Collaborative Cataloguing

Collaborative Cataloguing:

Engaging the Public with Collections Online November 19, 2010

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak Street Oakland, CA 94607 510.238.2200 www.museumca.org

This convening was made possible with support from

This document is intended to be a faithful synthesis of the discussions that took place at a work session hosted by the Oakland Museum of California on November 19, 2010. It is meant to serve as a resource for those who attended, for the James Irvine Foundation, and for Museum staff. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of session participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the James Irvine Foundation or the Oakland Museum of California.

Participant comments have in some cases been paraphrased and reordered in an attempt to best capture the content and meaning of the ideas presented.

The Oakland Museum of California’s second James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation grant is now referred to as: The Oakland Standard is a series of contemporary art projects produced by the Oakland Museum of California. Ranging from experimental exhibitions to blogs,

from workshops to meals, the Oakland Standard explores innovative ways to engage audiences. Oakland Standard programs nurture inquisitiveness, and support the creativity of artists and the public.

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Participants Invited Guests

OMCA Participant Observers

Jesus Barraza Artist and co-founder, Dignidad Rebelde

Sasha Archibald, Project Coordinator, The Oakland Standard Bridget Barnhart, Digital Specialist Carson Bell, Curatorial Specialist, California Library of Natural Sounds, Natural Sciences Department John Burke, Chief Conservator Winston Chou, IT Digital Technician Robin Doolin, Rights and Reproductions Lori Fogarty, Executive Director RenĂŠ de Guzman, Senior Curator of Art, Project Director for The Oakland Standard Barbara Henry, Chief Curator, Education Department Kelly Koski, Communications Manager Susana Macarron, Registrar, History Department Karen Nelson, Interpretive Specialist, Art Department Evelyn Orantes, Cultural Arts Developer, Education Department Tara Peterson, Registration Assistant, History Department Carolyn Rissanen, Registrar, Natural Sciences Department Adam Rozan, Marketing Manager Stijn Schiffeleers, New Media Developer, The Oakland Standard Joy Tahan, Registrar, Art Department Scott Thiele, History Program Coordinator, Education Department Ariel Weintraub, Grants Manager Rachael Zink, Associate Registrar, Art Department

John C. Fox Creator of MemoryMiner software Lincoln Cushing Archivist Joseph del Pesco Independent art curator Geoff Kaplan Artist and designer, General Working Group Nadia Khastagir Designer and co-founder, Design Action Collective Greg Morozumi Founding Director, East Side Arts Alliance George Oates Co-Creator of Flickr’s The Commons Peter Samis Associate Curator of Interpretation, SFMOMA Lisbet Tellefsen Collector, archivist, and event producer

Facilitator Kathleen McLean

Anne Walsh Artist Carol A. Wells Founding Director, Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Documentation Miriam Lakes

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Contents Participants Introduction

ii

Opening Remarks

2

Goals for the Day

3

An Overview of the Collection

4

Lightning Presentations Lincoln Cushing

Challenging Content

37

Political Posters Then and Now

38

Parting Thoughts: Radical Ideas of Distribution

40

Staff Discussion 42

7

Jesus Barraza

9

Joseph Del Pesco

11

John C. Fox

13

Geoff Kaplan

15

Nadia Khastagir

17

Greg Morozumi

19

George Oates

21

Peter Samis

24

Lisbet Tellefsen

26

Anne Walsh

28

Carol A. Wells

30

Group Discussion Bringing the Collection Beyond the Museum Walls

33

Who Owns the AOUON Archive?

34

Copyright and Accessibility

35

What Can We Do That’s Just Not Done by Museums?

36

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Opening Remarks

LORI FOGARTY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OMCA

Welcome. We are very honored to have you here.

I know many of you are familiar with the work we’re doing at OMCA, but some of you are new to the Museum and to the purpose of today’s session, so I’ll give a brief introduction. About five years ago, we began a physical transformation of our museum and our galleries. As we embarked on this work we began to see that it was part of a much broader institutional change. Happily, one of the first things that happened was that we received a grant from the James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation Fund.

This is a fabulous program, in which the Irvine Foundation provides “risk-free” capital to institutions to experiment. The grant is designed to foster not only new projects and programs, but new ways of working, new organizational structures, and new ways of engaging the public.

cross-departmentally in the museum. We are also looking at traditional museum practices, such as collections cataloguing, and exploring how to approach this work in new ways.

I’ll let René describe the project in more detail. A piece that has served as backdrop and informed our work is a paper that the Irvine Foundation published about four years ago called “The Crisis in NonProfit Arts.” The paper was a call to action. It stated that arts institutions and museums have essentially worked the same way for a hundred years, and have not responded to changes in our society. It specifically called on arts institutions to look at new ways of using technology, based on how visitors spend their leisure time. People want participatory experiences.

They want to be part of the dialogue rather than passive participants. This includes changes for staff— staff are entering the workplace with new expectations. At OMCA, the paper was a wake-up call that we couldn’t go about business as usual.

“The process of change we’ve begun in the last few years will continue in the future. What I’m very excited about today is that we’re bringing people from inside the museum world and outside the museum world, to help us think about how we can do our work better. “

We received our first Irvine grant about four years ago. The grant supported research and development in our Gallery of California Art, but as part of our activities under the grant, we convened leaders in the field around different topics, ranging from interpretation to language to technology. We found these sessions to be inspiring to our staff and often inspiring to the participants.

About a year ago, we received a second Arts Innovation Fund grant from the Irvine Foundation. This grant builds upon the work that we’ve accomplished around new ways of working and new ways of engaging our public. Barbara Henry, Chief Curator of Education, was the project manager for our first Irvine grant, and René de Guzman, Senior Curator of Art, is the project manager for the second grant. With this second grant we are using contemporary art practices to engage our public and also to ensure that we’re working even more cross-functionally and LORI FOGARTY

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Goals for the Day

RENÉ DE GUZMAN, SENIOR CURATOR OF ART, OMCA

engage the public. You might come up with the perfect project for us, but let’s keep things in the float-y stage. This is actually a very rare moment, when we are all away from our desks, thinking juicy thoughts.

As Lori mentioned, we’re here thanks to the James Irvine Foundation. The museum’s second Irvine grant continues the first. At this museum we hope to not only make our widgets better, but to actually reshape ourselves to be more relevant, more effective, and more in sync with the twenty-first century. As Lori said, this is part of a museum-wide transformation.

“We want to make sure this archive is stable and maintained and studied, so that generations down the line understand it.

But how do we also make it distributable, and accessible?

This creative convening follows a tradition of venerable OMCA creative convenings. I think Peter Samis from SFMOMA came to one on museum technology, and we’ve had others that related to language, collaborative processes, and, most recently, innovative adult programming. Today’s convening is slightly different because those other four approached a topic in general.

Today, we are taking the opportunity to look at the OMCA’s acquisition of an amazing political poster collection called the All Of Us Or None archive. How do we use this collection to transform the museum model of “fortress for experts” into something more relevant and engaging? How do we become participatory and in touch with the community we serve? How do we meditate on these big issues?

RENÉ DE GUZMAN

The All Of Us Or None collection was a joint art and history acquisition, and it really highlights these key themes that we’re trying to grapple with. Now we have this archive in our collection, but it’s really not ours—it’s actually a public thing, owned by the people beyond this museum and created by the community, for the community.

