Korda’s Guerrillero Heroico (“Heroic Guerrilla”), arguably the most reproduced photograph in the world.25 It is not surprising that Peace Press produced at least one poster using Korda’s iconic photo of Che Guevara; what is surprising is that they didn’t produce more.

Augusto Cesar Sandino was the nationalist Nicaraguan leader whose guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines who occupied Nicaragua (1927– 1933) was so successful that the Marines were unable to defeat the resistance. In 1934, when Sandino came under a safe-conduct agreement to sign a peace treaty, he was assassinated under orders of Anastasio Somoza, the U.S.-appointed head of the National Guard. Two years later, Somoza seized power, beginning a U.S.-supported hereditary dictatorship that lasted more than forty years.

In the 1960s, a liberation movement formed to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship. The movement called itself the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), taking its name and inspiration from Sandino. The FSLN overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The majority of extant photographs of Sandino show him with a large-brimmed hat. The hat is so identified with Sandino that in Nicaragua, graffiti of a large hat signified Sandino or the FSLN. At times, the hat symbol was reduced to a horizontal figure 8, as a symbolic reference to the FSLN.26 Sandino is also often shown with a bowtie, but only a few photos show him with both the hat and bowtie, such as a photo taken during a 1930 interview with Mexican journalists.27 There seems to be a direct path—altered at each step—starting from the 1930 photo, to a painting later reproduced as a poster, to a bumper sticker where the same pose with hat and bowtie were simplified into a line drawing and reversed. The bumper sticker image was then recopied, enlarged, and superimposed upon “Zero Hour,” a poem about Sandino written by Ernesto Cardenal, poet, priest, and Nicaraguan Minister of Culture (1979–1987). The background story of the creation of this poster again demonstrates the importance of Peace Press for the Los Angeles activist community.

The Personal is Political: MY STORY of a Poster

One of the most important contributions of the women’s movement—and it clearly permeated Peace Press—was the concept that “the personal is political.”28 In an unpublished interview with project Co-Curator Ilee Kaplan and Associate Curator Elizabeth Hanson, I described the evolution of a Peace Press poster that both exemplifies the use of appropriated imagery and demonstrates how the personal is political. The process of creating the poster O Hour provides a fitting conclusion to this essay.

The Call, n.d. See page163).

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

There Will Be Many Che's. See Checklist, p.173 (image on p.27).

24—See http://www. jewishjournal.com/up_ front/article/student_ union_20010323/, accessed June 6, 2011.

25—The photo was originally taken

by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the French freighter La Coubre, which exploded as munitions were being unloaded in Havana harbor. The Korda matrix is discussed

by David Kunzle, Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Natural History, 1997), 58-60. Trisha Ziff produced an exhibition and catalog based on the Korda matrix: Trisha Ziff, ed., Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006).

26—This symbol is reminiscent of the Early Christians’ clandestine fish symbol referring to Christ.

27—See http://www. destinyschildren. org/wp-content/ uploads/2010/01/general-augusto-cesarsandino.jpg, accessed June 6, 2011.

28—See Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay “The Personal is Political” (http:// mindthegapuk.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/ the-personal-ispolitical/, accessed June 6, 2011).

Hanisch’s essay was included in the anthology Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970.

APPROPRIATION AND IMAGE RECYCLING

In 1980, I was a graduate student in Art History at UCLA, trying to finish a dissertation in Medieval French architecture. In July 1980, one year after the Nicaraguan Revolution overthrew Somoza, Ed Pearl, long time activist, friend, and founder of the legendary folk music club the Ashgrove, was organizing a fundraising event at KPFK radio to support the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign. One of the many horrendous legacies of the Somoza dictatorship was a 56% national illiteracy rate; women in the countryside had a 90% illiteracy rate. Because Nicaragua lacked sufficient books, paper, and pencils, there was an outpouring of international support to buy school supplies. When Ed asked me to design a poster for the fundraiser, my first thought was that he didn’t know the difference between an artist and an art historian.

My second thought was—since I was looking for any excuse not to work on the dissertation—that it would be interesting to try to design a poster.

But I had no idea how to make one. I contacted Lee Whitten, an artist teaching at L.A. City College, and he designed and produced a beautiful silkscreen poster for the fundraiser, titled, Flores Para Nicaragua (Flowers for Nicaragua). Although I had arranged for one poster, I still wanted to design one myself.

At the time I knew nothing about the history of Nicaragua, and I remember wondering if they had a Che Guevara-like figure. I literally had never heard of Sandino. Ed introduced me to Blase and Theresa Bonpane—Blase had been a priest in Guatemala, and Theresa had been a nun in Chile. They were now married and long time Latin America solidarity activists with deep knowledge of the region. They invited me into their home, and while going through their files I found a bumper sticker with a simple outlined drawing of Sandino. I knew I had found the image I was looking for, but still needed an idea for the text.

Ed introduced me to George Fuller, a printer from Peace Press. Fortuitously, New Directions had just published “Zero Hour”, a poem about the assassination of Sandino by Ernesto Cardenal, a poet priest, and George had a copy. That was the perfect text. New Directions, gave us permission to use the poem as long as we credited them, and we were ready to go. I drew an enlarged version of the bumper sticker image and cut it out of Rubylith film—a skill I had learned a decade earlier while designing commercial T-shirts. This was the first poster I designed. I did the basic layout, and George did the rest. He helped with the design, photographed the poem, typeset the credits,

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made the plates, and did the printing. It was a two-color print job: white paper with black text, and Sandino’s portrait in red. The original idea was to do a red outlined Sandino over the English translation on white, and the reverse image, a white outlined Sandino over red background for the Spanish text. George printed both backgrounds, but we ran out of time and couldn’t find the Spanish version. This was preInternet, so we couldn’t just download it, and we were lucky to have what we had. We ended up printing the English translation over both backgrounds. Some of it was printed on glossy paper, some on matte paper. Although it looks like four different editions, we were probably just using what Peace Press had around, and it was all pro bono.

We brought the posters to the event to sell for $3.00 each. We sold very few. The event had music and speakers, including several North Americans who had gone to Nicaragua right after the revolution to volunteer for the literacy crusade. There were tables covered in posters that the new revolution had just produced for the literacy crusade, which were also being sold as part of the fundraiser. I did not buy any.

I didn’t see them as art. I didn’t see them as historical documents. I didn’t want them on my wall. So what would I want them for? But I also remember looking at the “Zero Hour” poster and suddenly thinking that more people would read that poster than would ever read my dissertation. It had a much broader appeal; it would reach and educate more people.

Exactly one year later, during my first trip to Nicaragua in July 1981, I watched a young boy trying to understand a poster, reading aloud the words and trying to figure out what the poster meant. At that moment I understood how posters work: they grab your attention when you are not expecting it through the color or the graphic or the slogan. While going about your daily life, something makes you do a double take. And then it makes you ask a question, it makes you think. The very act of asking a question changes you. Asking a question is transformative. That poster epiphany indelibly changed my life, but this new awareness started with a Peace Press poster.

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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Red in Black and White

Lincoln Cushing

The New Left Printing Renaissance of the 1960s—

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CUSHING The information officers of the New American Left have rediscovered an ancient political ally: print power. All over the country, radical and “movement” organizations have spawned their own print shops run by their own pressmen to churn out an increasing number of posters, pamphlets, handbills, and fliers. Whether it’s to mobilize a march on Washington, explain the advantages of “Free Speech” for GIs, or advertise courses at “Omega U.—an alternate uni­ versity,” the rebel presses are rolling. By the thousands, their folded-and-stapled brochures, deco­ rated with crude graphics, are being given away at hastily set up campus tables or sold in the standard subculture outlets: Barbara’s Bookshop in Chicago, the Granma in Berkeley, the Militant Labor Forum in New York, and scores of others.

—Associated Press, 19701

Every movement needs a voice, and ever since Gutenberg systematized the concept of movable type, radicals have put ink to paper to create multiple copies of documents supporting their causes. It’s also true that, as iconoclastic journalist A. J. Liebling wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”2 But at the end of the Second World War the Old Left (primarily the Communist Party, but also including other forces for change, such as the Industrial Workers of the World) was hammered down so far by McCarthyism that political presses went into hibernation. Producing public political documents could cost you your job and your family.

Viet Nam Shall Win, Rene Mederos ©Rene Mederos c/o Lincoln Cushing

The advent of relatively low cost office spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines democratized the lowest end of printing, and made it possible for unions, churches, and community groups to produce simple fliers composed on typewriters. 3 But the trickier and larger jobs were still in the domain of professionals who had the necessary skills and equipment. Occasionally a sympathetic shop or press operator could slip out a surreptitious tract, but for all intents and purposes publicly printed agitational documents like posters vanished from the landscape. It’s a remarkable fact that the

civil rights movement and the free speech movement (FSM) of 1964 relied on almost every medium but posters.

What changed the scene for poster production in the United States was the introduction of free handbills promoting San Francisco rock concerts, starting in 1965. All of a sudden, people began to realize what they had been missing—vibrant, powerful graphics they could put on a wall. Soon, the underground newspapers were doing crazy things with graphics. Cultural forces preceded political ones; interestingly, the same thing was happening about the same time in Cuba. The majority of posters produced by government agencies after the 1959 Cuban revolution had been relatively stiff and boring until visionary publicist Saúl Yelin at the Cuban Film Institute transformed the entire concept of a film poster. He encouraged a style where the graphic art emphasized the film’s content rather than the film’s stars, and dozens of idealistic and talented artists applied their professional skills to this new enterprise. The other Cuban propaganda agencies took note.

The first glimmer of the new generation of activist print shops started in 1964 in the heat of Berkeley’s free speech movement.

Their newsletter was first printed on a 14˝ x 20˝ Multilith 2066 in the basement of a home later demolished to make People’s Park. The press was owned by Dunbar Aitken, publisher of the occasional science journal Particle, but Dunbar was evicted by his landlord for printing “communist papers.” When FSM activist and newsletter editor Barbara Garson got involved, the shop was being managed by an old Trotskist printer named Marion Syrek.

Barbara describes the scene: Duard Hastings, a speed freak who was handy with equipment, got [the old press] running....We printed five or six issues of the FSM newsletter. The press did movement printing at cost. That was in the day of marches and demos with huge print runs of leaflets. We also took in commercial business at normal prices. But it was understood that in a political emergency the political jobs would come first.4

Ninteen sixty-seven saw the first generation of shops blossom. In addition to Peace Press,

Glad Day’s Biggest Press, a Chief 126: Liberation Movement News, Winter 1978

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1—“Young Radicals Rediscover and Use the Power of the Press,” Spartanburg Herald-Journal, July 8, 1970.

The current essay only begins to capture the rich and neglected story of radical presses in America.

The research on this topic is a work in progress, and space here only allows a limited treatment of the subject. A phrase in the 1975 booklet Sing a Battle Song: Poems by Women in the Weather Underground Organization expresses the challenge of compiling this sort of history: One thing I know all truths come close, are never the final verity . . .

Any corrections, amplifications, criticisms, or suggestions are welcome by the author.

2—Abbott Joseph Liebling, The Press (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 30.

3—For more on this technology, see “Cranking It Out, Old-School Style: Art of the Gestetner,” by Lincoln Cushing, AIGA Voice, October 19, 2010 (http://www.aiga.org/ cranking-it-out-oldschool-style-artof-the-gestetner/, accessed July 11, 2011).

4—Unpublished interview of Barbara Garson conducted by Lincoln Cushing, August 1, 2009.

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several other shops dedicated to social change began inking their cylinders. Glad Day Press was founded in Ithaca, New York, as a spin-off from the local peace center. The name was from William Blake’s 1795 painting Glad Day, where Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is liberated from his constraining circle and square, beaming with an inner energy—an apt metaphor for the transformative feeling of the mid-1960s. Organizers bought used equipment and learned to print as Glad Day Press began serving as a model for an independent activist shop. Although their initial priority was opposing the war in Viet Nam, they weathered shifts within the movement, including the disintegration of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the end of the war in 1973. They continued to produce materials for a wide range of issues, including Cuban solidarity, Native American occupations, and support for liberation movements in Southern Africa. Glad Day charged a sliding scale and produced many self-published projects, including posters and books. As the press began to take on more commercial printing to sustain the shop, it relied less on volunteers and cross-trained a core group of skilled collective members, proudly displaying the militant union label of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Also in 1967, in Madison, Wisconsin, local publisher Morris Edelson donated the profits from his production of Barbara Garson’s MacBird (1967) for the purchase of a used Multilith 1250 duplicator. This became the first movement press in the area, known variously as “Connections” or the “DRU (Draft Resistance Union) Press.” It only lasted two years, but the press printed numerous handbills, several multicolor posters, and the Left magazine Radical America.5 New York-based Liberation News Service (LNS), although technically not a movement shop (they rarely printed for outside organizations), was a movement resource that ran its material out on two little Chief 15s. Started in 1967, LNS sent twice-weekly news packets of articles, graphics, and photographs to member underground publications.

Also among the first of the “new” generation independent political print shops was Baltimore’s Liberation House Press, created by civil rights

activist Walter Hall Lively (1942–76) and subsidized by the Cummins Engine Foundation. The press began around 1968 as a training ground for the young black men Lively drew to his various programs, and it eventually offered a full range of printing services at cut-rates to “radical groups.”6 In 1968, the New England Free Press in Boston began a thirteen-year run in movement job printing, publishing, and that Achilles heel of all propaganda: distribution. Among their more significant titles was the feminist selfhelp classic Women and Their Bodies (1970), renamed Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1971, which sold 250,000 copies initially. Currently, thirtyone editions of the book have been published worldwide in twenty-five languages.7 Jellyroll Press was an early San Francisco Bay Area shop that mostly catered to the counterculture, but very often that community involved political work as well. In 1969, sole proprietor Thomas Morris was operating out of a warehouse on the Berkeley-Oakland border, and his story expresses the precarious and serendipitous nature of many community print shops: One night, just as I finished cleaning the press, the hair on my arms actually began to rise off the skin, and the air smelled electric. Opening the door into the rest of the old warehouse, I spotted flames in the back of the building. Looking into this incredible shop that we had built out of nothing, I grabbed the only possession that I cherished at the time, my leather coat, and made it to the front door on my hands and knees under the smoke, just as the fireman’s axe came crashing through the door. Word spread quickly (we had two communal houses nearby), and my friends all gathered as we watched the building burn to the ground.

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84 5—See J. Wesley Miller, “Largest U.S. Collector Takes You to Madison: Poster Country,” The Bugle American, April 23, 1976.

6—See Rudolph Lewis, “Walter Hall Lively (1942-1976), Civil Rights Activist & Black Liberationist,” ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes (http://www. nathanielturner.com/ walterlively.htm, accessed July 11, 2011).

Liberation House (Press logo) Liberation House Press

7—See Our Bodies, Ourselves website, http://www. ourbodiesourselves. org/programs/network/ faq.asp, accessed July 11, 2011.

Kathy Mulvihill Operating Liberation News Service Press, 1978 Photograph © Anne Dockery

Discouraged, but not undaunted, we moved the equipment into a storefront on old Grove Street (a few doors down from the Black Panther headquarters), and began peeling back the melted rubber and rust. As the restoration work neared completion, we were approached by a women’s collective who proclaimed that they were “liberating” the machine. It was their turn to unleash the magic and power of that printing press. I believe it ended up in a building filled with poetry groups near the Ashby BART station.

The small Multi 1250 remained in the

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86 Peoples Press (press logo) Designed by Frank Cieciorka in 1971 © Estate of Frank Cieciorka

storefront area at that location, where we had rooms overhead.8

Also in the summer of 1969, the Print Co-op started at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus. The core members later went on to found Salsedo Press in Chicago, but the reason for starting this first shop was typical: the need for unrestricted media access. As Chris Burke, one of the founding members, remembers: We decided to do this after the nearest printer, who was in an Air Force base town thirty miles away, began arbitrarily censoring our underground rag The Walrus (removing photos—typically naked people—and words— usually obscenities about Nixon) that he didn’t agree with. I clearly remember our first self-produced issue having coverage of People’s Park and the SDS convention.9

Come Unity! (press logo) Come Unity Press

These shops were followed by a whole generation of movement shops that sprang up in almost every major city. Madison’s second shop, RPM Print Co-op, got its start in 1970 with a grant from the Wisconsin Student Association to buy out an existing commercial printer. Salsedo Press incorporated in Chicago in 1973. The next year saw the triple birth of Red Sun in the Boston area, Resistance Press in Philadelphia, and Inkworks Press in Oakland (which later moved to Berkeley). Other shops of this vintage include New York City’s Come!Unity Press (a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective), Fanshen in San Diego, People’s Press in San Francisco, and Northwest Working Press in Eugene, Oregon.