We’re all very accomplished people who want to get stuff done, but the point of this convening is to stay in the float-y zone. You know the general facts: we want to represent the collection online in some fashion, and Collaborative Cataloguing Convening - page 3 - The Oakland Museum of California

Overview of the Collection

LINCOLN CUSHING, AOUON ARCHIVIST

The “All Of Us Or None” (AOUON) archive project was started by Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman [below] in 1977 to gather and document the poster-work of modern progressive movements in the United States. Though earlier work is included, its focus is on the domestic political poster renaissance, which began in 1965 and continues to this day. AOUON gathers posters from all streams of progressive activity — from movements of protest, liberation, and affirmative action, trade union and community struggles, to electoral and environmental organizing, community services, and visionary manifestos. Though strongest in work from the San Francisco Bay Area, its scope is national: one-quarter of its holdings come from out-of-state. These are complemented by an archive of international work. The collection consists of approximately 25,000 distinct titles.

LEFT TO RIGHT: ROBERT BECHTLE, 1970; BAEZ SISTERS, 1966; TONY BURCIAGA, 1985.

MICHAEL ROSSMAN AT HIS HOME WITH HIS POSTER ARCHIVE.

LEFT TO RIGHT: EAST BAY MEDIA, 1971; JUAN FUENTES, 1977; EMORY DOUGLAS, 1969.

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Carol A. Wells and I have worked very closely over the years and we’ve discovered how little overlap there is between the AOUON Collection and that of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. There are also a lot of other political posters out there that aren’t in either collection, so when somebody says to you, “Oh, I’ve got something, but it’s folded up under my bed,” you have to say, “Please don’t throw it away, bring it to one of us.”

“Political posters are swimming upstream against the flow. They’re political, which in this country is sort of unheard of.

And they’re generally not considered art, more like propaganda.”

LEFT TO R IGHT: NORTH PORTLAND BIKE WORKS, 2002; BLACK PANTHER PARTY, 1968; STANLEY MOUSE, 1967.

LEFT TO RIGHT: JOSÉ MONTOYA, RCAF, 1973; BROUGHAM, 1971; PETA, DATE UNKNOWN.

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LEFT TO RIGHT: GEORGE STOWE, JR., 1972; JOHN CARR/FIREHOUSE, 2008 ; UNKNOWN, 1963; RICARDO FAVELA, RCAF, 1975.

LEFT TO RIGHT: WES SENZAKI, JAPANTOWN ART & MEDIA, 1978; RCAF, 1977; UNKNOWN, 1969; “WONG-ALLEN”, 1970s.

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Lightning Presentations Lincoln Cushing

What makes for succesful cataloguing

ARCHIVIST AND OMCA CONSULTANT FOR THE AOUON ARCHIVE

I’m going to talk about three things that I’m very concerned with and that I think are relevant to this convening: inexpensive digitization of content, public access to images and catalogue information, and processes for gathering and integrating public content.

for the project to have a long life. There are some lessons here about longevity and follow-through with open-source material.

How to photograph 23,000 posters First, one thing that was not mentioned earlier is that this collection came to the Museum fully photographed. Lisbet Tellefson and I digitized 23,000 posters together this spring and added file names on the back of each object so that there’s a link between the digital file and the actual object. The collection came in on a six-terabyte drive, as well as in folders.

How to do it cheaply

Archivist and librarian Lincoln Cushing specializes in documenting, cataloguing, and disseminating socially and politically significant graphic material. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Revolucion!: Cuban Poster Art (Chronicle, 2003), Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Chronicle Books, 2007), and Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters (Cornell University Press, 2009). A friend of the AOUON collector, Michael Rossman, Cushing is currently working on adding information to the AOUON collection files at the Oakland Museum of California.

We need to be smarter and more creative about how we digitize content because it’s clearly the way to go. New tools and techniques are making all kinds of things possible. I recently worked on a collection at Berkeley where I mounted audio files on a website, files I’d processed myself with iTunes. Now the collection information has little sound bites attached. I had the text of the audio, so the files are also searchable.

Inexpensive approaches to digitization of content are available—money is not the problem.

Planning for future access Persistence and thoroughness is another issue. It’s one thing for an institution to throw a bunch of stuff online, but often that can spell trouble. I was working on a book a couple years ago about American labor posters. I was going to institutions around the country, including the Tamiment Library at New York University. They had everything already photographed, which is great. But when I ordered the images, I found out the research library’s group had pulled the plug on the entire digital database. I couldn’t get any images, so they’re not in the book. They didn’t prepare

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Processes for gathering and integrating public content Something that’s very important about this project and clearly translates to others is that it’s a wonderful opportunity to reach out to the community to develop information and knowledge. Almost every poster has a story. Very often posters in the AOUON collection were done anonymously. But if you have a title and an image up online, sooner or later somebody’s going to say “I did that” or “I know who did that.” You can build knowledge around artworks that otherwise would have remained unknown and buried in catalogue records for decades. A bigger institutional profile is going to make that kind of encounter more likely. It’s not only an opportunity to correct and amend collection information, but also engage with the original creators. People go nuts: “Oh, you’ve got my poster up, my wife put that on my birthday cake!” It builds collaboration between the creators, the community, and the institution.

“This poster shows that the 2009 Oscar Grant shooting by a BART officer in Oakland was not the first example of such misconduct.”

Artist Unknown, BART police: Who they Protect and Serve & who they killed, c. 1992.

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Jesus Barraza

Introduction to Rebel Dignity I started as a graphic designer in college; after I left college I was asking, “What am I going to do with myself?” and eventually found myself back in graphic design. I was introduced to printmaking when I was working as a graphic designer at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. A few years later I met my wife, Melanie Cervantes, and we started an art collective called Dignidad Rebelde.

ARTIST AND CO-FOUNDER OF DIGNIDAD REBELDE

We’re not just poster makers and we’re not just fine artists. We sit in this unique space that straddles both.

This summer, for instance, we made 3,000 screenprinted, hand-pulled posters to send to Arizona [to support immigration movements].

Dignidad Rebelde often collaborates on posters with other organizations. For instance, we worked with the Eastside Arts Alliance. They made the call into the community for graphics, and we heard the call and sent something back. I think we made a few hundred posters during the Oscar Grant trial.

“Our name, Dignidad Rebelde—Rebel Dignity—comes from the Zapatistas, from the Southeast corner of Mexico. Our idea is that as artists and poster makers, we come from below and from the left.”

These slides [below] are of a few different portraits I’ve done over the years: Angela Davis, Steve Piko, Dolores Huerta, Ricardo Flores Magon, and Frida Kahlo. The series represents heroes who are often not taught in our educational system. My prints take these subjects and put them out in the world.

Jesus Barraza is an activist printmaker based in San Leandro, California. As a graphic designer and screen printer, he has worked closely with community organizations to visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. His work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, and in 2005, he was awarded an “Art Is A Hammer” award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. With Melanie Cervantes, he runs the organization Dignidad Rebelde.

LEFT TO RIGHT: ANGELA DAVIS; DOLORES HUERTA; RICARDO FLORES MAGON; ALL BY JESUS BARRAZA.

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One of the first posters Melanie and I collaborated on was a Zapatista poster for a fundraiser to help send native youth in the US to Mexico for an EZLN [Zapatista Army of National Liberation] conference.

Part of the mission of Dignidad Rebelde is to work with younger artists. We’re currently working with Natalia Garcia, and with Les Lopez, an instructor over at Eastside Arts Alliance; they are our apprentices. It’s fun because for the past nine years I’ve been saying to the youth: “Get your posters together!” Les and Natalia were the ones who came back, and kept coming back.

Dignidad Rebelde does a lot of posters to support people’s movements around the world. We try to operate in the way that Ospaal does, or Mission Gráfica, or Self Help Graphics. A lot of the posters we make end up in galleries, and a lot end up on the street. It’s great that we are able to do both.

Like I said, we do fine-arts stuff. This year we’ve started working with more artists to print their work. We’re printing a poster by Ester Hernandez. When I was a kid I cut out a little black-and-white image of one of Ester’s posters from a catalog and put it on my wall.