Most of these shops embraced a distinct set of qualities: 1. An articulated political position 2. A sliding scale for fees and specific mechanisms for donated work 3. A commitment to hiring people not usually in the trade (women and people of color) 4. Membership in a trade union 5. Organization in a non-hierarchical form, such as a collective or co-op Inkworks Press, which is still in operation (as are Salsedo and Red Sun), exemplifies this generation of alternative presses. It was formed

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in 1974 by several members who had been learning offset printing at an alternative school and wanted to create a movement print shop.

Various streams of activism—against the Viet Nam War, for international solidarity, civil rights, feminism, LGBT rights—were flowing freely, and there was a deep need for communitybased media facilities. From the beginning, the shop was expected to be self-sufficient, which members would accomplish with a blend of commercial work and political work charged on a sliding scale. As a mechanism to institutionalize revolutionary politics, the shop became a nonprofit (though not tax-exempt) corporation with a collective structure in which everyone owned the press together—no one owned any individual share, as is the case with co-ops.

Over the years, the collective has sought to be a model of ethnic and gender diversity, and many members have come from other movement shops from around the country and Canada.

In its early days, the collective developed a “Political Points of Unity” to define the shop’s philosophy and whom it would serve. Inkworks has tried to be an inclusive facility serving the broad progressive community. As a way to assure reasonable working conditions and align with the labor movement, Inkworks became a union shop (International Printing and Graphic Communications Union, now part of the Teamsters) in 1978.

After the end of the Viet Nam War, much of the wind went out of the sails for movement printing.

However, American capitalism and imperialism marched on, and a whole new set of movements emerged that also required printing. Central American solidarity was one such cause, and the print shop New Americas Press (1981–85) was one of many shops in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to this movement. Press operator Adam Kufeld remembers: We were mobilizing for a particularly large and important demo. Kissinger was coming to town and we really wanted to “welcome” him.

So, we decide we needed 25,000 fliers for the Bay Area. That’s a lot of fliers on two twenty-year old presses. And we decided it needed to be two colors, for impact. Well, long story short, in our stupor of printing day and night we forgot to unmask the date and time of the demo. And, well, we were just going to have to run them all back through again, another 25,000 times, now that’s

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

8—Unpublished interview of Thomas Morris conducted

by Lincoln Cushing, December 8, 2009.

9—Email to author from Chris Burke, January 12, 2011.

RED IN BLACK AND WHITE 75,000 impressions, in printers’ terms. It’s sort of funny now, but then, well, it was less funny. But everyone pitched in, and we did it....10

The emerging women’s community also flexed its printing muscles. The San Francisco-based nonprofit Women’s Skills Center set up the Women’s Press Project (WPP) in 1974 for vocational skills training in the printing trade. In addition to the important task of helping women enter a traditionally male trade, members of the collectively run WPP also produced paid work to support themselves. WPP became a union shop in 1983, and it was joined by sister shop Up Press the next year. WPP eventually closed down due to the departure of several key members, coupled with the challenge of serving as a training facility while also producing commercial work.

The unique challenges for women entering this traditionally male trade were huge, but many found the rewards to be worth the effort. Here is one contemporaneous assessment of the situation by Jean Engle, co-owner of Ink Well Press in Youngstown, Ohio: Who are the lesbian and feminist printers?

We range in our politics from lesbianseparatist to commercial job shops. We are organized as collectives, cooperatives, partnerships, and proprietorships. Some lesbian and feminist printers work in relatively large collectively owned shops such as Iowa City Women’s Press; others of us run small enterprises singly or with other feminists. Some are part of “movement” press collectives that specialize in printing for liberation and social movements. And a great number of lesbian and feminist printers struggle to maintain their politics in the varying climates of male-owned commercial shops. We are not only press operators—we are engaged in all aspects of print and “print prep” from typesetting and layout, to camera and stripping, to binding.11 Like all other lesbians and feminists, our work comes into conflict with patriarchal, consumer values. For example, feminist-owned shops are usually working with “outdated” equipment that slows our production and restricts the range of what we can produce.

Why don’t we do as the male-owned shops do—borrow money and purchase new, better equipment? There are several reasons. First

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in importance is that most of us have chosen, by the very act of being lesbians and/or feminists, to seek alternatives to the capitalist, patriarchal business institution. We are looking to focus more of our energy on the process of production, not the product itself. That means taking time to discuss, work out hassles, reach consensus: it means trying to integrate our “work” lives with our “personal/political” lives. If we refuse to let money and production run our lives, we are going to be very wary of tying ourselves to enormous debt (and printing equipment is expensive). It is a choice about values.12

The Future of Movement Shops

From the 1980s on, new shops continued to appear with decreasing frequency. Some carved out a niche, such as letterpress work or Latin American poetry books, but the trade was fundamentally changing. Personal computers and “desktop publishing” replaced skilled typographers; inexpensive flatbed scanners and Photoshop now accomplish in seconds what used to take hours and cost a fortune.

Printing on paper itself is an endangered craft, although it’s far from dead. Scale matters. The Web can’t compete with a simple flier to get local citizens fired up about a neighborhood struggle. Tangibility matters. People will still pay something for a nice booklet or poster to take home and keep. New to the trade is Lantz Arroyo, pulling together the brand-new (2010) Radix Media print shop in Portland, Oregon. He describes his rationale:

10—Adam Kufeld, http://cispes30years. org/1980/10/foundingof-cispes, accessed July 11, 2011.

11—Several of these skills no longer exist in the current digital world— typesetting was the preparation of raw text into printable format, cameras were used to shoot that physical artwork, and stripping was the assembly of that film in a way that plates could be burned.

craziness of running a community print shop was to serve the people. Peace Press, and all the others who chose that humble path, did so for the most noble of reasons—to support an informed and active citizenry.

12—Jean Engle, “Why Feminist Printers?”

Feminist Collections 4, no.

3 (Spring 1983): 5–8.

13—Lantz Arroyo, interview conducted

by Mike XVX, “No Fucking Whey,” November 4, 2010 (http://nofuckingwhey. blogspot.com, accessed August 22, 2011).

Learning to print on an offset press has been really empowering. It’s really old technology. When I load a plate onto the press and start running it, I’m doing the same thing as someone a hundred years ago was doing. There are differences, sure, but the technique is the same, and that’s really exciting to me. My main goal with Radix, from the very beginning, has been to make beautiful propaganda. I consider it a form of activism, but it’s a factor that many times gets overlooked. Humans are very visual; if something doesn’t look good, people just aren’t going to pick it up, and they’re definitely not going to digest whatever message you’re trying to send.13

Yes, as sister Engle put it, it’s all about values.

The primary reason anyone engaged in the

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“Not Cool Enough to Catalog”:

Gregory Sholette

Social Movement Culture and Its

“NOT COOL ENOUGH TO CATALOG”

Radical social movements are vibrant, dynamic forces that generate copious amounts of visual and material culture. Yet the gatekeepers of the mainstream art world typically find this productivity lacking in some vital way. Such work is too ephemeral, too topical, or simply not sexy enough to enter through the gates of high art.

When two independent researchers visited a noted archive of social and political art located in a major New York museum, they made a telling discovery that offers some insight into the relationship between high art and “radical” materials. As they examined a collection of political posters, they noticed a series of Post-It® Notes attached to certain graphics with the instructions, “not cool enough to catalog.”1 The revelation offers a lesson about what I sometimes refer to as artistic dark matter. Think of this missing mass as the other ninety-nine percent of cultural activity that fails to achieve sustained visibility within the dominant structures of the art world, while the maintenance of institutional authority requires its invisible presence. I will expand on this thesis below, but for the moment it is the voluminous productivity of social movements that calls our attention.

For in their search for political transformation, bottom-up, grassroots movements are forced to compete for public attention by confronting the considerable resources of their opponents: government agencies, big business, wealthy elites, even the art world itself in some instances. This means taking advantage of whatever means of communication are available, including street graffiti and inexpensive printing technologies, but also sometimes sophisticated, multilayered graphics, and of course a growing array of digital media.

Historically speaking, the most ubiquitous form of dissident culture has involved ephemera: fliers, pamphlets, books, and posters made with cost-effective materials and unambiguous images. As archivist Lincoln Cushing points out in his essay for this catalog, “Ever since Gutenberg systematized the concept of movable type, radicals have put ink to paper to create multiple copies of documents supporting their causes.” He goes on to add that what really democratized publishing was “the advent of relatively low cost office spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines.” Thus small unions, progressive churches, political activists, and similar undercapitalized dissidents were suddenly able

to broadcast their views as if composing them on typewriters.2 Why then do I refer to a missing cultural mass if low-cost technology actually set off a creative “big bang” within the cultural arm of various liberation movements? Because, as those who have organized this exhibition will acknowledge, most of this passionate output has been lost: left to fade on streets, tacked to bulletin boards in community centers or union halls, folded up and forgotten in storage closets, or occasionally torn down and destroyed by the opponents of a given message or cause. Even the producers of social movement culture tend to treat such work as expendable. 3 Despite embodying considerable labor as well as often historical value, once a given political objective is attained, an event has past, or a cause is lost the posters, fliers, and street art associated with it are nullified. Neither the form nor the content is intended to endure, and in this sense movement art could be described as doubly ephemeral by design.

However, what if we looked at this mass of creativity not in its strictly material sense, but instead viewed it as part of an informally structured shadow archive—let’s call it a phantom or spectral archive, one that exists partly as tangible documents and posters salvaged in whatever condition found, while also existing—and this is key—within our collective cultural imagination? This concurrently material and immaterial archive of dark matter activity would inevitably comprise centuries of visual imagery, like an archeological site of art not collected, not recognized, and not valued by institutional high culture. It would include graphics created by an abolitionist movement that flourished in the mid-1800s, yet long preceded the American Revolution,4 as well as graphics and images produced by 19th-century anarchists, suffragettes, industrial labor organizers, and assorted socialist and communist parties stretching into the 20th century and beyond. But it would also include materials generated by religious and secular antiwar activists since at least World War I, as well as the voluminous creative productivity of the 1960s and ’70s “New” Left and ethnocultural liberation movements after World War II. Innovative as well as repetitive, startling as well as sloganistic, if viewed as an aggregate the variety, depth, and originality of this oppositional movement-generated art is not that different from the vaunted world of museum

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92 1—Whatever was the origin of these notes, they underscore the hierarchies of perceived value and importance that can crop up even within what is otherwise a carefully preserved and accessible scholarly archive.

For more on this collection, see http:// www.moma.org/learn/ resources/library/faq_ library#padd,accessed July 1, 2011.

2—Lincoln Cushing, “Red in Black and White: The New Left Printing Renaissance of the 1960s—and Beyond,” in the present volume, page 83.

3—See Carol A. Wells, “Have Posters, Will Travel,” in Lincoln Cushing, ed., Visions of Peace & Justice–Over 30 Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press Posters (Berkeley, Calif.: Inkworks Press, 2007).

See also Wells’ comments in the present volume, page 43.

Anti-Abolitionist Poster, 1837

4—For more on the graphic art of the abolitionist movement, see Nicolas Lampert, A People’s Art History of the United States (New York: The New Press, forthcoming).

Our Fight Is Here Not In Vietnam!, 1971 Red Star Rising Collective, Offset print, 23 x 17.50 inches, Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, See page 22.

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners,©1972 Offset print, 23 x 18 inches, Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, See page 113,115.

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culture. Any doubt about that was put to rest by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee’s ambitious 2010 display of oppositional graphics, Signs of Change, first seen at Exit Art in New York City, as well as the many scholarly exhibitions mounted by the Center for the Study of Politcal Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles.5 Movement culture makes available a range of visual tropes, some of which are recycled not only by “serious” artists, but also by commercial advertisers. That said, the haunting of mainstream art and art history begins with a moment of muted recognition. What is excluded is also somehow invisibly present within the institution. Like a well of seeping ectoplasm, the phantom archive passes through barriers of time and space, never simply enclosable within a specific space, be it a museum, a library, or a climate-controlled warehouse in Queens, New York, where the Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) Archive is housed. This vibrant dark matter is not somewhere outside of the art world, but lurks within the very heart of its aesthetic economy.

This may also explain the growing tendency by professionally trained artists to adapt the look, feel, and texture—though seldom the political intentions­—of dissident movement art for mainstream contexts.

TROPES of Exclusion

The massive graphic output of the Los Angelesbased Peace Press underscores the vital presence of this spectral absence. The group operated for twenty years (1967–87), collectively generating thousands of posters, pamphlets, fliers, newsletters, and books for “every progressive cause.”6 Few, if any, of these creations were intended as “art” to be exhibited in a gallery or museum. Instead, the work was produced to “serve” the political objectives of any number of concerns, including the struggle for civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, and of course peace, along with other causes linked to the New Left and Southern California’s legendary counterculture. As a result, like so many other movement-oriented art projects, much of what Peace Press produced is either physically lost or missing vital information about dates, artists, and commissioning organizations. In many cases, when such information is known, it leads back to small groups of artists and activists who either no longer exist, or whose names and mission have long since changed.

(It is worth noting that a website has now been set up to help locate missing data about these orphaned artworks and causes.7) To survive financially, Peace Press also took on commercial jobs for small businesses as well as musicians and artists. This is why among artwork demanding the release of Black Power activist and Communist Party member Angela Davis, or calling for solidarity with imprisoned Native American activists Richard Mohawk and Paul Skyhorse, there are also posters for countercultural events including a concert by the Grateful Dead and the Venice (California) Canal Festival.

One colorful graphic, emblazoned with a stoic bald eagle and splashing whale, was sponsored by the “Tree People” for a concert by New Age musician Paul Winter. Production costs at Peace Press were often arranged on a sliding scale. Movement causes were typically charged a bare-bones fee while more commercial ventures, like the self-declared avant-garde Wet Magazine, paid more because they expected to turn a profit. Peace Press appears to have actually attempted to put into practice Marx’s famed dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” However, it was the internal organizational culture of the collective that most clearly reflected its day-to-day critique of market capitalism. As much as possible the group made decisions nonheirarchically, including what production jobs they should or should not take on, how much to charge, and whether, in some cases, the images clients had chosen to print were really appropriate for a “movement printer” (see, for example, Ilee Kaplan’s discussion about the Wet Magazine cover controversy in this volume, pages 37–38).

As much as power was communally shared, so were friendships and food. But most importantly, Peace Press redistributed technical expertise horizontally within the group, including the skills of graphic reproduction as much as press management. Those members more professionally trained simply taught newcomers what they knew. As former group member Stacie Widdifield explains, “There was a generosity to say OK, you don’t know this, but we’ll teach you how to do it,” or, as Henry Klein comments, “[We] became professionals in the process of working at Peace Press.”8 Such collective “do it yourself” (DIY) learning was woven into the very ethos of the counterculture broadly speaking; however, what sets social movement groups

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5—Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee wrote an excellent catalog for the Exit Art exhibition, entitled Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2010). See especially Greenwald and MacPhee’s essay “Social Movement Cultures: An Introduction.”

9—Mary Patten, Revolution as an Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective (Chicago: Half Letter Press, 2011).

10—PAD/D 1 (February 1981). (Note: the title of the PAD/D newsletter was changed to Upfront beginning with issue no. 3.)

6—Taken from a press release regarding a documentary on Peace Press, available at http://www.peacepress. com, accessed July 11, 2011.

11—For better and worse, this closedshop mentality was doomed to disappear following the advent of inexpensive reproduction technologies. See Errol Wayne Stevens, Radical L.A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots, 1894-1965 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 29.

7—See http://www.politicalgraphics.org/ exhibitions/Peace%20 Press/peacepress. htm, accessed July 11, 2011.

8—Unpublished interview of Henry Klein conducted by John Ciulik, Elizabeth Hanson, and Ilee Kaplan, March 5, 2010.

PAD/D newsletter, New York City, 1981

apart was the way this generosity was understood to be in the service of something larger, more radical, or even revolutionary. Artist Mary Patten captures this spirit of global solidarity in her bittersweet memoir about the New Yorkbased ultra-Left group Madame Binh Graphics Collective. “We learned to make silk-screened posters, like students in revolt internationally.” 9 Similarly, PAD/D, with which I was involved in the 1980s, declared that its primary mission was to establish an “international, grass-roots network of artist/activists who will support with their talents and their political energies the liberation and self-determination of all disenfranchised peoples.”10 Calls for cultural, ethno-cultural, or international political solidarity bound together such otherwise diverse groups as the San Francisco Poster Brigade, Fireworks Graphics, the Royal Chicano Air Force, Chicago Woman’s

Graphics Collective, Syracuse Cultural Workers, La Raza Graphics Collective, Kearny Street Workshop, North­land Poster Collective, and See Red Women’s Workshop in the U.K. And a rebirth of this same spirit fuels contemporary social-movement artists like those involved in Just Seeds, an online radical graphics cooperative with members across North America. Artistic generosity and political solidarity not only set movement culture apart from entrepreneurially driven publishing ventures (or from highly commercialized youth culture, for that matter), but it also divided Peace Press and similar ventures from older Left organizations, including traditional trade-union printing shops. In Los Angeles, as throughout the U.S., unions had for decades protected their rank and file’s craft-based technical skills from disclosure.