Fifteen years later I’m printing her work.

We also did a series of prints with Rupert Garcia for the Galeria de la Raza’s fortieth-Anniversary portfolio.

We worked with five different artists, including Rupert Garcia and Enrique Chagoya. This is a triptych [right] that I did when I was part of an artist exchange with artists from Central America (Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador). There were about twenty of us who traveled around the US for three weeks, going to as many museums as possible. Then we went to Guatemala and Colombia and went to more museums.

We Rise up From the Earth [right] was a way of showing the native realities going on today. These are really big—26 x 40” screen prints.

JESUS BARRAZA, WE RISE UP FROM THE EARTH, 2009.

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Joseph del Pesco

I’m the program director for an art foundation called Kadist. For the last year we’ve been working on an experimental web tool to help curators, artists, and other professionals collaborate across great distances.

As the art world becomes more global, there needs to be new tools to accommodate these changes and offer points for collaborations and partnerships. Kapsul was born from that idea.

INDEPENDENT CURATOR

The simplest explanation of Kapsul is that it is like Google docs, but for images. We’re not interested in providing content, but in providing a tool to help create content and nurture collaboration. We have an amazing staff of developers who are working on Kapsul.

I’m going to very quickly introduce Kapsul, tell you how it works, give a few more secrets away, and then talk about some examples on the web that I think are interesting in relation to presenting art-related and museum content. I’ve been working on the web for a long time, first as a designer and then as a kind of consultant, so before I talk about Kapsul I want to jump to another site.

Amalgamating contentv Joseph del Pesco is an independent curator, arts journalist, and web-media producer. He has curated exhibitions at institutions including Artists Space, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and SFMOMA, and published his work in TENbyTEN, Flash Art, and other publications. He currently works as program director at the San Francisco Kadist Art Foundation.

This is the Independent Curators International website [right], which I developed with a team. All the content actually comes from other places. All the images are from Flickr, all the videos are from YouTube, all the news is from Twitter. The idea is to totally distribute your content and then use your website as an aggregate. This lets you tap into all these pre-existing communities. It’s a network philosophy—network philosophy is one of the things I like to think about.

INDEPENDANT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE.

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A web tool for art

Websites to learn from

In Kapsul you can move anything around, you can create sets, organize content, and view by artist. This shows you recent activity, and this is the works area.

I can look at any one of these images; I can get details on these images; I can leave notes; I can create multiple views of the same artwork; and I can look at them in a slideshow version if I want to. Today, for example, I could have prepared all my images last night, and uploaded them to this website, and then shown a slideshow that I could control just like PowerPoint.

There’s an artist-centric view [below right], which is the idea of creating an information-style checklist presentation on a specific artist. This is one of our next experiments—we’re basically hacking Google but we just search art sites. (It’s a capacity within Google’s custom search and we’re simply accessing it; we’re not actually breaking their terms of service.)

It is essentially like Google images, but with Kapsul you get only the artist and the artworks.

I’m going to show you a couple of other tools that are not the same as Kapsul but that we like to think of in relation to Kapsul. This is Dropmocks—it’s the simplest, dumbest way to get things on the internet. You take a folder of images, drag it here, and here’s the URL to view them. It’s new and it’s not accessible to all browsers, so it’s not very widespread. We will do a similar thing on Kapsul.

Vvork is my favorite contemporary art blog. Generating content is a ton of work. To actually be active, engaged, and always posting interesting things online is really rare. The editors of Vvork, a German art blog, are the only people I know who are doing it in the entire art world. Every day there are ten new images, and there are pages and pages of content from all over the world. They’re rabid, compelling, and super interesting. It’s very simple software, but we visit the site because the content is so compelling.

This [http://omeka.org] is what we thought would to be our competition—a free content management system called Omeka. It’s designed primarily for museums and historical collections.

I can also upload files from my computer. I can add things from a website—just put in a URL and it shows me all the images from the page and adds those as well. It’s a very robust system. When we launch in January we’re going to focus primarily on the search. We want to become the search engine of the art world.

From there we can build this collaborative spirit where you start with a search and then you start saving things and then you create a URL. You can send your collection to your friends or to your co-workers if you’re doing research. The idea is to present images and links in the same page, which even Google doesn’t do.

“The idea is to totally distribute your content and then use your website as an aggregate. This lets you tap into all these pre-existing communities.”

SCREENSHOT OF KAPSUL’S ART-BASED SEARCH ENGINE.

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John C. Fox

I have been working on a project called Memory Miner for the last couple of years. Since I only have about five minutes, I’m going to talk a bit about some of the ideas that have influenced me and show you a few software ideas to get your creative minds going.

CREATOR OF MEMORYMINER SOFTWARE

James Burke’s TV series This guy is my hero. I don’t know if you know him: James Burke. When I was in eighth grade I was riveted to James Burke’s television program, called Connections. He would come to an endpoint in some modern device or modern idea and he would trace back to the roots of it. It changed the way I look at things.

A typical episode would be, “How did the plague lead to pulp fiction?” The answer is that when you have a plague you have mass death so you have piles of unused clothing. If you smash it down and add water to it you can make paper out of it, and that just happened to come along at the same time you had movable type, and therefore you could have inexpensively reproduced materials.

point, and there are many different threads to follow.

You could start with symbology and find that yesterday’s radical imagery is tomorrow’s onesie design for your baby nephew.

I love this poster [below left] because the image reminds me of something I became familiar with when I moved to San Francisco. I lived in the Mission down the street from a house where they used to have this poster [below right]. It was the same people that delivered food in the Civic Center and got in trouble for that.

Applying this to the AOUON collection

John C. Fox is a pioneer in the field of networked digital asset management and the creator of the software MemoryMiner. MemoryMiner aims to build the world’s most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. The software is designed to bring old photos, letters, and the stories they represent into the networked digital world. The software has been adopted by institutions and individuals around the world.

The reality is, our lives intersect across time and place in many fascinating ways, but these connections are often hidden. This is especially the case with political and social movements because they are made by people who know they’re doing the right thing, but have no idea of the impact. There is a great movie, Berkeley in the Sixties, which I’m sure many of you have seen. In this movie some Black Panthers come across Mao’s Little Red Book. They’re standing outside the gates of Sproul Hall and some other kids see the book and say, “Oh man, the Panthers are down with Mao, I want to get a book like that.” So they go and find a store in Chinatown selling them and they buy a few boxes and start selling them like crazy.

LEFT TO RIGHT: FOOD STAMPS GRAPHIC, 1972; FOOD NOT BOMBS GRAPHIC, C. 1980.

So you can start with any artifact and trace a story, approaching it from any number of different ways.

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I was searching “Nixon eats lettuce” and I was reminded that there was a time when lettuce was really bad. So lettuce used to be bad but now lettuce is good [see below]. It’s that way of thinking about the traversal and evolution of ideas that I think should be considered when presenting this stuff. There was a phrase—“How did we get from Governor Moonbeam to Governor Aspercreme?” I wish I could take credit for that phrase.

The last thing I’ll discuss is an idea about map lines and places and times [right]. I was thinking about tracking people’s lives so that you can create timeplace markers for important events. For Barack Obama, we can mark the hospital where he was born.

Yes, it was in the United States and yes, Hawaii is part of the United States. You can attach information to these time-place markers, which give some depth and context.

Think of the different strands of DNA you can extract from this collection of posters—about people, place, theme, or any combination of these.

LEFT TO RIGHT: UNITED FARM WORKERS CAMPAIGN BUTTON, 1970; EARTHBOUND FARM WEBSITE, 2010.