And yet such protectionism was diametrically opposed to the collective “gift ethos” of Peace

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Press.11 These same qualities no doubt also contributed to the gap between movement culture and an increasingly commercial mainstream art world. Perhaps PAD/D put this most clearly when it argued that the group “cannot serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new forms of distribution economy as well as art.” This makes the New York Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of PAD/D’s Archive of social and political art some ten years later all the more poignant and ironic, for certainly there is no cultural space more powerful or foundational to the contemporary art world than MoMA. This is also why the museum’s meticulously maintained radiance casts such long, deep shadows of exclusion not only beyond the institution’s walls, but also within. Thanks to its privileged location at MoMA, PAD/D’s Archive has been well cared for, but its content has only once been seriously displayed in the museum. In 1988, before the PAD/D Archive had been gifted to MoMA, retired Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books Deborah Wye organized the exhibition Committed To Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art; however, it was immediately denounced by critics, including Roger Kimball, who called the show a “jumble of unadorned political propaganda without a shred of aesthetic interest.”

Notably Kimball’s review was acerbically entitled “Is MoMA Attempting Suicide?”12 One can only speculate about how much more visible the materials would now be if they had been left to CSPG, or a similar, movement-based collection. At the same time, there is something satisfyingly clandestine about the presence of this uncouth compilation of resistant culture lying in state within the bowels of the art world’s mother ship.13 Though PAD/D’s militant countercultural sentiments certainly steered some artists away from mainstream museums and galleries, its cultural separatism also pointed to the presence of a different artistic universe, one rooted in bottomup democracy and the anticipatory politics of hope. There is something striking about the way movement culture’s emphasis on nonmarket production, horizontal distribution, and collective generosity is now resurfacing among the most progressive—nay, utopian—proponents

of the DIY, tactical media, free software, and P2P (peer-to-peer) digital technology communities.14 And yet, despite all the organizational complexity, aesthetic innovation, and even farsightedness, not one major museum today systematically collects or exhibits the work of politically engaged movement art.15 That is not to say that here and there, one or another major art institution doesn’t procure a specific example of grassroots political art. It might be an iconic poster like Lorraine Schneider’s War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things, or Art Workers Coalition’s (AWC) grisly Q. And Babies? A. And Babies, or Shepard Fairey’s striking Barack Obama image, Hope.

But these captured specimens of oppositional art play a proscribed role within the museum aesthetic ideology. It is a part that typically involves one “political” artwork standing in as a synecdoche for an entire historical phase of resistant culture. Thus, Schneider is the antiestablishment ’60s, AWC is the anger of the ’70s, and Fairey is the post-Reagan angst of downsized expectations and ambiguous calls for “change.” When not filed away in a drawer these pieces are orphaned within the collection like political refugees. The reception of any lingering militancy they might still hold is isolated, reified, and ultimately managed. (At least until that moment when some independent-minded scholar or curator or interventionist artist seeks to reactivate their presence.) Thus the phantom archive remains always potentially a threat, though typically suspended in a state of lifelessness. Its real “presence” within the mainstream art world is therefore an absence that can only be grasped by gaining access to a different realm of cultural engagement that high art can neither represent, nor sustainably offer its patrons. To do so would mean to fundamentally politicize all artistic culture and thus undermine the very logic of art’s political economy that carefully separates what should and should not be aesthetically valued, collected, or enshrined.

Movement culture also offers something else— call it a set of tropes or a toolbox of images and techniques that seem to lie in wait as if ready to be appropriated and recycled when the need arises. Along with the familiar repertoire of doves, clenched fists, police, and people being tied, gagged, or otherwise repressed, there is a range of available techniques involving

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96 12—Roger Kimball, “Is MoMA Attempting Suicide?,” The New Criterion 6 (1988): 30.

13—Notably CSPG offered to house the PAD/D Archive, but MoMA ultimately won out. For more on the contradictions, ironies, and the history of the PAD/D Archive, see “The Grin of the Archive,” in Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 46–70.

14—A fine introduction to free software and open source programming is Michel Bauwens, “The Political Economy of Peer Production,” at http://www. ctheory.net/articles. aspx?id=499, accessed July 11, 2011.

15—While not an actual museum, CSPG’s work is unique in that it not only collects and preserves such work, but also mounts regular scholarly exhibitions out of their collection. In addition, the Tamiment Labor Archive and Fales Archive (both at New York University), the PAD/D Archive (at MoMA), and the All of Us or None political poster archive (at the Oakland Museum of California) are among the handful of United States repositories for politically committed movement art.

See http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/ AOUON.html.

Q. And babies? A. And babies.

The Artists’ Poster Committee of the Art Workers’ Coalition: Frazier Dougherty Jon Hendricks, Irving Petlin; Photo by Ron L. Haeberle 1968 Offset print 1970

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16—Rosler points out that her series Bringing the War Home was initially inspired “by a San Franciscobased artist named Jess Collins and by Surrealist Max Ernst [with Heartfield] only dimly in the background,”though she adds that Heartfield later “became an influence for real a few years after I began them, when his books were finally published in the US.” Email to the author from Martha Rosler, March 27, 2011.

17—See Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Boston, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 279.

Cleaning the Drapes Martha Rosler, 1967–72 From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful Photomontage

startling juxtapositions of collaged imagery typically clipped from print media, emphatic slogans either handwritten like graffiti or rendered in oversized stenciled lettering, and the rugged, high-contrast visual effects of lithography, woodcut, Xerography, and silkscreen (serigraphy) printing. But one might ask: whose aesthetic tropes influenced whom, and where exactly is the line separating movement culture from its fine art “other”? Furthermore, doesn’t commercial advertising adopt and adapt these graphic practices for its own purposes? But like the gently enveloping red and green leaves of the Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula, the archival specimen imperceptibly engulfs its prey as seduction and misrecognition play equal roles in this tender assimilation.

Counter-enclosures

Martha Rosler’s now iconic anti-Viet Nam War montages of the late 1970s found indirect inspiration in the cut-and-paste aesthetic of Dadaism and Surrealism, including John Heartfield’s antifascist photomontages of the 1930s.16 Notably, Heartfield produced his sharp satirical pieces not for collectors or for art galleries, but for working-class readers of the pro-Communist newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung).17 Likewise, the dense photomontages of Heartfield’s fellow Dadaist Hanna Hoch haunt Robert Rauschenberg’s magazine and newspaper collages of the early 1970s.

Rauschenberg’s silkscreened graphics also bear a striking similarity to certain underground newspapers from the same period, including

Berkeley Barb (cover), vol.6, no. 5, February 2,1968 Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library

Mimikry, John Heartfield, 1934 no.16, Photomontage for cover of AIZ, April 1934 © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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18—Carol A. Wells points out another ironic twist to the Warhol image. In 2008 it was “appropriated and altered by Robert J. Berman and John Colao, putting Bush’s face on the same shoulder and tie as Nixon in the original, and the words underneath stating Vote Obama.”

See http://www.artnet. com/Galleries/artwork_ detail.asp?G=&gid=1 18591&which=&ViewArt istBy=&aid=425760360 &wid=425760361&sourc e=artist&print=1&rt a=http://www.artnet. com, accessed July 11, 2011.

Calavera Revolucionaria José Guadalupe Posada, c.1910 Etching on paper

Vote McGovern Andy Warhol, 1972, Color screenprint 42 x 42 inches © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

the Berkeley Barb. Even the pioneering installations of Nancy and Edward Kienholz can be seen as rooted in the contrapuntal tropes of street art as much as the politicized antiaesthetics of Berlin Dadaism. This verdant ecology of visual tropes and graphic techniques is difficult if not impossible to differentiate into neat categories of high and low, inside and outside.Still, it should be apparent by now that aesthetic influence flows up from social movements to artists (and commercial interests) as often if not more often than high art trickles down.

The painterly caricatures and antiestablishment images of Ed Patschike, Peter Saul, May Stevens, Robert Arneson, or Robert Colescott share more than a passing resemblance to the visual style of political satire and cartooning— like the “skeletal grotesques” or “calaveras” of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, who lampooned government officials and wealthy Mexicans around the turn of the last century. The issue is not whether these artists were directly informed by specific examples

of populist and dissident culture (although we know that José Clemente Orozco was influenced by Posada and in turn was wellknown in the art world of América del Norte), but rather what hidden grammar of politicized image-making returns in time of crisis from the off-stage spectral archive. Most complex of these crossover artworks is Andy Warhol’s silkscreen poster Vote McGovern. It looks at first like an extension of the artist’s earlier portrait pieces of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elvis Presley, except that Warhol replaces the anticipated image of the 1972 presidential peace candidate McGovern with that of his opponent, Richard Nixon, who appears wearing several shades of sickly green and blue ink. One is reminded of John Heartfield’s ironic cut-and-paste image of Nazi propagandist Goebbels caught in the act of disguising der Führer beneath a flimsy fake Karl Marx beard. In Vote McGovern, Warhol uses his signature “dirty” silkscreen technique, previously employed for celebrity portraits, to mock rather than commemorate. His

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Untitled Christopher Wool, 1990 Enamel on aluminum, 108 x 72 inches Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. c.1990, Christopher Wool

intentionally coarse graphic style having entered the museum now leaves it again (momentarily) to join up with the “vulgar” political needs of social movement art. McGovern eventually lost his presidential bid to Nixon; however, Warhol’s print went on to raise some $40,000 for the Democratic Party.18 One could also argue that some conceptual artists borrowed their direct, unaffected approach to communicating information from certain 1960s and ’70s political graphics, as much as from advertising tactics. Think of Lawrence Weiner’s typographic installations, or Bruce Nauman’s text pieces, and compare these to the direct “sloganesque” approach that echoed in the streets of Paris in May of 1968.

More recently, the slushy word-covered paintings of successful Saatchi artist Josh Smith, or the large canvases of art star Christopher Wool, suggest a similar appropriation of urban guerrilla culture. Wool’s precisely stenciled paintings are emphatically inscribed with incendiary

words and phrases like “RIOT”, “FOOL”, and “FUCK THEM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A JOKE.” In a sense they appear to be political agitprop graphics minus the politics. Perhaps more helpful in delineating the absence/presence of this phantom archive is to note the way certain mainstream artists who are compelled to make an occasional political statement often do so by shedding their own familiar artistic style only to embrace the evidently “available” tropes of “movement art.”

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois produced her 1973 antiwar statement NO by repeating the twoletter word in several type styles and sizes.

Significantly, this protest graphic does not resemble any of the artist’s work before or since.

Bourgeois briefly abandoned her characteristic surreal-feminist aesthetic to make a work of emphatic “message art.” Is it a stretch to suggest that her use of bold typography and pareddown exclamatory language even resembles antislavery broadsides from the 19th-century

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NO, 2000 Louise Bourgeois, 2000 Inspired by the 1973 version Billboard for the Vienna Secession Façade Project, 2000 354 x 126 inches Photo: Etienne Rieger ©Louise Bourgeois Trust

Stop Bush Richard Serra, 2006 Photo, taken of installation in New York City Artwork ©Richard Serra/2011 Artists Rights Society ARS), New York, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Photo © Robert Polidori

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I Came Back!

John McDonald, c.1971 Offset print 22 x 18 inches Collection for the Study of Political Graphics See page 177.

abolitionist movement? More pointed still are the recent political graphics of sculptor Richard Serra. In his artistic response to the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, Serra abandoned his signature stark, minimalist style to mimic the unschooled urgency of political graffiti. Serra’s smeary, black-and-white impasto drawing of the iconic hood-covered Abu Ghraib prisoner was captioned with scrawling letters that read, “STOP BUSH.” The Whitney Museum then transformed Serra’s image into a poster for the museum’s 2006 Biennial, except that Serra’s original caption was replaced with the more ambiguous “STOP B S.” All of this seems to suggest that when one turns from making “serious” art to creating a strong social statement, it is necessary to abandon well-honed professional trappings and seek out another, less encumbered artistic directness. And yet, looking at Serra’s calculated naïveté, the work appears forced and conceptually graceless when compared to, say, the genuinely awkward and unaffected black-and-white sketch of an angry returning Viet Nam War vet featured on the 1971 Peace Press poster I Came Back!

There are exceptions of course to this detour tactic taken by those who only briefly dip their brush into social protest aesthetics. Picasso’s monumental painting Guernica appears to construct an entirely new language of protest art based on a mixture of Surrealist and Cubist technique. Yet even here the artist incorporates figures and symbols familiar to popular forms of protest culture, including a flower, a light, a dead child, and an agonizing scream. At the opposite end of this spectrum is a different choice involving the recycling of one’s own painterly imagery for a social cause. Jasper Johns chose one of his well-known flag paintings to support a massive, nationwide protest against the Viet Nam War on October 15, 1969, merely adding the stenciled letters “MORATORIUM” beneath it. This was a temporary foray into social protest art, as was Frank Stella’s 1975 poster for the Attica Prison Defense Fund.19 Stella reproduced one of his familiar black minimalist paintings, added captions in stenciled typeface (again, a trope drawn from movement culture), and essentially offered up his recognized artistic brand as a fundraising tool for survivors of the brutal 1971

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19—Carol A. Wells discusses the Attica uprising in her essay in the current volume, page 44, note 8.

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police attack at the upstate New York prison.

Let me conclude these examples by returning to another, far more effective foray into “political” graphics by sculptor Richard Serra in which President George W. Bush plays the part of the hungry Roman god in Goya’s terrifying canvas Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1819–23).20 Dark Matter

Few art historians, critics, or curators would deny that something variously described as an oppositional or movement culture of the Left has existed, and likely still does. If nothing else, it is impossible to ignore the broad scope of defiantly radical ideas and imagery in the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and then again in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. The impact of such widespread dissent on everything from advertising to high art is markedly obvious. Most will concede this but then move on, never stopping to define what that impact actually means or what exactly “it” is that produces such powerful effects. Perhaps this other cultural phenomenon operates in a world all its own, like a parallel universe or unknown country. Or maybe it occupies a space at the margins of high art, but short of Madison Avenue’s churning commercialism. Or perhaps it is something like Freud’s drives, a mixture of Eros and Thanatos mysteriously motivating action from below. Despite major efforts by independent scholars and researchers such as Carol A. Wells, Lincoln Cushing, and Henry Klein—as well as Paul Buhle, Dara Greenwald, Nicolas Lampert, Dylan Miner, and Josh MacPhee—the notion that movement-generated art is a significant component of past and present culture more broadly is an assertion that the gatekeepers of high art either ignore, or greet with cynicism.21 And perhaps that is a good thing—up to a point, especially when we consider the cooptation of radical ideas by normative culture over the past fifty years. Far more disconcerting is to assert that mainstream art has benefited from a nebulous but far larger sphere of imaginative production that lacks a precise discourse and identity. This nondescript zone includes not only artistic nonprofessionals and amateurs, but also forms of visual culture generated by politically engaged social movements, including those of Peace Press. Think of this as a kind of creative dark matter that remains invisible precisely to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of

“serious” culture—the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators, and arts administrators who nevertheless depend on its quantitative offscreen presence in ways both direct and circuitous. Much in the way cosmic dark matter and energy are necessary for the gravitational stability of the universe, this hidden artistic productivity exists not strictly outside of, but invisibly within, the heart of the elite art cosmos where it serves (and always has) to prop up the established distribution of power and visibility. And like physical dark matter, this other productivity might only be perceived by its effect on visible structures. To test this idea, contemplate the impact on art world institutions if hobbyists and amateurs were to stop purchasing art supplies, or if the enormous surplus army of MFAs stopped subscribing to art magazines or museums, or no longer attended lectures, or refused to serve as part-time instructors “reproducing” the next generation of artists for the market. We can easily see how the producers of movement graphics and other oppositional art practices might belong to this phantom sphere of dark matter that continuously haunts, informs, and/or delimits the works of visible, mainstream art and culture.

Curiously, perhaps not coincidently, something similarly amnesic and dislocated has befallen the legacy of both the New and Old Left. This strand of our collective social narrative has all but fallen out of historical memory. However, it did not drop from sight by its own volition (though infighting and factionalism took their toll). As Van Gosse points out, some American radicals were jailed, others assassinated, and some went on to organize less visibly in factories, environmental groups, and women’s organizations, as well as, of course, entering into academia.22 And while the Left has failed in its attempts thus far to radically overhaul capitalism, it still managed to advance real economic and political change. For example, it secured voting rights for women and the poor, eliminated Jim Crow policies, ended the draft, and resisted the further militarization of Indochina, among many other tangible gains. This narrative seems especially lost following the nation’s recent hard-Right shift, although the rise of a new, centrist liberal politics may be even more to blame for the erasure of Left history. After all, the Tea Party still loudly claims to find socialists hiding

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104 20—Serra’s potent remix was created for a pro-voting advertisement that ran in The Nation magazine during the lead-up to the 2004 elections.

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The Artists’ Peace Tower of Protest 1966, Charles Brittin and Mark di Suvero ©Charles Brittin Archive, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

21—Among the few “mainstream” curators who have briefly engaged with movement art are Deborah Wye, who organized the 1988 exhibition Committed to Print at MoMA (discussed above), and Charles Esche, who curated the 2009 exhibition Forms of Resistance at the Van

under every bed (just think of the conspiratorial hash made of Barack Obama’s informal connection with former Weather Underground activist Bill Ayres). But in an act of historical matricide, liberal-centrist politicians and policymakers answer their conservative hecklers that the old “angry” Left is over and done with. Even the progressive gains described above are attributed to liberals thanks to the weakened state of current political discourse. Today, the legacy of Left politics in the United States is like so many fading chalk marks on the sidewalk of our national memory. To underscore this inestimable loss with an example directly relevant to this exhibition, consider the way the 1966 Peace Tower, sponsored by the Los Angeles Artists Protest Committee, was reframed and reconstructed some forty years later.

The original protest project was located near Hollywood, at the intersection of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards. Its fifty-eight foot tower was surrounded by some four hundred smaller artworks condemning military intervention in Southeast Asia. The public outcry regarding the piece’s political stance became fierce. At one point, volunteers from the African American neighborhood of Watts, over twenty miles away, joined artists in defending the structure from conservative opponents. This was just months after Watts had exploded in riots in opposition to years of brutal, racially motivated acts of repression by the Los Angeles Police Department.

For the 2006 Whitney Biennial, a new version of the Peace Tower was erected just inside the Whitney Museum’s posh Madison Avenue entrance. This sterile, barely noticed “remixed”

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tower was intended to signal opposition to the widely unpopular war in Iraq. But even though a few of the original Los Angeles crew worked on this art-world-oriented remake (notably Mark di Suvero, who had supervised the fabrication of the first project), the Whitney’s tepid update ultimately preached to a politically receptive choir rather than moving out and provoking a wider debate within the public sphere.23 By contrast, an undiluted glimpse of a lost Left culture materializes within this exhibition. Bob Zaugh articulates the breadth of the progressive dissent Peace Press made visible when he states in an interview that “at one time in the early ’70s I had a list of three hundred political groups that we printed for.” That list almost certainly covered every significant movement organization in the Southern California region, as well as many that consisted of just a handful of members. It included the Los Angeles Black Panther Party, whose members were largely politicized by the Watts riots, and Gidra, an Asian American newsletter started by former University of California, Los Angeles, student radicals. Gidra was, in turn, linked to the East Wind, a small but highly disciplined MarxistLeninist collective that later opened a storefront on the Westside that served as a daycare center, food co-op, and host to youth-related programs. Much like PAD/D a half-decade later, East Wind’s cultural mission called for “the liberation of all people oppressed by imperialism, racism, and sexism.”24 Peace Press made posters in support of Chicano students attempting to establish ethnic studies departments at the University of California, a struggle that had spread south from San Francisco. Starting in 1968, a coalition of Latina/Latino, black, American Indian, and Asian students calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front, organized a five-month strike in consort with SDS. Chicano Studies Departments in L.A. and San Diego emerged soon after this. A Peace Press poster asks in Spanish and English, ¿Conoce Usted Su Herencia Cultural?/Do You Know Your Cultural Heritage? Other graphics celebrate gay and women’s liberation struggles, one demands the ouster of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from school campuses, and several sought to topple dependency on nuclear power, especially at the Diablo Canyon power plant located a mere 150 threatening

miles away in seismically unstable San Luis Obispo. Peace Press actively called on artists to organize against white rule in South Africa, as well as for Native American rights at home.

Graphics were printed for politically conscious artists like Suzanne Lacy and Sheila Pinkel, as well as for the highly celebrated alternative space known as the Woman’s Building, just east of downtown Los Angeles. A 1975 poster entitled Woman to Woman shows imagery and floorplans of the influential feminist space founded two years earlier and almost completely peripheral to the art scene at the time.

Once again, the contagion between a largely overlooked movement culture and mainstream art is underscored by the little known graphics generated by Peace Press.

The question that remains therefore is this: What role does this other, dark matter creativity play within the broader cultural imaginary, including in relation to that of the high art world? For if we are to consider oppositional graphics and movement culture like those generated by Peace Press as anything more than a curious historical footnote, then we are obliged to reconsider the interdependency of visual art and its phantom archive. Suddenly a different version of art history appears. It does not devalue social-documentary photography or printmaking beneath painting; it does not privilege abstraction over artistic movements like Surrealism and Dada and Situationism, with their decidedly political dimensions. Most of all, it does not demean political posters and the ephemera generated by social movements, banishing them to the archival crypt. Still, as Cushing admits in relation to what I am calling dark matter creativity, “proper recognition of this sort of material awaits a fundamental revolution. I’m not holding my breath, I’m just working within the cracks.”25 And just as it always has done, the phantom archive with its patchy, sometimes repetitive, and ungainly cultural productivity continues to represent the radical social imaginary that is always conspicuously absent.

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106 Abbemuseum in the Netherlands.

22—Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

23—Mark di Suvero worked in collaboration with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija on the 2006 tower.

24—See Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006),140.

25—Email to the author from Lincoln Cushing, January 25, 2011.

Woman to Woman, 1975 Sheila Levant de Brettville, design 17.5 x 22.5 inches Offset print ©The Woman’s Building, Inc. Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics See page 52.

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Lessons for the

Twenty-First Century from a 1960s Los Angeles Radical Printing Collective HENRY KLEIN a young art student in the early 1960s, making art was already such a rush that it seemed too good--a guilty pleasure. I wanted to ameliorate that guilt by putting my talents and skills in the service of socially redemptive goals. But nonobjective abstraction was the dominant art form of the day. The idea that one was supposed to make art for art’s sake went unquestioned. If artwork had a discernible content other than the form itself, it was already suspect.

In the schools, artistic production had been divided into two mutually exclusive categories-fine and commercial art. Fine art was pure,”and Commercial Art was in the service of business objectives. Hardly anyone intimated that fine art simply operated in a different commercial sphere in which the artwork was the object to be sold, or that issues of patronage and marketing played a significant role in that realm. Certainly, no one suggested that a commercial artist might have the right or obligation to exercise his or her moral conscience with respect to the goals of the client.

In the end, both fine and commercial artists were cogs in the wheels of one or the other commercial enterprise.

In 1968, I did a painting and lithograph that was my strongest anti-Viet Nam War image, Human Ecology. The subject was topical--in direct response to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Guns and Butter Speech.” One painting, and just ten lithographs; if it had any effect, it was only upon my fellow students and colleagues in the School of Art at Ohio State University who saw my MFA Thesis Show that spring. I needed a Peace Press to help disseminate my image. I flirted with the idea of getting the commercial printing training to actually command those media skills. While still teaching, I went back to school in a printing technology program to do just that.

As

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With freshly minted pre-press skills under my belt, I arrived at Peace Press in 1976 at age 33. I wanted to consolidate those skills and to add to them by also becoming an offset lithographic pressman. Though formerly a politically active artist, I had begun to settle down to a responsible” married life as a college professor, father of two young children, and homeowner, with a house beginning to fill with the good things that money can buy. Peace Press affected a personal redemption for me.

There I found a community of socially and spiritually committed friends. They were not caught up in style. They lived modestly, cared for one another, shared a great deal, and loved chocolate.

It triggered a reflection upon the positive side of my childhood growing up in the industrial decay of Newark, New Jersey. I recognized that I did not have to buy in to an advertising-driven, headlong pursuit of material things. Moreover, it reinforced my desire to not have my children be trapped by the lure of that kind of life. I remembered that I had spent my childhood in a three-room apartment, with one bathroom, no washing machine or air conditioning, and no family car early on. I had learned to cook, iron, do household repairs, and, later, even construction. I had shared a bedroom with my brother, while our parents slept in the living room. We went all over the city on buses, or we walked. There were public parks, a great public library, and a fine museum. I had not felt deprived!

As a student, I had hitchhiked to college and graduate school, and back and forth across the country. Often, I lived out of a duffle bag and shared a place to live with friends and fellow students also living on the cheap. I worked my way through school with only a little help from my parents; I did not own a car until I was twentyfive. My luxuries had been books and art supplies.

From the perspective of the 21st century, I had left a surprisingly small carbon footprint.

Peace Press was evolving into a commercially viable institution when I arrived. It needed the professional skills I brought to the table, but

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there was little time for me to train as a pressman, as I had hoped. Nevertheless, I used the facilities in off hours to work on a few art projects of my own that would not have been possible without the skills I was acquiring on the job and the technology available there. Of more life transforming impact was the way in which the business was run.

Early Thursday mornings at Peace Press could be a bewildering frustration to our clients. They would come in the front door to find the presses silent and only one person at the front desk. The place seemed lifeless. It flew in the face of some clients’ expectation of a commercially competitive printing enterprise. Some were not shy in telling us that we did not have a clue about how to run a business. Nevertheless, they kept coming, even those who did not share our politics. Strategically located in the low-rent district of Culver City, but just south of Beverly Hills, the wealthy would drive down Robertson Boulevard (even in their Rolls) to get a simple printing job done cheaply.

While clients shook their heads in the front office, back in the kitchen the rest of us sat around a table discussing whether or not to print jobs, or whether we were willing to commit ourselves to absorbing part or all of the costs of producing printed projects for causes and organizations whose goals and ideals we supported. No boss told us what to do or made decisions based solely upon how much money a job would bring in. No board of directors selected jobs with an eye to maximizing profit for shareholders. We were a collective with shared decision-making and a distinct agenda. We did not leave our moral judgment behind when we came to work. Born out of war resistance, we shared many political and moral perspectives. Our politics were decidedly radical. We wanted the business to survive to promote our political and social agendas as well as provide us with an adequate working wage and benefits. While the way in which we ran our business might have baffled some clients, others came to us precisely because they supported our goals and ideals.

I have called Peace Press the alternative everything press. We published books on alternative agriculture, consciousness, drugs, education,

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energy, health, and history while we put our printing skills in the service of civil and human rights for all ethnic and national communities, labor, women’s and gay rights, and the antinuclear movement, to name just a few. We did discounted or free printing for some of those movements. Sometimes we donated our labor in off hours and absorbed the costs of materials as well. When I look back at the breadth of causes to which Peace Press ultimately committed itself, it is clear to me that the collective evolved a more global view of the interconnection between war resistance and class, economic, environmental, ethnic, gender, racial, and even spiritual justice that was optimistic, life affirming, and on the cutting edge of the counterculture. Although I was only there for three and a half years, I still carry those ideals in my heart today.

Much of the technology of Peace Press is now obsolete. Nevertheless, it was a training ground for the development of artistic skills, and an empowering atmosphere in which an artist could engage in socially redemptive work. Moreover, as a business in which the collective made moral decisions about what commercial jobs they would accept or reject based on the content of those jobs, the press validated the reintroduction of moral considerations into what might otherwise have simply been financially driven choice-making. I chose art teaching as a career because it offered me the opportunity to make a difference in my students’ lives. But, at no time since my three-and-a-half-year tenure at Peace Press have my work and ideals been so completely at one with one another.

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ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE: 1967–1987

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ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE: 1967–1987

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ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE: 1967–1987

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ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE: 1967–1987

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ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE: 1967–1987

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California Timeline

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KAPLAN

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National Timeline

International Timeline

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1946 Viet Nam War begins as Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh forces seek independence from French colonial rule.

--------------------------------------1962 In Viet Nam, U.S. forces take part in first combat missions against National Liberation Front (N.L.F.).

“Agent Orange” is used for first time.

NLF wins major military victory against U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces.

---------------------------1964 Civil Rights Act passes, outlawing racial segregation in schools, workplaces, and public facilities.

Students demonstrate against Viet Nam War in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin.

--------------------------------------1965 Filipino farmworkers win wildcat strike against grape growers.

Mexican American farmworkers join Filipino farm workers in grape strike.

Watts Riots, thirty-four die.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) begins planning first national antiwar demonstration.

---------------------------1965 Malcolm X assassinated in Harlem.

First teach-in on Viet Nam War, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Voting Rights Act passes.

South Vietnam’s President Diem is overthrown in a U.S.-supported military coup.

--------------------------------------1964 Based on alleged attack of U.S. battleship, Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing president to use “all necessary measures.” Attack later revealed as false.

Lyndon Johnson wins landslide election, and applies the Gulf of Tonkin mandate to increase U.S. military presence in Viet Nam.

--------------------------------------1965 U.S. role in Viet Nam expanded from advisory to combat.

The U.S. begins bombing North Viet Nam using controversial chemical napalm.

Lyndon Johnson sends twenty thousand troops to Dominican Republic to prevent democratically elected President Juan Bosch from taking office.

Millions killed in CIA-assisted army coup in Indonesia.

Peace Press Graphics

California Timeline

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National Timeline

International Timeline

California Timeline

1966 Green Berets intervene in Guatemala.

1968 The Metropolitan Community Church, first spiritual center for gays and lesbians, founded by Reverend Troy Perry.

1966 First farmworkers’ union contract signed.

----------------------1966 National Organization for Women (NOW) founded.

Thousands join Cesar Chavez on march from Delano to Sacramento.

Students hold first sit-in to oppose Viet Nam War, University of Wisconsin.

United Farm Workers (UFW) formed from merger of Filipino American and Mexican American farmworker organizations.

Students throughout U.S. protest Dow Chemical, the sole manufacturer of napalm.

Black Panther Party for SelfDefense co-founded, in Oakland,

by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

----------------------------------1967 UFW begins international grape boycott.

The Advocate, pioneering Los Angeles gay community magazine, first published.

Brown Berets formed in East Los Angeles by David Sanchez.

Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez composes Yo Soy Joaquin, a poem inspiring many young Chicanos to demand civil rights.

Peace and Freedom Party founded in Venice by John Haag.

Fifty thousand march against the Viet Nam War in Century City. First incidents of police violence against antiwar demonstrators.

Black Panther Party’s official newspaper, The Black Panther, begins publishing.

Black Panther Party marches on California State Capital to protest selective ban on weapons.

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First Chicano youth conference organized by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez.

East Los Angeles high school students walk out, demanding equality in education. Sheriffs beat and arrest students.

Venice Beachhead, a newspaper collective, founded.

---------------------------1967 Thurgood Marshall becomes first African American Supreme Court Justice.

First list of Endangered Species released.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., condemns U.S. role in Viet Nam War. Viet Nam Veterans Against the War founded.

Youth International Party (Yippies) founded by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

Thirty-five thousand protest against Viet Nam War at Pentagon.

Fifty thousand protest against Viet Nam War at Lincoln Memorial.

Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali indicted for refusing the draft.

Six hundred artists take part in Angry Arts Week to protest war.

--------------------------------------1967 General Thieu elected president of South Viet Nam.

Berkeley school board begins first non-court-ordered busing in nation to desegregate schools.

KAPLAN

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National Timeline

International Timeline

----------------------1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

1968 Scientists hold first U.N. Biosphere Conference in Paris to discuss global environmental problems.

Age Discrimination in Employment Act passed.

My Lai Massacre of 583 women, children, and men by U.S. soldiers.

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) established.

North Viet Nam launches the Tet Offensive.

Lyndon Johnson announces he will not run for another term.

Police brutally attack protestors at Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Lyndon Johnson stops bombing North Viet Nam. Civil Rights Act passes.

U.S. bombs Hanoi.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos (gold and bronze metal winners) expelled from Olympics for giving black power salute.

Arab nations and Israel fight Six Day War.

-------------------------------------1969 California’s first African American mayor, Douglas Dollarhide, elected in Compton.

Richard Nixon elected President.

--------------------------1969 Shirley Chisholm is first African American woman elected to Congress.

Santa Barbara oil spill pollutes eight hundred square miles.

First The Whole Earth Catalog published.

El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) created.

Crew of Apollo 8 take first photograph of earth from space.

Free Venice movement founded to separate from Los Angeles County after proposal to construct a freeway in Venice.

First Venice Canal Festival.

Neil Armstrong walks on moon.

Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village, New York; gay and lesbian patrons fight police harassment, marking start of Gay Rights Movement in U.S. and internationally.

221 major protests take place on college campuses throughout U.S.

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500,000 U.S. troops occupy Viet Nam. Student-worker uprising in Paris causes general strikes throughout France.

Students, sometimes joined by labor unions, hold strikes and/or protests throughout the world including Yugoslavia, Japan, Germany, Italy, U.K., Mexico City, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and Poland.