A software to link media with memories MemoryMiner is a software that works on the desktop. To give you an idea of what Memory Miner is, you can draw markers over areas of a photo, you can identify a person who is in the photo, you can add a name if you want, and use the “Ken Burns effect” to pan and zoom in on the image. You can even attach video and audio.

“Think of a poster as a freeze-dried moment in time. It captures all these different threads, which you can then traverse. ”

ABOVE: MEMORYMINER MAPPING THE HOSPITAL WHERE BARACK OBAMA WAS BORN; BELOW: MEMORYMINER ALLOWS YOU TO ADD COMMENTS TO THE MAPPED LOCATIONS.

The audio, video, webpage, or whatever it is that you use to add depth and content becomes part of the record. Starting on the desktop you can also publish your records on the web. All of these different forms of media can be published in a format that’s innately hackable. It uses open standards including RSS. When I created the software I was thinking about photography in particular, but there are obviously people embedded in a poster also.

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Power of the People

Geoff Kaplan

ARTIST AND DESIGNER, GENERAL WORKING GROUP

I’m a graphic designer and I’m editing and designing a book called Power of the People: The Graphic Design of Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture.

In the 1960s, a media revolution was afoot, every bit as daring and explosive as what was taking place on the streets of San Francisco, Paris, Prague, and Mexico City.

With access to cheap offset printing, countless groups linked with anti-war, civil rights, and various liberation movements were able to spread their message through elaborately designed newspapers and broadsheets, ranging from the psychedelic pages of the Oracle, Haight Ashbury’s free paper of choice, to the fiery editorials of the Black Panther Party paper.

These papers are remarkable for their do-it-yourself ethos, their fervent belief in freedom of expression, and their staunch advocacy of politically radical and countercultural lifestyle. In keeping with such convictions, the publications were also extraordinary for their graphic interventions, including experimental typography and wildly inventive layouts.

Artist and graphic designer Geoff Kaplan of General Working Group has designed projects for a range of academic and cultural institutions. Kaplan is writing, editing, and designing Power of the People: The Graphic Design of Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964—1974 forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His work is included in the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the New York Museum of Modern Art. He teaches design at TransMedia in Brussels and at California College of the Arts.

The radical press newspaper gave shape to an alternative media culture that was as much informed by the space age—television and computers and socialism—as by the holy trinity of the 1960s underground: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Power of the People treats these design practices and movements as a type of activism in their own right, as a vehement challenge to the dominance of official media.

Considering publications’ links to a diverse body of social movements including Black Power, women’s lib, gay rights, environmentalism, the anti-war movement, etc., Power of the People explores graphic elements of these movements relative to 1960s visual culture at large [see images on following page]. I’m interested in the implications of such work today, when corporate media has inserted even more divisive control over the free exchange of information.

Historical context of 1960s alternative press The first chapter in the book is an essay by Bob Ostertage called “Histories of the Alternative Press.” Social movement press has played a critical role in every social justice movement in American history. This essay compares the movement press of the sixties to the press of the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. Conventional wisdom sees the sixties as a failed social movement that squandered its political opportunities to forays into drugs, infighting, and ideology. To the contrary, this essay argues that the sixties shaped our culture and politics more profoundly than many revolutions commonly considered to be a success, and that the underground press played no small role.

The alternative media and design movements Power of the People examines the role of alternative and underground media in the formation of social movements from 1964 to 1974, with a particular emphasis on design. It documents the ways in which the practices of a few groups shape the image of an entire culture that’s undergoing pronounced change.

This was the era in which Marshall McLuhan could proclaim: “The medium is the message.”

Setting the stage for new media Next is an essay by Fred Turner, called “Bohemian Technology and the Alternative Press.” Turner shows that a large segment of the counterculture embraced the core ideals of mid-century American technocracy.

It looks at the psychedelic papers of San Francisco and New York to show how the design reflected a joint embrace of beatnik sensibilities and cybernetics.

The famous Whole Earth Catalog, perhaps the single best-selling countercultural publication of all time,

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celebrated that same aesthetic fusion. The essay uses the journal Radical Software to argue that this fusion of the psychedelic and the cybernetic helped set the stage for embracing a wide variety of new media technologies. Far from turning away from mainstream media, Turner concludes that these periodicals in fact celebrated the tool-centered social ethos and the systems theory that dominated the military industrial hierarchies of the time.

The graphics within a greater context Glen Allen’s essay, “Design as a Social Movement,” is a more formal analysis of the papers, and examines the graphic design of alternative press in relation to the social and political ideals it espoused. The periodicals were critical tools for communicating the movement to a broader public. The essay historicizes the graphics within the context of art history, as well as contemporaneous social, political, and technological transformations. These publications were using techniques paralleled by artistic movements from Dada to conceptual art, including avant-garde tactics of photomontage and appropriation, new politics of representation around queer identity, and models of communication and distribution drawn from cybernetics and new media.

ABOVE: WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, 1970; BELOW LEFT TO RIGHT: AVATAR NEWSPAPER, OLD MOLE NEWSPAPER, OFF OUR BACKS FEMINIST JOURNAL.

The radical press aimed less to report reality than to transform it. These publications envisioned a different world.

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Nadia Khastagir

Founding and mission, Design Action Collective I’m here with Design Action Collective in Oakland. We are an offshoot of Inkworks Press, a Berkeley-based printing press that has been serving the social justice movement for thirty years. Like Inkworks, we are a worker-owner collective and we espouse all of the points of unity that have come out of Inkworks’ dedication to social justice. Design Action spun off so that we could concentrate completely on communications for the movement, focusing on design and also getting into new media and web design.

CO-OWNER, DESIGN ACTION COLLECTIVE

We’re mission driven, and our mission is what gets us up in the morning. We’re around to create good design for the movement and to further the messages of left organizations. We want to help win campaigns for social justice.

Nadia Khastagir is an Oakland-based print designer and activist, and a co-owner of Design Action Collective. Design Action Collective was founded in 2002 in Oakland, California, as a worker-owned collective that serves social justice movements with print and virtual design services and strategic communications.

I like to say that we actually started with this poster [right]. Our founder, Innosanto Nagara, who came out of Inkworks Press, created this poster after the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. He knew he could put out this graphic, but felt like it wouldn’t have a broad effect, so he went in search of other organizations that were working on issues around Shell Oil in Nigeria. He met folks from Project Underground and started working with them to produce materials for their campaigns. This encapsulates the premise of what Design Action does: we’re here to serve, we’re here to further the message. We consider ourselves less artists and graphic designers and more part of a visual communications group.

When we work with community groups we make sure there are strong methods of distribution. We want the materials used well. Once a year we hold a submission contest, where groups submit a proposal and then we donate the labor to produce the posters. We work really closely with the group on developing the message and the imagery, and then Inkworks donates the printing.

INNOSANTO NAGARA, REMEMBER KEN SARO-WIWA, 2002.

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This [below] was used by Causa Justa, which recently merged with St. Peter’s Housing Committee in San Francisco to create a cross-Bay collaboration. It signifies black and brown unity between the two communities.

We worked with Just Seeds, a national artist collective. They asked that we work with artists to develop the posters. We already had a relationship with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which was perfect because they were just embarking on a campaign for climate justice [below].

“We’re not designing in a vacuum; we’re working with folks to stay relevant.”

A different way to put your message out there is to project it onto the wall of the abuser. We temporarily projected the slogan “2 for 1 Discrimination (Race and Gender)” onto Wal-Mart during a shareholders meeting. It’s interesting to work with folks on different strategies on how to get the message out there.

We also print posters as placards for marches and demonstrations. There might not be that many people at a march, but posters make for a great photo opportunity. The group has a very unified look when they all have the same intense poster.

Another poster we did for California Peace Action was actually placed on BART. People could sit on BART and see what was going on. We also work to distribute messages from abroad, and we’ve done lots of spoofs of existing corporate advertising campaigns.

We went through a long process developing this poster for the World Social Forum. That sort of long, engaged process is central to what we do. We’re not designing in a vacuum; we’re working with folks to stay relevant. I admire the way Jesus and Melanie at Dignidad Rebelde are doing this, too. They’re working with communities to get the messages out there. Good graphics give people pride and show a force of unity.

LEFT TO RIGHT: UNITY IS POWER, 2010 ; FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE; WORLD SOCIAL FORUM, 2010, ALL BY DESIGN ACTION COLLECTIVE.

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Greg Morozumi

Eastside Cultural Center I’m with the Eastside Cultural Center, a third-world cultural center that’s based on 23rd and International, just east of the Museum. We are in one of the most ethnically diverse communities west of the Mississippi, and it’s very interesting to think about the culture of Oakland and what the Bay Area has to learn from it. There’s a cultural transformation happening not only in Oakland, but in urban centers throughout the country. Poster art in particular has to do with the livelihoods of urban communities and the transformations of huge immigration populations.

FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF EAST SIDE ARTS ALLIANCE

Central location for culture We bought our building, and we offer community cultural services. We just finished our 10th Annual Malcolm X Jazz Festival this last May. We also offer free art workshops where you can do intaglio etching and other classes. One of the projects I’m most involved in is launching the Third World Community Archival Resource Institute.

Exhibiting communities of color

Greg Morozumi is the Founding Director of the Eastside Arts Alliance (ESAA). ESAA is an organization of artists, cultural workers, and community organizers of color who live and/or work in the San Antonio district of Oakland, and who are committed to using the arts to improve quality of life and advocate for progressive social change.

This was the last show we organized at the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation. (Now there’s a new developer who wants to corporatize the space and not do exhibits.) What’s important about the Eastside Cultural Center is that it focuses on communities of color. Nowhere else in the Bay Area, no other cultural space, has that focus. I’ve presented work by all nationalities in the course of thirteen years there, but we’ve focused on communities of color because that’s the demographic that’s been largely ignored by institutions and universities.

Third World Community Archival Research Institute We’re also creating the archival resource center because of changes on college campuses, and the lack of student activism. The ethnic studies libraries are

not getting funded at UC Berkeley or San Francisco State anymore. Creating an ethnic studies program was one of the demands of the third-world strike in 1968 and 1969 at Berkeley—to ensure that there will always be community input on the curricula at Cal or at any public university, including Laney College.

Past work with the posters I had many conversations with Michael Rossman over the years. I borrowed a hundred posters from him to do a show on the Vietnam War, the same time the Oakland Museum did a show on Vietnam. I did our exhibit with a group called VietUnity, an activist group in Chinatown, at a gallery called the Asian Resource Gallery. We’re not subject to quite the same pressures as the Museum, so we had posters of Ho Chi Minh, which you couldn’t have here. I also borrowed collections from Lincoln—Cuban posters, and posters for the solidarity of African, Asian, and Latin American people.

Documentary archival exhibits are very important. I also organize fine art exhibits—I work for the City of Berkeley doing the Addison Street windows and Center Street Gallery—but I think it’s important to do archival documentary exhibits because those images are also part of culture. Sometimes I integrate the two: the current exhibit at Eastside Cultural Center is about both Dias de los Muertos and the Oscar Grant case.

Using the posters to benefit the community What I want to talk about today is the function of collections and their accessibility to communities. I would like to see communities of color integrated into programming at the Museum, not just as the audience but actually helping put up the exhibits.

You need to look at these posters not just as acquisitions and assets, which is what most museums traditionally do, but as opportunities to raise awareness and to educate. Eighty to ninety percent of the largest

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collection of Native American artifacts in the world gets warehoused. At most major museums in the United States, the majority of assets and acquisitions are not shared with the public.

“You need to look at these posters not just as acquisitions and assets, which is what most museums traditionally do, but as opportunities to raise awareness and to educate.”

LEFT TO RIGHT: FILOSOFÍA CARIBEÑA, 2010; HOLLA BACK!; GRASSROOTS COMPOSER’S WORKSHOP, 2010, ALL EVENTS PUT ON BY EASTSIDE CULTURAL CENTER.

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George Oates

Flickr’s The Commons I’m here because I used to work at Flickr, where I made a program called The Commons. The Commons was intended to get public photography archives onto the Internet.

FOUNDER OF FLICKR’S THE COMMONS

Monsters through the ages: a metaphorical presentation For today, however, just pretend that I’m going to give you a rough proposal for a thesis about monsters in Anthropology 101. In my work I like to try to find metaphors that help me think through things, and I’m very interested in what monsters might be able to tell us about what’s happening on the Internet today. I’m going to offer a brief five minutes worth of monsters throughout the ages, and hopefully end with a couple of questions that might be useful.

The Flickr website says: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”

The origin of monsters The actual etymology of “monster” means to demonstrate, or to show, to warn. Obviously there are monsters that are nasty, evil, and scary, but they are also used for a purpose. The word “monster” came about in the year 1300 during medieval times. In a picture or map, monsters indicated distance from God. George Oates was one of a core team that shaped the online Flickr experience, and created Flickr’s The Commons.

She currently works at Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive.

Monsters within maps This is an example of what’s called a Map of Mundi or a map of the world—it’s called the Ebstorf map [right].

If you zoom into the Ebstorf map you see Jerusalem is in the center and then the head, hands, and feet of Jesus surround the map. There are a lot of monsters in there, mostly at the edges. Unfortunately, the original has been destroyed—it was burned in World War II —but luckily, multiple copies were made before then.

The point is that monsters are often used to describe the edges of things, or what happens past the borders. They symbolize that scary unknown thing under your bed, or what happens outside of town.

EBSTORF MAP, C. 1300.

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Monsters at the edge

Monsters today

Here’s another key point about the borders of things.

If you look into the marginalia of this map [below] you have storms, boats, dragons, and all sorts of unknowns. These monsters, these hybrids, these beasts, were used at the edges to keep you moving in a certain cultural direction: to keep you safe and to keep you on the right path.

One of my favorite monsters today is from a television series called Underworld. She is a vampire who falls in love with a werewolf. Today we have soap operas about monsters. They’re really cool monsters, they have guns, they fall in love; we get to admire our monsters.

There’s also the example of the scary seven-headed anti-Christ, which you may or may not know from your Bible studies. These sorts of hybrids are meant to pull you back to the norm and to show you your distance from the evil beasts.

Gothic monsters I’m revealing a weakness in my studies so far, but if we jump from medieval times to the first edition of Frankenstein [below], published in 1888, you have the new Gothic romanticized version of the monster. I don’t know what happened in between—I’m still finding out some things. But the monsters in the 1800s were very different than the earlier hybrid beasts. Obviously something like Dracula has deep sexual power, he’s all-consuming and all-controlling. One of the interesting things about Gothic monsters is that they often involve the un-dead or ghosts, as in haunted houses, and human-like dead people.

Then there is Marilyn Manson. He’s actually a celebrity monster. And of course Monsters Inc., where our monsters are kind of human. We can see into their lives and become friends with them.

I’ve been talking to a few friends about this concept of monsters. I’m trying to find similar patterns in culture with regards to monsters that we had in the past. We still have monsters, but they’re real. We can see pictures of them. We can see them talking. This woman Aileen Wuornos is actually called “the monster” and a film was made about her life called Monster.