Soviet and Warsaw-pact troops invade Prague, Czecheslovakia.

Hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City killed or wounded by government troops.

--------------------------------------1969 Nixon initiates secret bombing of Cambodia.

Nixon announces withdrawal of fifty thousand troops.

Paris peace talks begin.

My Lai Massacre made public, trial for Lt. William Calley, Jr., held.

Bombing of North Viet Nam intensifies.

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----------------------1969 Eight of the Democratic National Convention protestors indicted with conspiracy charges; found not guilty.

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California Timeline

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Dissatisfied women artists form Women Artists in Revolution (WAR).

Cesar Chavez calls national boycott of non-union lettuce.

Cesar Chavez jailed for refusing to stop the lettuce boycott.

Angela Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

Gay and Lesbian Center founded in Los Angeles by Don Kilhefner and Morris Kight.

Los Angeles Council of Women Artists emerges to protest exclusion of women artists in Art and Technology exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. First national Chicano Moratorium; thirty thousand people march in East L.A. Police attack unprovoked. Ruben Salazar, first Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times, killed by L.A. sheriffs.

--------------------------------------1971 First Feminist Women’s Health Center in the U.S. founded in Los Angeles by Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman.

General Motors’ president, Edward Cole, promises pollution-free” cars by 1980.

First Earth Day (April 22).

Women, Students, and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), founded by Faith Ringgold, protests exclusion of women and people of color from Venice Biennale.

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics published.

La Raza Unida Party is formed.

Antidraft protests escalate in U.S. U.S. National Guards kill four students during antiwar protest at Kent State University, Ohio.

International Timeline

----------------------1970 Two student protestors killed by police at Jackson State College, Mississippi.

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Bomb built by Weather Underground explodes prematurely, killing three members and destroying Greenwich Village townhouse.

----------------------------1971 George Jackson killed by San Quentin prison guards.

------------------------------------1971 U.S. invades Laos.

Nixon announces withdrawal of another 100,000 troops.

Attica Prison revolt.

New York Times publishes

Pentagon papers.

The 26th Amendment gives eighteen-year-olds vote.

Clean Air Act passes.

Christopher Street Parades take place in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to commemorate the Stonewall riots, also known as Gay Liberation Day.

National Timeline

Art Strike: One-day action at New York museums and galleries protests the war.

Woodstock Music Festival: Over 300,000 people attend.

--------------------------------------1970 Five-year grape strike ends when Delano growers sign first union contracts.

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Students for a Democratic Society folds.

Nixon signs draft lottery bill.

Chicago police assassinate Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

-------------------------1970 The Occupational Safety and Health Act passes.

KAPLAN

--------------------------------------1972 Death penalty ruled unconstitutional by California State Supreme Court.

Peace Press destroyed in fire, arson suspected.

California Coastal Act passed.

Westside Women’s Center established in Venice.

Brown Berets dissolved.

Weather Underground bombs U.S. capitol to protest U.S. invasion of Laos.

----------------------------1972 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists forms.

DDT banned in United States.

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to Constitution, granting equal rights to all regardless of sex or race, proposed.

In Eisenstadt vs. Baird, U.S. Supreme Court rules that unmarried couples have right to use birth control.

The Weather Underground bombs women’s bathroom in Pentagon to protest U.S. bombing Hanoi.

Flooding destroys classified information.

Watergate break-in.

Nixon re-elected.

------------------------------------1972 Researchers report that three-quarters of the acid rain falling in Sweden is caused by pollution originating in other countries.

Nixon visits China and U.S.S.R.

California Timeline

----------------------------1973 Cesar Chavez begins second grape boycott.

First African American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, elected.

Metropolitan Community Church torched and burned to the ground.

Feminist Studio Workshop, first independent school for women artists, established by Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven.

American Indian movement activists occupy Wounded Knee (Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation) for seventy days.

--------------------------------------1974 U.S. Supreme Court restricts power of California prison authorities to censor mail and ban inmate interviews with law students and paralegal aides.

Riot in Oakwood over property tax increase to renovate Venice Canals.

Jerry Brown elected Governor of California.

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----------------------1973 Miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, vote to join United Mine Workers of America. A long and bloody strike ensues when employers refuse to contract with union.

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The EPA requires phase-out of lead in gasoline.

Nobel Peace Prize awarded to U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Le Duc Tho (North Viet Nam), who refuses it.

In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court rules that the constitutional right to privacy allows women the right to an abortion.

Local 621 United Rubber Workers at R.G. Sloane Plastic Pipefittings demand voluntary overtime, a decent wage, and organization of a union.

The EPA is charged with monitoring water quality.

First openly gay political candidate, Elaine Noble, runs for office in Massachusetts State Legislature.

Congress passes the Equal Education Opportunity Act guaranteeing equality in all public schools.

Nixon resigns.

National Timeline

International Timeline

----------------------1974 U.S. Episcopal bishops ordain eleven female priests.

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Weather Underground bombs U.S. Department of State

--------------------------------------1975 UFW wins passage of landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act guaranteeing collective bargaining for farmworkers.

--------------------------------------1976 In response to exclusion of women in Art and Technology exhibition (1970), Women Artists: 1550–1950 opens at LACMA. Los Angeles City Planning Commission proposes construction of Marina in Oakwood to force out low-income residents.

--------------------------------------1974 Scientists reveal chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could destroy the earth’s protective ozone layer.

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Little League allows girls to play baseball.

Paris peace agreement signed.

CIA-supported coup overthrows Chile’s democratically elected government; President Salvador Allende killed. Pinochet dictatorship begins.

Spiro Agnew resigns Office of Vice President to avoid charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery, and conspiracy.

----------------------------1974 Coalition of Labor Union Women is founded.

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1973 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) initiates oil embargo, creating energy crisis.

Crystal Lee Sutton (a.k.a.

Norma Rae) is fired for trying to organize a union at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

The APA votes unanimously to remove homosexuality from official list of psychiatric disorders.

California Timeline

KAPLAN

--------------------------------------1977 State of California restores the death penalty.

Governor Jerry Brown appoints Rose Bird to California Supreme Court, the first woman to hold that position.

Amnesty International begins investigating treatment of political prisoners, including Richard Mohawk and Paul Skyhorse, who were beaten by guards at Ventura County Jail.

Architects of Governor Jerry Brown’s Office of Appropriate Technology design first energy-conserving building in Sacramento.

--------------------------------------1975 Last U.S. troops withdraw from Viet Nam. ----------------------------1976 EPA mandated to control all new and existing chemical substances being used in U.S. U.S. Congress passes Hyde Amendment excluding abortion from the comprehensive health care services provided to lowincome people.

Hispanic Caucus is formed in House of Representatives.

----------------------------1977 President Jimmy Carter announces plan to reduce gasoline consumption, cut imported oil, increase coal production, and use solar energy.

Clean Water Act passes.

Miami is first city to eliminate discrimination based upon sexual preference. Singer Anita Bryant succeeds in repealing ordinance.

Gay and Lesbian National Lobby, National Gay Task Force, and Lambda Legal Defense Fund formed.

--------------------------------------1976 North and South Viet Nam reunited.

Hanoi becomes the capital and Saigon renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

California Timeline

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1978 UFW ends boycotts on grape, lettuce, and Gallo wines.

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International Timeline

----------------------1978 In the Bakke vs. The Regents

of the University of California decision, the U.S.

March organized by the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in Los Angeles.

Supreme Court rules against fixed racial quotas for admissions decisions.

First openly gay person elected to political office in California, Harvey Milk, becomes San Francisco Supervisor.

EPA bans aerosol fluorocarbons.

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1978 Viet Nam overthrows Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

California Timeline

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National Timeline

International Timeline

----------------------1981 AIDS epidemic recognized.

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1981 President Reagan forms counterrevolutionaries, a.k.a. Contras, to disrupt and destroy Sandinista accomplishments in Nicaragua.

Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association calls strike. President Ronald Reagan fires all strikers and breaks union.

AFL-CIO organizes 400,000 at Mall in Washington, D.C., on Solidarity Day, largest rally in 20 years.

City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone assassinated.

Rufino Contreras, twenty-sevenyear old UFW striker, shot to death by grower’s foreman in Imperial Valley.

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Workers of NASSCO (National Steel and Shipbuilding Company) go on wildcat strikes. On September 16, three men arrested on false charges of conspiracy to bomb shipyard.

Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative)— to ban all gay educators from teaching in public schools— rejected.

Proposition 13 (Jarvis-Gann Initiative limiting property taxes) passes; funding for schools and social services affected.

-----------------------------------1979 UFW calls strikes at major lettuce and vegetable growers.

KAPLAN

---------------------------1979 Meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, Harrisburg, Penn.: The worst nuclear accident in the U.S., causing evacuation of 140,000 and releasing radiation into the surrounding communities.

Over seventy-five thousand people march on Washington to demand the passage of protective civil-rights legislation.

--------------------------1980 Thirty-three inmates die in New Mexico State Penitentiary riot in Santa Fe due to prison overcrowding and inferior prison services.

Superfund Bill passes, providing for cleanup of hazardous waste sites.

Ronald Reagan elected president.

---------------------------------------1979 U.S.-supported Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua overthrown by Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Guerrilla fighters in El Salvador begin war to overthrow brutal U.S.-supported government.

--------------------------------------1980 Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated by U.S.-supported death squads in El Salvador while saying mass.

Three American nuns and a lay sister raped and murdered by U.S.supported National Guardsmen in El Salvador.

Iran hostage crisis.

President Reagan dismantles the solar water heating system on White House roof, installed

by President Carter.

-------------------------------------1982 Under Governor Deukmejian, thousands of farm workers lose their UFW contracts, many are fired or blacklisted.

Amnesty International sets up Los Angeles office and launches national campaign to abolish torture.

-------------------------------------1983 Fresno dairy worker Rene Lopez, nineteen, shot to death by grower’s agent after voting in union election.

President Reagan slashes EPA’s budget.

---------------------------1982 Viet Nam Memorial, designed

by Maya Lin, dedicated in Washington, D.C. Over one million demonstrate for nuclear disarmament in New York City.

---------------------------1983 Guion Guy”S. Bulford, Jr., becomes first African American astronaut to orbit earth.

Environmental racism documented in government publication revealing that the majority of commercial hazardous waste facilities are in African American communities.

Equal Rights Amendment fails to be ratified.

--------------------------------------1983 The U.S. EPA and National Academy of Sciences release reports concluding that “greenhouse gases” in earth’s atmosphere would likely lead to global warming.

Marine barracks in Lebanon bombed, killing 241 U.S. soldiers and 60 others.

Two days after Marine barracks in Lebanon bombing, Reagan orders U.S. forces to invade Grenada.

California Timeline

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1984 Chavez declares third grape boycott.

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----------------------1984 Jesse Jackson runs for Democratic presidential nomination.

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1984 Explosion at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, sends a cloud of poison into the surrounding city of one million; an estimated ten thousand people killed and many more injured.

CIA illegally mines Nicaragua’s harbors in support of Contras.

Osama Bin Laden peddles opium and other drugs with support of CIA.

-------------------------------------1985 California and other western states experience largest known outbreak of food-borne pesticide illness to occur in North America.

-------------------------------------1986 Chief Justice Rose Bird and Associate Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin voted off California Supreme Court because of perceived reluctance to enforce death penalty.

Proposition 65 (California safe drinking water enforcement act) passes. Prohibits businesses from discharging cancercausing chemicals into sources of drinking water and requires publicly posted warnings.

The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament begins in Los Angeles, March 1, 1986, and arrives in Washington, D.C., November 15, 1986.

-------------------------------------- ---------------------------1987 1987 ACT UP organization forms to Peace Press collective folds; address and combat AIDS. commercial printing firm takes over.

Boland Amendment passes Congress forbidding any CIA aid to Nicaraguan Contras. CIA goes outside legal channels to funnel cash and arms from Iran, among other sources, to Contras.

------------------------------------------1985 First major international conference on the greenhouse effect warns that greenhouse gases would “in the first half of the next century, cause a rise of global mean temperature which is greater than any in man’s history.”

Scientists report the discovery of a “hole” in the Earth’s ozone layer.

------------------------------------------1986 A global ban on whaling initiated.

U.S. bombs Libya.

One of the four reactors at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes and completely melts down, sending radioactive particles as far away as Western Europe.

------------------------------------------1987 Warmest year on record.

Stories behind Selected Posters 155

The posters in this section have been arranged in thematic groups that parallel the order of the plates sections of this catalog. Groups include antiwar, feminism, civil liberties, environmental issues, and popular culture.

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Printing for the People/ Guernica 1969 Jerry Palmer see page 18 Printing for the People is unique among the Peace Press posters. It presents the collective’s philosophy while simultaneously advertising the print shop. It is the only work in this exhibition that offers such a dual function.

Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica depicts one of the many horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The poster links the bombing of civilians in the Spanish town of Guernica to the 1968 massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. The drama of Guernica recalls the devastating images, published and televised daily, of the Viet Nam War. Both wars have been immortalized and made accessible through the visual image.

Printing for the People also facilitated networking and grassroots organizing by listing dozens of antiwar, progressive cultural, and community groups throughout Los Angeles. Although intended to be the first in a series of posters showing revolutionary art, no further examples have been identified.

The text of Even If It’s Our Last Moment comes from a statement made by Joseph “Joe” Maizlish, peace activist and member of the Resistance. While waiting to be arrested for participating in demonstrations and refusing to be drafted, Maizlish said to a friend, “Well this is our last chance, let’s go out into the sun. We walked out and sat in front of the courthouse and then some marshals came out and cuffed me and dragged me in and all that stuff.”1� Maizlish later discovered that artist and fellow Resistance member Dale Oderman had created a poster for Peace Press based on his story. Oderman referenced the romantic idealism of the Resistance, portraying their peaceful methods through the use of free flowing design in text and images. The poster features a nude male and female, “flower children” of the time, running through a field of daisies while the floral, curvilinear text—common for the times—announces the Day of Resistance.

Researched and written by Christina Alegria 1—Related as part of an interview conducted by Carol A. Wells, Ilee Kaplan, and Elizabeth Hanson.

“0 Hour” Jazz Press; Carol A. Wells, George Fuller 1980 see page 26

Researched by Mary Coyne

Even If It’s Our Last Moment Mike Hoover, Dale Oderman 1968 see page 23 As the number of U.S. troops in Viet Nam continued to escalate, members of the antiwar organization the Resistance designated November 14, 1968, as a National Non-cooperation Day or Day of Resistance. Across the country, activists held sit-ins, protests, and draft-card burnings. However, resistance often came at a high price, particularly when it involved refusing to cooperate with the Selective Service (Draft Board). Objectors faced stiff penalties that ranged from government surveillance to incarceration. Many members of Peace Press were also dedicated members of the Resistance who were arrested for acts of civil disobedience.

“Zero Hour” is a poem in four parts by Ernesto Cardenal (b.

1925), Nicaraguan poet, priest, and proponent of the Theology of Liberation. Part I describes the military dictatorships of Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Part II focuses on the United Fruit Company and its control of the region.

Part III tells the story of Augusto César Sandino (1893–1934), a Nicaraguan nationalist hero. Part IV is autobiographical, describing Cardenal’s role in a failed 1954 attempt to assassinate Anastasio Somoza, leader of a U.S.-supported hereditary dictatorship.1 This poster depicts Parts III and IV of the poem.

Sandino organized an army, primarily of peasants, to fight a guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines who occupied Nicaragua from 1927–1933. Although Sandino’s greatly outnumbered and poorly equipped troops suffered heavy casualties, the Marines were unable to defeat them. When a truce was called to sign a peace treaty, the U.S. appointed Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

Somoza to head up the Nicaraguan National Guard, and Sandino was given a safe-conduct agreement. However, on February 21, 1934, he was assassinated under Somoza’s orders and with prior U.S. knowledge. Two years later, Somoza seized power, beginning the dictatorship that lasted more than forty years.

In 1961, in response to the continuing brutality of the Somoza regime, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was formed, taking its name and inspiration from Sandino. On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista Revolution overthrew the Somoza regime.

Cardenal wrote “Zero Hour” during the Somoza dictatorship.2 Following the revolution, he became Nicaragua’s first Minister of Culture (1979–1987). He believes that the arts, including literature and poetry, are closely tied to politics, and he utilized his poetry, such as “Hora Cero,” to nonviolently protest injustice.

Researched by Hillary Morimoto 1— Alan West-Durán describes the poem in an essay on Ernesto Cardenal that appeared in Carlos Solé and Klaus Muller-Bergh, eds., Latin American Writers, Supplement I (New York: Scribners and Sons, 2002), 149–66.

2—Written in 1956 but not published until 1960. See page 48 for back story.