Famous monsters, old and new Beauty and the Beast is another example: “I’m in love with my beast, I don’t fear my beast anymore.” Godzilla is an interesting example of a monster created in direct response to something terrible. This monster came into being just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and people think this terrible beast is a symbol for that bombing. The bombings were still very fresh in the Japanese consciousness, so Godzilla emerged.

LEFT TO RIGHT: WORLD MAP, DATE UNKNOWN; FRANKENSTEIN, 1931.

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So we have a direct connection with our monsters these days. It’s no longer about the unknown and the boundaries of our world. Well, maybe it is, but maybe it’s not. We can come back to this older idea of where the borders lie, what we can control, how we can connect, but we have a geography that looks like this [below]. You could argue that our geographic boundaries have disappeared. What’s the unknown now? We know exactly where we are with Google maps [below].

We can look at the Bahamas and know exactly where we’re going to stay next week.

Taking risks and letting in the monsters I want to leave with a question, because I think we can bring this back to the Museum’s curatorial and cataloguing conversation. In my work with the Commons I saw a lot of resistance and fear and nerves around allowing “those people” to come over the borders of the institution and begin to argue and engage with us.

I was so excited to hear your introductions because the conversation is really shifting. You’ve seen the monsters now, and you’re saying, “Come in monsters, we could all be friends. You could benefit us.” That is a very liberated position. I want to encourage you to lean on monsters a bit. They’re actually not nasty monsters, and they won’t bite your face off. They might be very helpful.

“Who are today’s monsters?”

LEFT TO RIGHT: INTERNET VISUALIZATION BY BESTIARIO; GOOGLE MAP OF OAKLAND MUSEUM.

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Peter Samis

The first community memory

ASSOCIATE CURATOR OF INTERPRETATION AT SFMOMA

This is Community Memory. This whole project is so evocative of where we are and who we are and who we’ve been, and so I thought if I want to bring anything to the table it’s this concept of community memory.

I looked up community memory on Wikipedia, thinking I would find different sites about survival—survival through Hiroshima, or other traumatic events, and how people gather their memories. But the one thing Wikipedia came up with was a kiosk in Leopold’s records in Berkeley on Durant Avenue, right above Telegraph back in the day, where the first Community Memory existed. It was a computer kiosk hooked up by a remote linkup to the main frame, which Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, had used as the mother of all demos back in the day. There we are back at the link between the utopian grass-roots radical Berkeley thing and the seeds of Silicon Valley—technology as a means of empowering people.

The caption on the image [below] reads “an antique time-sharing equipment the size of eight refrigerators, originally used by Douglas Engelbart in the

Peter Samis is Associate Curator of Interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA’s Interactive Educational Technology (IET) programs and related exhibitions have received awards from the American Association of Museums, the Webbys, the National Educational Media Network, and I.D. and Communication Arts magazines. Samis is a member of the open source Pachyderm 2.0 governing council (www.pachyderm.org), and serves on the steering committee for steve, a national art museum social tagging initiative.

mother of all demos and donated to Resource 1 for community use.” If you scroll down to the external links you will see “Implications of Community Memory,” an article by Michael Rossman. It’s a very small world.

Community memory today Then I started thinking about other community memory projects. There is a project in Australia, where they put the same idea of a protected bombproof kiosk-terminal in the dust of the Outback, near Alice Springs. People can come to the kiosk, look at photographs and images, and share knowledge about them.

In the aboriginal community there is private knowledge, secret knowledge, and knowledge that can be shared with the general public, and the distinctions between those make this particular project interesting. It’s like a StoryCorps for the local community.

Darren Peacock, a museum technology consultant, did a presentation at the Museums and the Web conference last year where he looked at a wiki community, also in Australia. He commented that the community is defined by the fact that it shares interests, shares a practice, and keeps people connected. His framework invites us to rethink our practices, our relationships, and our priorities.

COMMUNITY MEMORY TERMINAL AT LEOPOLD’S

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This is the Mallala community in Australia [right].

They’re ramping up digital workshops so that people will learn how to use computers and not be afraid of them. They’ll be empowered to share stories through a digital interface no matter their generation.

On a different scale, the Smithsonian is establishing the September 11th Digital Archive [right]. Even though the Smithsonian is a government-run official institution, this is essentially a grassroots project.

They’re asking people to contribute their own stories and comment on how September 11th changed their life. They’re hoping people will potentially make available artifacts that are related to these topics in the archive. There’s a sense of grassroots dialogue going on; it might be organized by a Museum, but it doesn’t have to represent an authority narrative.

This is the website of Lake Champlain in upstate New York and Vermont [right]. It’s a very simple interface, called “Voices for the Lake.” It’s mainly for kids and families. The whole idea behind this website is basically raising consciousness of the value of the lake in people’s lives, from little-kid-dom up through all the generations. When families go on an outing, the kids can visit this website and tell a story or do a drawing and post it up here. Prompts include: “Think about when you felt connected to water and your community. Tell us about that memory.”

This is a collaboration between the Vermont Folk Life Center, which is a great resource to look at for oral traditions built around the community, and the Aquarium and Science Center. The portal refreshes and changes constantly. These institutions are trying to build consciousness around ecology, but not just around ecology in a biological way, but about how we feel it: how we sense it in our own lives and how it matters in our personal relations. You can add audio, video, images, web links, and stories, and it’s all completely simple in terms of the interface.

“I’m so glad this collection ended up here.

This is a place where it can be displayed both physically and virtually, and where it speaks entirely of and to the community from which it originated.”

TOP TO BOTTOM: NOW & THEN MALLALA HISTORY ARCHIVE; SMITHSONIAN SEPTEMBER 11 DIGITAL ARCHIVE; VOICES FOR THE LAKE WEB INTERFACE.

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Lisbet Tellefsen

“We can’t foresee what might be created by making these posters available to younger generations. It’s not even for us to fathom—it’s for us to make happen.”

COLLECTOR, ARCHIVIST, AND EVENT PRODUCER

Building social history collections Michael Rossman was my mentor, a colleague, and a kindred spirit. He was someone who was all over the place and incredibly focused at the same time.

Over the past seven years, I had the privilege of working with Lincoln and Michael on this collection. Our work leading up to this moment was about creating a brain trust to figure out how to best make use of Michael’s incredible legacy. Michael would be stoked to be here right now, discussing an online political poster portal.

Lisbet Tellefsen is a collector, archivist, and event producer who has been active in the Bay Area’s cultural arts community for twenty-five years. In addition to working with Michael Rossman and Lincoln Cushing on digitizing the AOUON Collection, Tellefsen has archived collections of Black Panther material, early hip-hop history, Black LGBT movement, and others. She is currently producing the LGBT Historical Society’s 25th Anniversary Speaker series.

My name is Lisbet Tellefsen. I’m a Bay Area native, raised in the Mission, a product of Black Communists and the Berkeley Left. I have the movement pedigree.

Like Michael and my godfather, I inherited a certain gene. There are people in every community who take on holding the history, and I got that gene. Basically, in every project I’ve been involved with over the years, I’ve been the community archivist. I have never been trained and I call myself delightfully not academic. My driving force is history, the forwarding of history, and making history not only accessible but exciting to the next generation.

I’ve gotten so good at building collections that I actually now get paid to do it. I’ve built dramatic collections about North Beach nightclubs, pre- and posttopless. I now have an early hip-hop client, and I’ve done personal archive work for a lot of Black Panthers. My own collection is what led me to Lincoln. In the early 1980s, as a musician, I had the opportunity to go back and forth to Cuba, and on the various trips

I began to collect Cuban revolution Che Guevara posters. I amassed what I like to call one of the best private collections of Che Guevara posters in the world. When Lincoln wrote his book on Cuban posters, I showed up at Black Oak Books and he introduced this little guy in the audience as a resource, Michael Rossman, who had 25,000 political posters. I was boggled. I was thinking, Where does he live, in a warehouse? So Michael invited me over, and showed me a room that was neat and organized and not drowning in paper. I couldn’t figure out how he did it.