Find the Mother in This Picture Feminist Women’s Health Center, 1980 see page 51 Find the Mother in This Picture documents the well-publicized trial of four women’s health care activists arrested after they performed an unofficial inspection of the Tallahassee Community Hospital—the same institution that had criticized the Tallahassee Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC) for unsafe practices.1 Expanding upon the abortion rights movement of the late 1960s, feminists throughout the country established women-owned clinics where women received the personalized attention they needed and became more actively involved with their own health care.2 The first feminist women’s health center started in 1971 in Los Angeles and grew into a federation of more than a dozen clinics throughout the West Coast, Atlanta, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida.

These health centers departed from the large, institutionalized health care system, which was, at the time, run largely by men.

Because feminist clinics often relied on more natural cures and educated their patrons in basic practices, they clashed with many physicians who believed the clinics undermined established standards of safety, professionalism, and knowledge. 3 Many argued that the rift between the corporate institutions and the feminist health centers was not due to different medical safety standards, but because a large number of these centers were founded in the years following Roe vs.

Wade (1973) and the legalization of abortions in the U.S. In 1977, FWHC lost a lawsuit against the doctors of the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital after the latter refused to offer their services to the center, stating that FWHC procedures were not equal to the standards of the mainstream medical profession. Meanwhile, WATCH­­—an organization formed to combat harassment of women’s health centers by governmentcontrolled entities—compiled troubling statistics regarding the hospital’s routine use of internal fetal heart monitors, drugging of mothers, and separation of mothers and infants. These practices prompted the inspections described in the poster text.

The poster was produced to bring attention to the arrest and sentencing of the women who served as inspectors of the Tallahassee Memorial maternity ward.

In the following year, FWHC reached a settlement that awarded $75,000 and the services of three obstetricians/gynecologists to the center.

Researched by Mary Coyne 1—“Health: A New Era for Feminist Clinics,” New York Times, November 23, 1980, A108.

2—Linda Lewis Alexander, et al., New Dimensions in Women’s Health (Boston: Jones and Barlett Publishers,1994), 6.

3—“Health: A New Era for Feminist Clinics,” New York Times, November 23, 1980, A108.

Tree Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, design; Hella Hammid, photograph; Deena Metzger, text, 1981 see page 52 Tree embodies the personal journey of

Deena Metzger, feminist writer, poet, and teacher. Metzger, who lost a breast to cancer, posed for the inspiring image taken by noted photographer, Hella Hammid. The resulting photograph exposes the naked Metzger, triumphant, with the strength to reveal her mastectomy scar that has been camouflaged by a tattoo in the image of a tree branch in bloom. Describing the actual moment when the photo was taken in her own yard, she stated, “I just stood out there and opened my arms and said, ‘Yes’ to life.”1

In the 1970s, Metzger and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville worked together at Cal Arts, founding a feminist design program where Metzger lectured on writing and Bretteville taught design. In describing the groundbreaking program, Metzger recalled, “We were coming to understand that women were different, certainly different from the predominant society, that they had cultural vision that was completely different, that it contained certain values that were no longer respected by the society, that this was exceedingly precious, brilliant, had its own genius and that it needed to be nurtured.” 2 De Bretteville juxtaposed Hammid’s photograph with Metzger’s poetry,3 to compose the cover design for the book.

Also referred to as Warrior, this design reveals Metzger’s triumph over cancer, as well as the physical and emotional scars left behind. Metzger brought her book and cover design to Peace Press to be printed because they “had consciousness. Peace Press was committed to standing behind people who wanted to make change, who were trying to introduce new ideas into the culture, and so it was a great asset to us.” 4 Researched and written by Christina Alegria

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

1—Unpublished interview of Deena Metzger conducted by Ilee Kaplan and Francine Kola-Bankole, June 18, 2010.

2—Deena Metzger “Michele Kort. Words, Writers, Women,” in From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, ebook edited by Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton.

3—“I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the Amazon, the one who shoots arrows. There was a fine red line across my chest where the knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart. Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears. What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing. I have relinquished some of the scars. I have designed my chest with the care given to an illuminated manuscript. I am no longer ashamed to make love. Love is a battle I can win. I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound. On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree.”—Deena Metzger, Tree Text from TREE by Deena Metzger, published by Peace Press, 3828 Willat Avenue, Culver City CA 90230.

4—Unpublished interview of Deena Metzger.

We Cannot Live Life as Usual Breaking with the Old Blessing the New France White, SHCJ; 1984 see page 54 The National Assembly of Religious Women (NARW), a progressive, grassroots organization, was established in Chicago in 1970 to facilitate communication and collaboration among American Roman Catholic women and other women of faith who shared a vision of social injustice.

Their political and social concerns were global in scope, and the group was founded in part due to the influence of Vatican II (1962–65) and the re-examination of the teaching of Church doctrine in the modern world. Of central concern to NARW was the role of women in both the Church and in society at large. Working in collaboration with other like-minded organizations, NARW addressed nuclear

STORIES BEHIND SELECTED POSTERS disarmament, antimilitarism, and social justice reform.

defense strategy was that the case was a frame-up, to financially damage AIM.”1

This poster, commemorating the August 1984 NARW Conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, was conceived of and created by Sister France White, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ), a Roman Catholic community of nuns. About the concept of the poster design, White makes clear how the imagery reflects the theme of the conference, “We Cannot Live Life as Usual Breaking with the Old Blessing the New.”

The details of the murder were so appalling that AIM was advised to disassociate its name with the crime. As a result, AIM would provide no financial or legal support to Skyhorse and Mohawk. According to Bob Zaugh—a longtime member of the Peace Press Collective—he received a call from Skyhorse and Mohawk on the night they were first detained, requesting some form of support. Peace Press produced several posters to raise awareness of the men’s unjust detention at this place, including two featured in this exhibition.

Each woman is part of the symbol of the cross, yet breaks from it. At each cross a woman raises her arms in blessing, assistance, and supplication. The women free of the cross, standing in cruciform; they, too, bless, bear burdens, and supplicate.

So it’s really just a way of showing what women are about, how women are blessing, and how being a blessing, it’s necessary to move.... It really stands for breaking from patriarchal structures and oppressions.

–France White, interviewed July 6, 2010.

Researched and written by Elizabeth Hanson

Free Richard Mohawk Paul Skyhorse Dave Buffalo Greene ca. 1976–78 see page 77 On October 4, 1974, cab driver George Aird was stabbed to death at the American Indian Movement (AIM) camp in Box Canyon near Chatsworth, California. The FBI, acting on an anonymous tip, arrested Richard Mohawk and Paul Skyhorse at an education conference on October 17, 1974, nearly two weeks after Aird’s murder.

These two key AIM activists were held without bond in the Ventura County prison.

In an elaborate conspiracy apparently orchestrated by the FBI, three original suspects in the crime were offered immunity in exchange for falsifying their testimony during the trial. Jack Schwartz, who served as a lawyer in the case, stated, “The FBI urged the local sheriff’s Department to charge Skyhorse and Mohawk, and to let the three people found at the scene of the crime covered in blood go free. . . .But the

On May 24, 1978, after four years of incarceration, Skyhorse and Mohawk were found not guilty. However, the apparent frame-up had succeeded; the Southern California AIM was financially devastated by the trial and fractured beyond repair.

Written and researched by Daniel Pham 1—Rex Weyler, Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against First Nations (Philadelphhia: Rex Weyler, 1992).

Tourist Guide to Target L.A. Paul Glover; Sue Maberry; Artists for Survival 1983 see page 116 Tourist Guide to Target L.A. is a sardonic appropriation of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous tourist maps to address issues of nuclear research, production, and storage sites throughout Southern California.

Sponsored by Artists for Survival, part of Los Angeles’ Alliance for Survival (an antinuclear group), the poster was part of antinuclear advertising campaigns active around the city during the early 1980s.

It identifies potential nuclear targets for enemy missles.

Contributions and concepts for the poster came from Paul Glover, a marketing and city management expert who worked in urban planning and design, and Sue Maberry, co-founder of Sisters of Survival (SOS), a group that exposed antinuclear issues through performance art. SOS participated in antinuclear protests throughout the U.S. and Western Europe as fears of a European-located nuclear war proliferated. These fears were exacerbated by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

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In the summer of 1982, the United Nations convened its second Special Session on Disarmament to diffuse the escalating tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Governor Jerry Brown considered the option of a mutual nuclear freeze between the U.S. and Russia to be “the most important issue of our times” in May of 1982. That year saw a consolidated effort by the Californians for a Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative to pass a proposition that would allow an international weapons freeze to be negotiated. The initiative gathered 750,000 signatures—the result of launching an extensive national outreach campaign—and was passed in the November elections.

Tourist Guide to Target L.A., published after the election, expressed the fears of antinuclear activists while educating the Los Angeles community. In addition to depicting the city as a target for destruction, the map also draws attention to the far-reaching realities of nuclear warfare— dangerously close to home.

Researched and written by Mary Coyne

Alliance for Survival Don Farber; Alliance for Survival 1979–80 see page 117

The Alliance for Survival’s iconic logo of the Earth rising over the Moon had its beginnings well before there were satellites to capture such a view. Artist Don Farber described his inspiration for the design: “I heard [an interview] . . . about one of the astronauts being in space and looking at the Earth and being overwhelmed with a sense of awe and concern for the planet....” It was this firsthand description by the astronaut that prompted Farber to recall the Earthrise illustration in a favorite boyhood book—an image in use well before the Soviet Union’s satellite Sputnik was launched in 1957, or the United States’ Explorer 1 in 1958.

The image of the green and peaceful Earth came to represent more than a single organization; it embodied the larger movement of increasing concern about global environmental issues. The Earthrise logo appeared on posters, newsletters, fliers, and T-shirts. These items were distributed at events like the Survival Sunday Festivals, first held at the Hollywood Bowl in 1978 and again in 1979. In 1980, the image was used at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl to

rally against the use of nuclear energy and the building of new nuclear power plants. Peace Press posters documented these rallies, events, and festivals, which featured speakers including civil rights activist and United Farm Workers cofounder César Chávez; consumer rights activist and third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader; and musicians like Ritchie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, and Peter, Paul, and Mary.

The Earthrise image was an emblematic representation of the delicacy and balance of the environment and humanity’s place within the universe. The plethora of environmental groups that emerged in the 1970s, of which Alliance for Survival was but one, pursued their role as advocates for our ecosystem, gaining political traction and converts along the way.

Researched and written by Elizabeth Hanson

Earth Day 74 Bob Zaugh; Tracy Okida; 1974 see page 121 Originally conceived as a “campus teach-in,” the first Earth Day was proposed by United States Senator and Wisconsin native Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) in 1969, and it was celebrated nationwide on April 22, 1970. Inspired in part by the escalating demonstrations against the Viet Nam War, millions of people gathered in urban centers throughout the United States for the first Earth Day to protest environmental abuses. This triggered the creation of significant environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.

Celebrate Earth Day 74 was a self-generated project by Peace Press Graphics member Bob Zaugh and artist Tracy Okida. Zaugh remembered going to the airport and being accosted by members of the Hari Krishna sect who offered publications to passersby as if they were free and then required payment. Zaugh wanted to share something truly free and political, and he describes the response

when he offered Celebrate Earth Day to people lined up at the theaters in Westwood: “People would be suspicious.

Someone would finally take one and other people saw that I wasn’t asking for money.

Then they all wanted it.” The poster calls for people to observe Earth Day by not working, and Zaugh remembers that Peace Press closed for at least half a day and the staff went to Encinal Canyon.

Researched and written Elizabeth Hanson

Save Gasoline, Read a Book 1979 see page 124 The year 1979 marked the height of the gasoline crisis, with retail gas prices rising by nearly 250 percent in just twelve months.1 Peace Press produced the poster Save Gasoline, Read a Book to address the gasoline shortage and focus on emerging environmental concerns. Bonnie Mettler, who had worked at the Press since 1971, created the layout and design.

Photographer David Feldman recruited his wife, Jill Schwartz, to pose as the mother in the image.

Hundreds of libraries across the U.S. displayed the poster, making it one of the more widely distributed Peace Press products. Reading a book—instead of driving to a movie or lecture—is still popular advice for those looking to save gasoline and money. The poster’s subject matter and style were designed to appeal to a general middle-class American audience, depicting peaceful postwar images of the ideal suburban family—modified for a new era.

Researched and written by Mary Coyne 1—James L. Sweeny, “The Response of Energy Demand to Higher Prices: What Have We Learned?” American Economic Review 74 (May 1984), 31; Jad Mouawad, “Oil Prices Pass Record Set in ’80’s, but Then Recede,” New York Times, March 8, 2003.

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Christopher St. West, 1971 see page 143 Los Angeles’ first gay pride parade was held on June 28, 1970. The parade marked the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots at New York City’s Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. The parade—dubbed the Christopher Street West (CSW) Parade—was started by a number of Los Angeles gay activists, including Morris Kight, Don Kilhefner, Reverend Troy Perry, and Bob Humphries.

Although one of several gay pride parades that took place that day around the United States, the L.A. parade was the only “street closing” gay pride parade in 1970—something that other parades would emulate the following year. After several troubled years (no parade was held in 1973), the CSW parade returned in 1974 and added another feature of the modern gay pride movement, a festival.

The Los Angeles Police Department opposed the event; its members attempted to stymie the parade by enforcing unreasonable and unsubstantiated fines and sanctions. While the fines would eventually be overturned in court, the organizers also faced obstacles from owners of commercial businesses. Due to their political or moral stance, these business owners refused to be associated with the celebration in the production of any CSW parade material.

This poster was for the second Christopher Street West parade. No printshop was willing to print the poster until organizers contacted Peace Press.

The Press’ members not only printed this poster, but also enthusiastically printed pamphlets about gay rights in general and gay opposition to the war in particular.

Researched by Daniel Pham

Third Annual Venice Canal Festival 1971 see page 168 The first Venice Canal Festival was held on September 1969 as a

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

STORIES BEHIND SELECTED POSTERS peaceful means to protest the city of Los Angeles’ 1968 plans to redevelop the Venice Canals. The city’s “Canal Assessment” proposed the construction of luxurious condominiums and the widening of the canals, displacing low- and middle-income families.

Venice residents organized the first event as a “Venice Canal Funeral,” mourning the “death” of the canals. Instead, the funeral became a festival that celebrated the Venice community.

The first Canal Festival’s success prompted organizers to make it an annual celebration. At its peak, the event attracted ten thousand attendees and had become highly profitable. Local activist Carol Fondiller states that the “festivals started to look like a bazaar for hippie capitalism and a fair stop for tourists. The people who had always been instrumental in the festival had finally been pushed out by high rents.”

Members of the Peace Press collective, who lived in Venice, created this poster to promote and support the Third Canal Festival, held on September 19, 1971.

Researched and written by Liliana Montalvo

published in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. The tree was scheduled to be uprooted in order to make way for an apartment complex. Davidson inserted activist Ron Guenther as if he were triumphantly standing on top of the tree.

In their efforts to save the cypress, fiftyseven police confronted Richard Clark, Dennis Gunter, and Ron Guenther. The police arrested activists for protesting and charged them with assault and battery and resisting arrest. Defend Venice was sold to raise funds for their defense. Guenther was sentenced to five days in prison and one year of probation.

In an article for the Venice Beachhead, Guenther stated, “My crime was protesting the destruction of the tree . . . and the house next to it that had provided shelter for the same family for 20 years.”1 He perceived the destruction of the tree and homes of the surrounding low-income families as comparable acts of social injustice. He went on to cite Dr. Mildred Mathias from the UCLA Department of Botany, who confirmed that this species of Monterey Cypress grows in only two locations in the world. Thus, removing the tree would be another instance of stripping the Venice community of its unique character.

Researched and written by Liliana Montalvo

Defend Venice Rick Davidson design; Richard Mackson, photograph, 1975, see page 139 The Los Angeles City Council’s 1968 “Venice Master Plan” would have dramatically altered the landscape of the Venice neighborhood—homes would be bulldozed and replaced with expensive high-rise condominiums, the Venice canals would be closed to the public, and a freeway would be constructed through the community. The Free Venice Resistance was a group of antiwar and antidevelopment activists who engaged in an ongoing struggle to preserve the Venice community. Twenty-two hundred signatures on a petition protesting the plan gave a strong indication of residents’ opposition.

Venice activist and architect Rick Davidson designed Defend Venice by altering a photograph of a Monterey Cypress tree. The original photograph by Richard Mackson was first

1— Bob Wells, “Fight Continues VS Tree Killers,” Free Venice Beachhead, July 1975 (accessed November 5, 2010).

California State University Long Beach, Microfilm. Ron Guenther, “In the Slammer,” Free Venice Beachhead, September 1975 (accessed November 5, 2010).

California State University Long Beach, Microfilm.

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of Diablo Canyon was vocal and resolute, yet ultimately unsuccessful. The San Luis Obispo plant went online in 1985.

On August 6, 1978, the affinity group Butterfly Railroad implemented an act of civil disobedience at the Diablo Canyon site. They climbed over the wall of the plant and carried in tree saplings to transform the grounds. Bob Zaugh, a member of Butterfly Railroad, asked Bonnie Mettler to design a “backstage pass” to identify participants of the affinity group. Zaugh explained her design, a giant butterfly emerging from the nuclear towers, as referring both to the Butterfly Railroad name and also suggesting the mutations that nuclear power can cause, affecting our descendants for generations.

This same image was incorporated into posters for concerts facilitated by legendary concert promoter Tom Campbell through his company, Pacific Alliance Productions (another frequent client of Peace Press). Campbell was known for connecting the patchwork of environment alliances throughout the United States by producing benefit concerts for antinuclear causes. The poster Reconstruction, for example, uses the same image to promote a benefit concert of the experimental rock and jazz ensemble comprised of Grateful Dead musician Jerry Garcia, as well as John Kahn, Gaylord Birch, Ron Stallings, Ed Neumeister, and Merl Saunders. This rare live performance by the band celebrated the alliance between the Greenpeace and the No Nukes movements.

Researched and written by Elizabeth Hanson

Diablo Canyon Occupation/ Transformation Bonnie Mettler; Bob Zaugh, 1978 see page 119

Of primary concern to Greenpeace and Alliance for Survival and other antinuclear organizations was the threat of nuclear accidents, radioactive waste disposal, and nuclear proliferation.

The possibility of nuclear disaster was of profound concern to California residents as the Nuclear Generating Station at Diablo Canyon was well into the planning stages. Opposition to the building

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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Checklist Peace Press plate information, listed by page number: 17. Resist!,1967 Jerry Palmer, The Resistance, Vietnam Day Committee silkscreen 22.50 x 14 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Jeremy M. Palmer 18. Printing for the People/ Guernica,1969 Jerry Palmer 17 x 20.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Jeremy M. Palmer see page 156 19. Down With Imperialism, Feudalism, and BureaucratCapitalism,1978 National Student Center of Thailand 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 20. Students, Workers and Peasants Unite!,1978 National Student Center of Thailand 22 x 15.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 21. In the Revolutionary War Time,1978 National Student Center of Thailand 22 x 15.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 22. Our Fight Is Here Not In Vietnam!,1971 Red Star Rising Collective 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 23. Even If It’s Our Last Moment,1968 Dale Oderman, Mike Hoover 26.25 x 20 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Dale Oderman see page 156

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24. Celebrate 10th Anniversary of the N.L.F, 1970 21 x 16.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Flier designed by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen Artwork appropriated: Hans Erni Atomkreig Nein,1954 offset lithograph © Hans Erni, Lucerne

A Letter to an Unknown Girlfriend,1971 21.25 x 17.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Defend to Death,1984 (Double sided work with Atomkreig Nein) Flier designed by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen Artwork appropriated: Peter Kennard Defended to Death,1983 photomontage © Peter Kennard

ROTC Must Go!,1970 Contempt 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 25. There Are No Neutrals in the War in Southeast Asia, c.1970 The Woman’s Center 21.75 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Poster for Anti-War Exhibition,1984 (Double sided work with 1984) Flier designed by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen Artwork appropriated: John Heartfield Come and See Germany!,1936 photomontage © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VGBild-Kunst, Bonn.

26. 0 Hour,1980 Carol A. Wells; George Fuller; Jazz Press 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Carol A. Wells see page 156 27. There Will Be Many Che’s,1970–71 Appropriated Alberto Korda image; Contempt 22 x 15.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris 28. Celebrate With Us,1977 28 x 20 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angele The Week of Solidarity With Palestinian and Lebanese People’s Struggle, (n.d.)

22.50 x 15.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Atom Child,1984 (Double sided work with Atomic) Akigama Kazuo Hibakusha (atom bomb survivor) Flier designed

by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen 30. Libertad De Expression (Freedom of Speech),1984 (Double sided work with Aztec Mask) Flier designed by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen Artwork appropriated: Adolfo Mexiac Calderón Libertad De Expression,1968 © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SOMAAP, Mexico City

29. left to right, top to bottom: Atomkreig Nein (No Atomic War),1984 (Double sided image work with Defend to Death)

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Aztec Mask,1984 (Double sided work with Libertad De Expression) Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of

Mark Vallen ©Mark Vallen 31. Atomic,1984 (Double sided work with Atom Child) Akigama Kazuo Hibakusha (atom bomb survivor) Flier designed by Mark Vallen 8.50 x 11 inches Collection of Mark Vallen 1984,1984 (Double sided work with Come and See Germany!)

Mark Vallen 8.50 x 11 inches Collection of Mark Vallen ©Mark Vallen 32. Poster for Anti-War Art Exhibition,1984 Flier designed

by Mark Vallen 11 x 8.50 inches Collection of Mark Vallen Artwork appropriated: John Heartfield Never Again!,1932 photomontage ©2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VGBild-Kunst, Bonn.

49. Diplomatic Ties With Apartheid Must End!,1978–1980 National Coalition To Support African Liberation 15.75 x 11 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics Art Against Apartheid,1986 Social and Public Art Resource Center 17 x 11 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©SPARC 50. Countries Want Independence, (n.d.)

17.50 x 22 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 51. Find the Mother in This Picture, 1980 Feminist Women’s Health Center 22 x 15.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©1980 Feminist Women’s Health Center see page 156

CHECKLIST 52. Tree,1981 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, design; Hella Hammid, photograph; Deena Metzger, text; Women’s Graphic Center 17 x 24 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Deena Metzger; ©Sheila Levrant de Bretteville; ©Estate of Hella Hammid see page 157 Woman to Woman,1975 Sheila Levant de Brettville, design 17.50 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © The Woman’s Building, Inc. 53. Take Care Of Your Body, (n.d.)

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye © LA Gay & Lesbian Center 54. We Cannot Live Life as Usual Breaking with the Old Blessing the New,1984 France White, SHCJ; National Assembly of Religious Women 28 x 20 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © France White SHCJ and Society of the Holy Child Jesus,1984; all rights reserved see page 157 55.Woman’s Place is in the House, c.early 1980s Hella Hammid, photographer; Deena Metzger, text; National Organization for Women (NOW), 20 x 16 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Estate of Hella Hammid; ©Deena Metzger 56. Sister,1973 Carol Clement 22.25 x 15 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Carol Clement

57. Wanted,1978 Gloria Hadjuk; Mother Art 24 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Gloria Hadjuk; © Mother Art 1978 58. Davka,1971 Los Angeles Hillel Council 23 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Yad Vashem 59. 2da Jornada de Resistencia, (The 2nd Day of Resistance) (n.d.)

22 x 17.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics The Beginning of our Victory, (n.d.)

22 x 16 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics Stop the NASSCO/FBI Frame-Up, c.1980 18 x 23 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 60. Time to Unite and Fight Back,1974 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 61.¡Avanzar la Tradición Revolucionaria del 16 de Septiembre! (Advance the Revolutionary Tradition of September 16th!), c.1980s 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 62.“Marcha De La Reconquista” De Calexico a Sacramento!! (“March of the Reconquest” from Calexico to Sacramento!!),1971 Ramses Noriega 23 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Ramses Noriega

63. Cesar Chavez, 1972 John Swanson 22 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©John August Swanson 64. International Workers Day,1975 17.50 x 20.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics One Year on Strike,1974 17 x 22 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 65. 4th of July 1976,1976 22 x 16.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 66. Isuda Ti Immuna (They Who Were First),1977 Faustino Caigoy, design; Dean S. Toji, text 22.50 x 17.75 ©Faustino Caigoy, © Dean S.Toji 67. We Support the Farmworkers, c.1970s 14.50 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 68. La Raza Unida, c.1972 21.50 x 13.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Peace Press 69. Please Don’t Shop Here, (n.d.)

17.50 x 11.25 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 70. Madria Madria, c.1970s 21.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 71. Nixon Drinks Ripple, c.1975 21.25 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 72.Wanted!, (n.d.)

United Farm Workers of America 21.75 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987:

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CHECKLIST

174 73. Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge,1976 23 x 17 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Rita Coolidge; Courtesy of Kris Kristofferson 74. Free All Philippine Political Prisoners, (n.d.)

22.25 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 75. Police Brutality & Power Abuses!, 1978 28 x 22 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 76.Cowboys for Indians, 1987 Harry Fonseca 30 x 20 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Harry Fonseca Estate 77. Free Richard Mohawk Paul Skyhorse, c.1976–78 Dave “Buffalo” Greene 23 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Peace Press see page 157 78. Free Paul Skyhorse and Richard Mohawk, c.1976–78 Henry F. Klein; Tin Roof; Skyhorse-Mohawk Legal Defense 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Henry F. Klein 79. The People Outside Are Coming Together, 1972 Jimmy Hughes 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 80. Save Our Sister,1972 Rupert García (appropriated image); L.A. Committee to Free Angela, 22 x 15 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Rupert Garcia Save Our Sister Day,1972 Rupert García

(appropriated image); L.A. Committee to Free Angela 22 x 15 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Rupert Garcia 113.Free Angela Davis, c.1972 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 114.Support the Harriet Tubman Prison Movement and Its Objectives, c.1971 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 115.Free All Political Prisoners, c.1972 National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 116.Tourist Guide to Target L.A.,1983 Paul Glover; Sue Maberry; Artists For Survival 28.75 x 22.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Paul Glover; ©Sue Maberry see page 158 117. Alliance for Survival, 1979–80 Don Farber; Alliance for Survival 23.50 x 17.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Don Farber see page 158 118.Warning,1985–87 (Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant opened in 1985) 22 x 13.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye Diablo Canyon Occupation/ Transformation,1978 Bonnie Mettler; Bob Zaugh 21.25 x 14.75 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Robert Zaugh see page 160

119.Honor the Earth,1972 Jimmy Hughes 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 120. Earth Horizon, (n.d.)

22.25 x 14.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 121. Earth Day 74,1974 Tracy Okida, Bob Zaugh 21.50 x 15 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Tracy Okida see page 158 122. Earth Day,1980 Craig Calsbeek 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Craig Calsbeek 123. Eight Minutes to Midnight: A Portrait of Dr. Helen Caldicott, 1981 Mitchell Block, art director; Vincent Carra, design 22 x 17 inches Produced by Mary Benjamin, Boyd Estus, Susanne Simpson.

Directed by Mary Benjamin 1981 Academy Award nominated Documentary Feature, Distributed by Direct Cinema Ltd., Inc. www.directcinema.com Printed by Peace Press. ©DCL1981 All Rights Reserved 124.Save Gasoline, Read a Book,1979 24 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Robert Zaugh see page 158 125. No Nukes/The Dirt Band, (n.d.)

25 x 11 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Little Feat,(n.d.)

Kenneth Carre, graphic; Fox Venice 22 x 8.50 inches Collection of

Jonathan Kawaye, ©Little Feat 126.A Benefit Acoustic Concert for a Nuclear-Free Pacific,1980 Don Lewis 22 x 16.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 127.The Dirt Band/Le Roux, (n.d.)

22 x 17 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Nitty Gritty Dirt Band No Nukes Disco Benefit, (n.d.)

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye Paul Winter Consort, (n.d.)

Edward Kasper 20 x 13 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 128.Quilapayun,c.1975 Vincente Larrea, logotype 17.50 x 11 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Quilapayun: E. Carrasco, C. Quezada, H. Gomez, R. Escudero, H. Lagos, Oddo Jr. 129.Oingo Boingo, c. 1974 Pearl Beach 21.75 x 17 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Pearl Beach 130.Peter Frampton, (n.d.)

Richard E Aaron, photograph 22.50 x 14.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Richard E Aaron/ Rockpic.com Tom Waits & Leon Redbone, (n.d.)

22.50 x 11.5 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Tom Waits; ©Leon Redbone 131.Blue Öyster Cult/T Rex, (n.d.)

20.25 x 16.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Blue Öyster Cult; ©T Rex

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

132.Bob Marley, (n.d.)

22 x 9.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye Santana, (n.d.)

17 x 20.25 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye Herbie Hancock, (n.d.)

22.50 x 16.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Herbie Hancock 133.Richie Havens, 1978 Larry Junss; Rol Murrow 22 x 8.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Larry Janss and Rol Murrow Oingo Boingo, c.1975 22 x 8.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Pearl Beach 134. Tret Fure,1974 21.25 x 16 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Tret Fure Canned Heat, ©1978 Larry Janss; Rol Murrow 23.25 x 8.5 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Canned Heat/Two Goats Entertainment, LLC. ©Larry Janss and Rol Murrow Thin Lizzy, (n.d.)

21.75 x 8.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Thin Lizzy, all rights reserved 136.Johnny Mathis,1977 Richard Avedon, photograph 21.75 x 13.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©The Richard Avedon Foundation Linda Ronstadt, (n.d.)

23 x 15 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 137.Dolly Parton, (n.d.)

21.75 x 14.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye

CHECKLIST 138.KPFK American Folk Fair, (n.d.)

Pacifica Radio (KPFK) 17 x 11 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 139.STARART,1979 Klaus Voormann 23.25 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Chesher Cat Productions 140.Grateful Dead,1978 20 x 16.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 141.An’ When Yer Smashin’ Th’ State, Kids,1971 Skip Williamson 21.25 x 16.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Skip Williamson 142.Street Corner Daze, c.1971 Appropriated 1968 R. Crumb comic; The Print Mint 17.50 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©1968 Robert Crumb Asian American Week,1975 Asian American Student Association 17.50 x 17.50 inches Hexagon Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 143.Christopher St. West,1971 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © Peace Press see page 159 144.¿Conoce Usted Su Herencia Cultural? (Do You Know Your Cultural Heritage?), c.1971 22.50 x 14.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 161.Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?, (n.d.)

Appropriated 1932 Scot Tissue Towels advertisement, Richard Healey; New American Movement (NAM) 17 x 11 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Richard Healey, New American Movement

Van Heusen Century Shirts, c.1980s 23 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics We would like to acknowledge and thank PVH Corpage, the owner of the Van Heusen trademark.

162.Celebrate Philippine National Day 1978,1978 22 x 16 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 163.The Call, (n.d.)

The Call 21.50 x 16.25 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye El Clarin (The Call), (n.d.)

The Call 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

176 170.Those Who Have a Chance/ Nixon,1972 A. Lunsford 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 171.Sunshine Day,1979 Madeline Rae Cripe 21.25 x 16.75 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Madeline Rae Cripe 1979

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172.Sunshine Day ’81,1981 Trombley, Irvine & Brinks Advertising, design; Deline-O-Type Inc., typography Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, Los Angeles County 23 x 16 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye

Image Unavailable

164.Drop By and Get Down with Emiliano Zapata, ©1970s Libreria Unidos 17 x 11 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 165.Pista Sa Nayon,1977 22.75 x 17.50 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye 166.Fifth Annual Venice Canal Festival,1973 22.50 x 16.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Unite Against Nixon, 1968 or 1972

Ecclesiastes, 1969

Manco Capac, 1970

22 x 17 inches (uncut sheet of fliers) Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

John August Swanson 18 x 24 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©John August Swanson

Dale Oderman 22.50 x 15 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Dale Oderman

Estamos con los Campesinos

Grunge Proof, c. 1971 Toke International, Inc. 17.50 x 11.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Make Love on Monday, c.1970 image unavailable 17.50 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

167.Seventh Annual Venice Canal Festival,1975 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics 168.Third Annual Venice Canal Festival,1971 16.50 x 10.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics see page 159 169.Defend Venice,1975 Rick Davidson, design; Richard Mackson, photograph 22 x 17 inches ©Richard Mackson see page 159

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987:

Vietnam Das Geht Dich An???