Where I began We started buzzing not only as poster heads, but as Mac heads. I was part of that early generation of Macintosh users that was very infused with the possibility and promise of technology—that sensibility has transformed my life. I was possibly the earliest adopter of desktop publishing: I published my first publication in middle school on a purple mimeograph.

I bought my first printing press—an AB Dick—at age twenty-one, and was doing desktop publishing in the 1980s. Everything I’ve done in my life has followed this wave of technology and possibility. When digital archiving began to take hold, the possibilities blew my mind. Michael and I would sit around and blow each other’s minds as to what could possibly happen with technology and collections.

The future of collections I’m going to be fifty next year and what drives me now, not only as a collector who has created worldclass collections, but as a citizen of the world, is really a concern about where these collections will go, who will take care of them, and how they will be made accessible. Will they be seen? Will they sit in a museum warehouse? How can new technologies be used to dramatically increase scholarship and exposure?

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This kind of legacy and engagement is what drives me to produce events. I’m on the board of the LGBT Historical Society in San Francisco and I find that the events I organize are archive-heavy in an interesting way. Design Action did a great poster [below] for an event I had—Sister Comrade—which took a look at twenty years of correspondence between the poets Audrey Lorde and Pat Parker, and created a choreopoem using different sorts of archival materials. I’m doing a series right now pairing various kinds of activists, such as Bettina Aptheker and Erica Huggins, with young activist scholars, and it’s blowing my mind.

They’re coming up with things I can’t even imagine.

My hope and parting thought is that we can’t foresee what might be created by making these posters available to younger generations. It’s not even for us to fathom—it’s for us to make happen. We’re bringing history to life by making it accessible through new technology and great web design.

SISTER COMRADE, DESIGN ACTION COLLECTIVE POSTER, 2007.

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Anne Walsh

Engaging with historical material as an artist I’m an artist and I work mostly with sound, print media, and video. I often work collaboratively with Chris Kubick, and I often engage historical material, particularly around questions about the public presentation of artworks and sound archives. That’s the work I’m going to show you today; just a little bit, because most of it is time-based and difficult to represent in five minutes.

VISUAL ARTIST

Personal archives I wanted to start with a few documents that I think are deeply illustrative of my own personal tendencies.

This is a hospital discharge document, actually of my own twin brother, who is known as Twin A, Boy Walsh. I don’t know why my discharge document wasn’t in my baby book, but for some reason his ended up in my book. This makes me think about how deep and far back tagging, indexing, and cataloguing goes, at least in my consciousness. It goes back very far.

Anne Walsh is a visual artist who works with video, performance, audio, photography, and text. Her works have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Royal College of Art, London; and numerous other galleries and festivals in Europe, Japan, and North America. She also works as an independent curator, and art writer and editor. She is currently Associate Professor of Electronic Media in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, where she teaches video, graduate studies, and critical theory.

Not that I could read this at five days old, but my baby book was my favorite book as a kid, and hopefully many people feel that way. These are some of the first images I started investigating as a little person, and one of the things I find particularly weird and troubling is that my mother felt the need to tag us in these pictures. Here it would be hard to tell which one of us is which, but as time goes on I think it’s pretty easy to tell who is who. As a two-year-old I start looking at this and wonder, Who was my mother making these notations for? Who was she imagining would be looking at these books? It’s a little harder to see, but all of these snapshots have our initials, A or P, A or P. This entire book is composed of photographs framed just like this, meaning every single picture I see of myself as a kid is a twosome in a square format. This consciousness of comparison appears right from the start of my life.

I’m not much of a collector even though I’m the daughter of an art historian and a museum curator, but I am drawn to paper ephemera and marginalia, and I’m very drawn to lists.

I discovered that my grandfather kept packing lists of the clothes he would pack for vacations, and I was delighted to find that what he wore to my wedding was also what he wore to the father and son golf tournament and his seniors golf tournament, amongst other things. There are many of these packing lists.

Non-traditional artifacts I couldn’t help including this because I felt it had some bearing on the question of preservation versus access. This was a poster that I found on the street: “Searching for the person who took the thrown out dresser from the Downing Street fence 2 weeks ago.

I have the missing drawer. I was going to take the dresser piece by piece but you got it. If you want the missing drawer for a price, call --------.” I got this in New York, in Manhattan. I was thinking about what completes a collection and what it means to have a piece versus the whole.

This is a page from the Pleasure Chest catalogue— this is pre-Internet. Pleasure Chest was the biggest purveyor of sex props and products in Los Angeles and they had a printed a catalogue that you could get in the store. This is a sample page. The dongs, dildos, and butt plugs are catalogued by size and alphabetically, so there are three ballsy super cocks, and they’re in descending order. This is the kind of index that I have a lot of.

Working with sound catalogues I first started working with catalogues when I became interested in sound effects, around 1994. Libraries of sound effects have to be catalogued in some way, and to do that, the sounds have to be named. The nomenclature around sounds is something of deep inter-

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est to me, often because the cataloguing system is so subjective. Typically the sounds are named either by the people who made them or the people who use them. I’m going to play something. [plays recording] Those were sounds from a sound installation by Chris Kubick and myself called Room Tone [below].

It’s a piece that exists as an installation but also as a series of drawings that are now being collated into a book. Room tone is the sound you record for any given space in which you’re shooting film, video, or audio. It’s the silence inherent to that particular room.

What you are hearing is a series of room tones. The piece was graciously entrusted to us to produce by Joseph del Pesco for an exhibition in New York at Artists Space.

An earlier, similar piece, commissioned by René de Guzman at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, involved recordings of gun shell casings falling to the ground.

We specified the sounds and there was a monitor at the base of the wall scrolling the names of the sounds as they were heard [right]. The sound was very rainlike. There are parts of the piece that surprised us when we installed it.

other mediums to be with these objects and then allow us to interview, so to speak, Joseph Cornell about the circumstances of the work being displayed in the museum. In particular, we wanted to know how the artist feels about where the work is now, how it’s been handled, and what it means.

This is one of the Cornell boxes, Celestial Navigation, on display at the Whitney [right]. There was a peculiar circumstance around this piece. We received an image of the work from the Whitney before our visit.

However, we learned in the course of doing this project that Cornell’s boxes are actually stored disassembled. Every time we held a séance, the box had to be remade. What we noticed from watching the preparator make the box is that the box looked different than how we were expecting it to look on the basis of the photograph, and that was quite perplexing. The fact that the boxes were frequently disassembled and reassembled helped us understand what the mediums were reporting from their communications with Cornell.

Art After Death The other main project Chris and I have been working on involves historical interpretation; it’s called Art After Death. This is an action-figure sculpture of the American artist Joseph Cornell. It was made by an artist right at the time when Chris and I were completing this audio CD as part of Art After Death. Art After Death is a spoken- word audio project that has also had some live lecture versions and some physical museum installation versions. It’s a project where we’ve moved into museums with spirit mediums and professional psychics who specialize in speaking to spirits. In this case, we were joined at the Whitney Museum with these three Cornell boxes by Valerie Windborne, a trance medium, and asked her and then four

ABOVE: JOSEPH CORNELL, CELESTIAL NAVIGATION, 1958.

LEFT TO RIGHT: DOUBLE ARCHIVE, ROOM TONE, 2007; DOUBLE ARCHIVE, FULL METAL JACKETS II, 2005.

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Carol A. Wells

Before I knew posters

FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF POLITICAL GRAPHICS

My background is as an art historian and medievalist, but I started in high school as a political activist.