(Vietnam Is Your Concern???), c.1970 18 x 24 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

(We Support the Farm Workers), c. 1970s 14.50 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

I Came Back!, c. 1971 John McDonald 22 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics see page 103

ADDITIONAL POSTERS

Image Unavailable

Image Unavailable

Pentagon Papers: To get closer to an answer..., c. 1971

Pentagon Papers: (Chained Prisoners), c.1971

Philip Jones Griffiths, background photograph; Indochina Information Project 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Indochina Information Project 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Fourth Annual Venice Canal Festival, 1972

Seeds of Brotherhood, 1972

Noel Osheroff 8.50 x 11 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

The Peoples College of Law, 1973 Gloria Flores; The Peoples College of Law of National Lawyers Guild 17.50 x 11 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye ©Peoples College of Law

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ADDITIONAL POSTERS

178

John Swanson 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©John August Swanson

Pentagon Papers:...I see this war…,

Pentagon Papers: If we are to stay…,

c.1971 Mark Jury, background photograph; Indochina Information Project 23 x 17.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

c. 1971 Philip Jones Griffiths, background photograph; Indochina Information Project 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of Robert Zaugh

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, c.1972 23 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

The Mother (Bertolt Brecht), 1973, Jane Norling; San Francisco Mime Troupe 20 x 14 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©San Francisco Mime Troupe

Sixth Annual Venice Canal Festival, 1974

International Women’s Day, March 8, c. 1974

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, 1975

11 x 8.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

22.25 x 17.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

22.25 x 14 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics Courtesy of Joseph Stern

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

Benefit Screening, Murder of Fred Hampton, 1977

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1977 University of Southern California 23 x 11.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Hotel Universe, c. 1977 San Francisco Mime Troupe 20 x 14 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©San Francisco Mime Troupe

Three Martyred Brothers,

Vote Commoner for President, 1980

Ayatollah Khomeini, c. 1980

c.1979–80 The Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada 22.50 x 28 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Citizens Party 24 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

23 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Water for Life, 1981

The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, 1986

Happy Groundhog Day, 1986 Mary Peterson, design; Bonnie Mettler 16.50 x 9.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Mary Peterson

Fred Hampton Legal Fund 11 x 19 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics © William Hampton

Jack Malotte 25 x 18 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

11.50 x 23.25 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Jeff Share

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Stop Diablo Canyon, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, (n.d.)

20 x 13 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Robert Zaugh

Americans or Last Tango in Huahuatenango, 1981 Manfred Walfender, photographs; Renee Young, design; San Francisco Mime Troupe 18 x 12 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©San Francisco Mime Troupe

Crosby Stills Nash & Young, 1987 Greenpeace 22 x 16.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

ADDITIONAL POSTERS

Defend Venice, Vote Ruth Galanter,

Untitled (Indians on

1987 Richard Mackson, background photograph 22 x 17 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics Photograph ©Richard Mackson

Horseback), (n.d.)

17.75 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Chinese Women: On the Road to Complete Emancipation, (n.d.)

20 x 13 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Free Jewish University, (n.d.)

Ilya Schor, woodblock print 22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Concerned About Oil,(n.d.)

24.50 x 16 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Danny O’Keefe

Hampton for Congress, (n.d.)

Peace and Freedom Party 14 x 8.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Black Is, (n.d.)

Tyrone Lawson 21 x 17.25 Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Celebrate The Victory Of The Indochinese Peoples!, (n.d.)

Third World Solidarity Committee 22 x 17 inches Collection of Jonathan Kawaye

Condemned Venice, California,

Fiesta de los Contratos (Celebration for the Contracts), (n.d.)

(n.d.)

23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

I.F. Stone’s Weekly, (n.d.)

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

181

ADDITIONAL POSTERS

180

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

International Student Center and the Experimental College, (n.d.)

17 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Is The Nature Of Blacks and Whites

Justicia (Justice),(n.d.)

Man and Technology, A Series of

Really the Same?, (n.d.)

The Black Library 28 x 22 inches; Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Lectures, (n.d.)

18 x 22.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Need a Job that Needs You?,

Ricardo Chavez-Ortiz Educación, Justicia Y Libertad (Richardo Chavez-Ortiz: Education, Justice, and Liberty), (n.d.)

(n.d.) Steve McGrady; Susan Rogers 17.50 x 11 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Wanted!, (n.d.)

United Farm Workers of America 22 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

21 x 14.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

we have assumed the name of peacemakers..., (n.d.)

Mark Kent, design; Daniel Berrigan, poem; LA Berrigan Support Group 23 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics ©Daniel Berrigan

The Third International Faire, (n.d.)

C. C. Marshall 17.50 x 23 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Women Behind Walls, (n.d.)

22.50 x 17.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Muhammad Ali, (n.d.)

20.50 x 26.50 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

...this time, I have come with full power, (n.d.)

21.25 x 13.75 inches Collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics

ADDITIONAL POSTERS

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

183

182

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Contributors

Lincoln Cushing ran his first Multilith 1250 in 1971; he later co-founded the San Diego Print Collective (1974–78) where he ran an AB Dick 360. He was a member of the Inkworks Press collective for 19 years and is currently an archivist and author. His next book is about the Bay Area political poster renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. www.docspopuli.org Ilee Kaplan, University Art Museum (UAM) associate director, has worked with the museum since 1984. She received her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 in Medieval Literature and her M.A. at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in Printmaking. Her curatorial projects include InSIte/Centric 49: Frederick Fisher; InSite/ Centric 50: Eugenia Butler; Ruth Bernhard: Known Unknown; Worth a Thousand Words: The Narrative Impulse; and Implacable Witness: Käthe Kollwitz Graphic Works.

Kaplan has received artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.

Henry Klein received his A.B. at Oberlin College in 1965 and M.F.A. at Ohio State University in 1968. Independent art critic, curator, writer, and artist, he is also an Emeritus Professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley College. Klein is currently the owner of kleinprint, an art dealership representing mostly Central and Eastern European contemporary artists. A past president of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society and board member of numerous printmaker organizations, Klein served as member of the Peace Press collective 1976–79.

185

184

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980–88), and REPOhistory (1989–2000).

His recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson). He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College: City University of New York (CUNY). http://gregorysholette.com http://darkmatterarchives.net Carol A. Wells is an activist, art historian, and curator. She received her B.A. in History and M.A. in Medieval Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Wells began collecting posters in 1981 and produced her first exhibition the same year. In 1988, Wells founded the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and serves as its executive director. She has lectured internationally on art and politics, and her articles have appeared in numerous publications and catalogs. Wells believes that the power of graphics can combat public apathy and feelings of helplessness, and help open up a truly democratic arena for political debate.

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

Christina Alegria is currently pursuing an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies at CSULB, having completed a B.A. in Art History and Comparative Literature. She also serves as the assistant curator of education for the University Art Museum (UAM).

Mary Coyne received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from CSULB and plans on curating and organizing exciting exhibitions throughout her career.

Elizabeth Anne Hanson is currently pursuing an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies at CSULB. Her B.A. from CSULB is in Studio Arts. In England, Hanson studied conservation and restoration, and she worked in Los Angeles as a conservator specializing in traditional, water-gilded wood frames.

Presently, she works as an assistant curator of exhibitions at the University Art Museum.

Liliana Montalvo, a history student at CSULB, served as the Getty Multicultural Summer Intern at the UAM in 2010. She is currently the 2011–12 CSULB McNair cohort , researching Southern California’s urban history.

Hilary Morimoto received her B.A. in Art History from Santa Clara University in 2009 and is currently in the Museum and Curatorial Studies Graduate Program at CSULB. Morimoto works with the UAM Education Department as an outreach program coordinator.

Daniel Pham received his B.A. in Art History from CSULB. He has interned at the Bowers Museum Collections department and at SPARC (Social Public Art Resource Center) Archives.

He is currently pursuing an M.A. in Library Information Science and plans to leverage his skills within museum institutions.

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

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------ and Donald Devenish Walsh.“Zero Hour” and Other Documentary Poems. New York: New Directions, 1980.

------, Michael T. Martin, and Jeffery Franks. “On Culture, Politics, and the State in Nicaragua: An Interview with Padre Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture.” Latin American Perpectives 16, no. 2 (1989): 124–33.

Gibbons, Reginald.

“Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1987): 648–71.

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TREE Find the Mother in This Picture, 1980 Dejanikus, Tacie. Off Our Backs: A Women’s Newsletter, December 31, 1979, 10.

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We Cannot Live Life as Usual Breaking with the Old Blessing the New, 1984 France White, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, Liliana Montalvo, Hillary Morimoto, and Carol A. Wells. Los Angeles, Calif. July 6, 2010.

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Free Richard Mohawk Paul Skyhorse, c. 1976–78 Butler, Raymond V. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs: Activities Since 1945.”

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by Michael Apted. Produced

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Tourist Guide to Target L.A, 1983 Clymer, Adam. “Gov. Brown Links His Future to Issue of a Nuclear Freeze.” New York Times, May 21, 1982.

Mouawad, Jad. “Oil Prices Pass Record Set in ’80s, but Then Recede.” New York Times, March 8, 2003.

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Alliance for Survival “18,000 Attend L.A. Rally against Nuclear Power.”

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Don Farber, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A.

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

Wells, Los Angeles, Calif.

September 13, 2010.

People. Time Magazine, June 5, 1978. http://www. time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,916185,00. html (accessed July 11, 2011).

Earth Day 74 Bob Zaugh, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells. Los Angeles, Calif.

February 10, 2010.

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Save Gasoline, Read a Book, 1979 Bob Zaugh, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells. Los Angeles, Calif.

February 2010.

Henry Klein, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Francine KolaBankole. Van Nuys, Calif.

March 5, 2010.

Christopher ST. West, 1971 After Stonewall: From the Riots to the Millenium.

DVD. Directed by John Scaglioti. Produced by John Scaglioti. First Run Features, 2005.

Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community.

DVD. Directed by Greta Schiller. Produced by John Scaglioti, Greta Schiller, and Robert Rosenberg.

First Run Features, 2000.

Johnson, David K. “‘Homosexual Citizens’: Washington’s Gay Community Confronts the Civil Service.” Washington History 6, no. 2 (1994/1995): 44–63.

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Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics.

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“Proposition 8: Judge Walker and Our Short Memories.” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2010.

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Stern, Kenneth S. Loud Hawk.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,1994.

------. “Pat Russell: Tree Killer.” Free Venice Beachhead, May 1975. California State University, Long Beach, Microfilm.

DIABLO CANYON 7 occupation / transformation Bob Zaugh, interview by Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, and Carol A. Wells. Los Angeles, Calif.

February 10, 2010.

“Garcia ‘Guests’ with Reconstruction.” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1979, G12.

Weyler, Rex. Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Emmaus, Penn.: Rodale Books, 2004.

Posters and Propaganda Allner, W. H. Posters: Fifty Artists and Designers Analyze Their Approach, Their Methods, and Their Solutions to Poster Design and Poster Advertising. New York: Reinhold, 1952.

Barnhisel, Greg. “‘Perspectives USA’ and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State.” Modernism/ Modernity 14, no. 4 (2007): 729–54.

Barnicoat, John. A Concise History of Posters. London: Thames & Hudson, 1972.

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Boulard, Garry. “When Ugly Politics Turn Out Beautiful Works of Art.” Art Business News 26, no. 8 (1999).

The Times of Harvey Milk. DVD. Directed by Rob Epstein.

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Bradley, Will, Charles Esche. Art and Social Change : A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2007.

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Cassou, Jean. Art and Confrontation; The Arts in an Age of Change (Art et contestation).

English. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970.

Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War against First Nations. Philadelphia: Rex Weyler, 1992.

Third Annual Venice Canal Festival, 1971 Defend Venice, 1975 Fondiller, Carol. “Funeral Festival.” Free Venice Beachhead, 1976. California State University, Long Beach, Microfilm.

Gordon, Jane.“The Plan.”

Free Venice Beachhead, 1969. California State University, Long Beach, Microfilm.

Guenther, Ron. “In the Slammer.” Free Venice Beachhead, September 1975. California State University, Long Beach, Microfilm.

Clark, Toby. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture.

Perspectives. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

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Visions of Peace and Justice: San Francisco Bay Area: 1974–2007.

Over 30 Years of Political Posters From The Archives Of Inkworks Press. Berkeley, Calif.: Inkworks Press, 2007.

ART IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

------, and Timothy W. Drescher, eds. “Agitate!

Educate! Organize!: American Labor Posters.”

Journal of American Culture 32 (2009): 267.

Dickie, Chris. “Poster’s Power to Persuade.” British Journal of Photography, no.

7171 (1998): 12–13.

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Heller, Steven. “Polemics and Politics, American Style.” Print 42, (1988): 101–13.

------ and Karrie Jacobs.

Angry Graphics—Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992.

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------. Prehysterical Pogo (in Pandemonia). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Krayna, Philip. “The Cuban Poster Crisis.”

Communication Arts 36, (1994): 40–49.

Kunzle, David, and University of California, Santa Barbara, Art Gallery. Posters of Protest: The Posters of Political Satire in the U.S. 1966–1970. Goleta, Calif.: Triple R Press, 1971.

Larkin, Oliver W. Art and Life in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Lavin, Maud. Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

MacPhee, Josh, ed. Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today. Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2009.

Martin, Susan, ed. Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam, Cuba 1965–1975. Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press, 1996. [Exhibition catalog with essays by David Kunzle, Nguyen Ngoc Dung, Carlo McCormick, and Carol A. Wells].

Martin, Victoria. “Waging a War on Images.” Artweek 23, (1992): 3.

McQuiston,Liz. Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics since the Sixties.

London: Phaidon, 1993.

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“Viewpoint.” Artweek 36, no.

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“Posters with Panache.”

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Resnick, Elizabeth, Chaz Maviyane-Davies, and Frank Baseman, Curators. The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Social Justice & the Environment 1965–2005.

Boston: Massachusetts College of Art, 2005.

[Exhibition catalog with essays by Steven Heller and Carol A. Wells] Rickards, Maurice. Banned Posters. Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Press, 1972.

------. Posters of Protest and Revolution. New York: Walker, 1970.

------. The Rise and Fall of the Poster. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971.

Robertson, Kirsty.

“Capturing the Movement: Antiwar Art, Activism, and Affect.” Afterimage 34, no.

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Ross, Sheryl.“Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 16–30.

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Schnapp, Jeffrey T., Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, and Wolfsonian-Florida International University.

Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914–1989.

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Weissman, Jane. “Community, Consensus, the Protest Mural.” Public Art Review 17, no. 1 (2005): 20–23.

Wells, Carol A. Los Angeles: At the Center and On the Edge— Thirty Years of Protest Posters.

Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press, 1997 [Exhibition catalog] Widener, Danny. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Wilson, Mick. “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An Interview with Grant Kester.” Art Journal 66, no.

3 (2007): 106–18.

Yanker, Gary. Prop Art: Over 1000 Contemporary Political Posters. New York: Darien House; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn, 1972.

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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General Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Gerrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art. The America Movement of the 1970s History and Impact. New York, 1994.

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Graphis 47 (March/April 1991): 30–35.

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STAFF LIST University Art Museum Staff Christopher Scoates, director Ilee Kaplan,associate director Angela Barker, registrar/curator of the permanent collection Shirley Brilliant, accountant John Ciulik, office manager Amanda Fruta, PR/design coordinator Elizabeth Hanson, assistant curator Pet Sourinthone, chief preparator Brian Trimble, curator of education

UAM Student Assistants and Interns Kevan Aguilar Cassandra Aguirre Deanna Amaya Geraldine Awosanya Remo Bangayan Alyssa Bierce Erin Burdex Amy Chiao Kantreal Daniels Miki Fujieda Jennifer Gardiner Andres Herrera Tanner Hewitt Samantha Hull Michael Johnson Seth Kanavel Ioannis Kondylis Meg Linn Ivan Lopez Christina Manger Zurishaddai Maradiaga Patty Metoki Sophia Nam Michael Nguyen Robin Ordaz Amanda Poffinbarger Edward Ramirez Ta’kijah Randolph Paola Redondo Guadalupe Rodriguez Cristina Rodriguez Jessica Romero Gina Sattui Luisa Villanueva Fereshteh Ruth Younessi Marielos Zeka

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University Art Museum (UAM) is a contemporary art museum on the campus of California State University, Long Beach. The UAM is dedicated to presenting projects that blur the boundaries between visual arts and science, technology, music, and popular culture. With a permanent collection of monumental sculpture works on paper, and paintings, the museum offers four to six exhibitions each year accompanied by scholarly publications, interpretive programs, and outreach opportunities for the community and K-12 students. Museum projects provide a forum for experimentation by emerging and mid-career artists, help train the next generation of arts professionals, and document new work for future research.

Center for the Study of Political Graphics Staff Carol A. Wells, founder and executive director Mary Sutton, program director Joy Novak, archivist Alena Barrios, administrative assistant Anna Castro, Getty intern Gloria Galvez, Getty intern Kyle McCloskey, intern Karina Puttieva, intern

Peace Press Research Team Christina Alegria Mickel Breitenstein Mary Coyne Elizabeth Hanson Liliana Montalvo Hilary Morimoto Daniel Pham Doreen Seelig Shadi Seyedyouset

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) collects, documents and

Project Consultants

exhibits posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for peace and social justice. With more than 80,000 domestic and international human rights and protest posters dating back to the 19th-century, CSPG’s growing collection is a unique and invaluable resource for artists, activists, filmmakers, historians, and students. The majority of the collection covers the 1960s to the present, and CSPG has the largest collection of post-WWII protest posters in the United States. Through traveling and online exhibitions, lectures, publications, and workshops, CSPG is reclaiming the power of art to inspire people to action.

Tom Bowman, exhibition designer Lee Harrington, exhibition designer Julie Cho, catalog designer Jane Neidhardt, editor Tim Fox, editor

www.politicalgraphics.org

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987

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Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987