When I got to graduate school I really wanted to do something with activism, but the man I wanted to work with did not want to deal with contemporary issues, so I ended up in medieval studies.

High school was the Civil Rights Movement, undergraduate was the Vietnam War, graduate was trying to stop US intervention in Central America, and unfortunately, it hasn’t stopped. When I started to teach in 1980, I was teaching about the art of the rich and powerful, because that’s what our history is all about, but I was doing it from a socialist-feminist perspective. I was teaching about how art was used to maintain the status quo from the pyramids to the cathedrals to the halls of culture today.

An introduction to political posters

Carol A. Wells is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), an archive of 70,000 post-WW II graphics, and the largest independent collection of political posters in the world. CSPG collects, preserves, and exhibits posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change, and is committed to the wide dissemination of the posters through online and traveling exhibitions.

In 1979, I started doing Nicaragua solidarity work.

I was asked to help organize a fundraiser to provide supplies for literacy programs: books, paper, and pencils. At the fundraising event there were two sixfoot tables piled with the first posters produced by the new revolution. They were selling for two or three dollars each as a fundraiser and guess how many I bought? Zero. This tells you that my own personal journey started from having no connection with political posters—not seeing them as art, or even historical documentation. They weren’t that visually compelling, so I didn’t want any of them on my wall. I wrote a check as a donation, but I took not one poster.

would travel to a country from which he didn’t have posters, in this case Nicaragua, and collect. He hired me as his research assistant and I was paid a thousand dollars for the month, which was enough for my husband and I to fly round trip to Nicaragua and have one hundred dollars left over. David went off to paint a mural and my husband and I were responsible for collecting posters. It was fascinating to be down there, going to different offices and talking to people. I went to the Women’s Movement offices and they were preparing for a demonstration. Their posters were hot off the press, and they gave me a pile of them.

I was used to getting a few at a time: maybe one for David, one for me, and a spare. I didn’t know what to do with a dozen. I put four aside and the others I began to give out to people. I was staying with a nurse and I gave her one and she put it on the wall. One of her neighbors was very anti-Sandinista, but not opposed to getting free health services. The neighbor came into the home and she and the nurse went off to speak in another room. Her eight-year-old son was left alone with me. He’d never been in the house before, he’s looking around, and he sees this poster.

He goes over to it and I watch him mouth the words, which translate as, “In constructing a new country we are becoming new women,” and at that moment I had my epiphany.

Two years later, I was hired by a UCLA art historian who had been collecting posters. Like Rossman, this professor became obsessed with posters during the Vietnam War and had 10,000 by the time I met him in the early 1980s. (This is when universities had money and used to give faculty funds to go on trips every summer and do what they wanted to do.) David

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Realizing the potential of a poster It was like the light bulb—that’s how posters work!

They attract your attention when you’re going about your daily life. You don’t have to go to a special place to see a poster like you do to see a film. They attract your attention with their color and their graphic design, and then the message makes you ask a question. It doesn’t have to answer the question. The very fact of provoking you to ask a question—like that eight-year-old kid asking, “What does that mean?” has changed you. It was literally in that moment that I became obsessed with collecting posters. The country of Nicaragua was covered in posters. I thought, If they can use posters to teach their community, I want to use them to teach my community.

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics

The first few years

This poster [right] was the most widely distributed poster during the Vietnam War, and it was actually rejected from an art contest. It was done by Lorraine Schneider, a graphic designer. She submitted it for a contest at Pratt Art Institute and it was rejected as being too simplistic. Meanwhile a friend of hers was starting an anti-war organization and wanted to use it for their logo. She gave the design to them, and the rest is history. I just found a letter from a GI who wrote that these posters were stuck on walls, trees, and in the barracks all over Vietnam. This poster had a whole life overseas that I wasn’t even aware of. Another GI wrote that they also have medallions with this image.

UCLA funded my first poster exhibition. So in 1981, I collected my first poster, helped curate my first exhibit, and gave my first public talk. After UCLA did the exhibit they didn’t want the posters so I asked if I could keep them and they agreed. Next I put them up in a local community art gallery. Somebody saw them from San Diego and said, We have a community space, can we have them? I said sure, so after a month we put them in the trunk and drove down there. Somebody from Colorado said “My sister does solidarity work,” and then from 1981 to 1989 I was traveling around the country and around Canada with the posters and the slide show, collecting everywhere I went.

By the mid 1980s, I was trying to figure out what to do with my 5,000 posters. I started doing research to see what other institutions were out there. I wanted to know who was doing what I was doing: consciousness-raising, education, mobilizing, organizing. The Library of Congress was asking for posters, but no institution, including the Library of Congress, was actually using them to do grassroots organizing. People told me to start my own organization. Be careful what you wish for.

In 1988, 75,000 posters later—we get between three and five thousand posters donated annually—the center was incorporated and in 1989, we got our nonprofit status. Our exhibits have gone to over 300 venues around the world and we’re the only activist archive I know of in the country.

If that Sandinista poster had come to me today, with what I know now, I probably wouldn’t think it was so great. It’s not one of the top one hundred posters I’ve ever seen. But it is the poster that changed my life.

Posters can change people’s lives. That’s the power and importance of the poster.

LORRAINE SCHNEIDER, WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS, 1967.

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Posters as a way of teaching Before this poster was made [below right], the majority of people in the United States supported the Vietnam War. They believed the lies, they believed we were winning, and they believed the description of the enemy as a monster. When this photo and the related interviews came out, the American people literally said: This is not what I want with my tax dollars.

At the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, we show this to every group of young people that come into our exhibits or offices. It’s important to know the history, and posters allow a history that is not usually taught to be told.

“These posters record peoples’ struggles and peoples’ victories. People who write our histories often don’t want us to know how effective our movements are. So these are a record of our history.”

I recently showed this [below right] to a group of local graphic design graduate students and they said “Whoa.” I thought they were responding to the horror, but they said “Those babies look real, how did they insert them?” They thought it was a digitally manipulated image.

This poster also changed the opinion of the US population [below left]. When the Abu Ghraib photos came out, they immediately were made into posters. A group of college freshmen visited the Center in 2008 when this was on the wall. They immediately knew it was an iPod ad, but not one of the thirty-five kids in the group knew what the image was from because they were fourteen years old when it was in the headlines. What fourteen-year-old reads the newspaper and watches the news? It was out of their consciousness. So it’s not even twenty years, like I thought it was, it’s a couple of years. The posters become extremely important for keeping the history we want people to know. People need to know this history so the government doesn’t manipulate them, so that we can have a more democratic history and a more democratic process.

LEFT TO RIGHT: iRaq POSTER, 2004; ART WORKERS COALITION, 1969-70.

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Group Discussion Bringing the collection beyond the museum walls RENÉ DE GUZMAN [STAFF] : I would love to hear our guests’ thoughts on how this collection can engage with the public outside the Museum walls. The posters represent a history that bears directly on what our society is going through now. There is also a great deal of local relevance. How do we make this collection compelling to a broad range of folks? We could build web modules, but that has its challenges as well.

The folks who lived through this period feel deeply connected to this material, but it takes more to engage the younger generations.

LINCOLN CUSHING: I housed this collection for a couple of years, and had the opportunity to share it with many people. One thing that became clear was that I could choose a subject matter, such as Asian American history or LGBT history, and bring together eight to twelve people who were subject specialists.

When you get a room full of people who lived through it and you pull out these posters, people go haywire.

The stories come out. Things that would never be evident, even to an informed cataloguer, can be captured. Not only are you getting fascinating data, but you’re also building buy-in from the community about the relevance of the collection. There’s an opportunity to really capture these stories while people are alive.

PETER SAMIS: I see immediacy and topicality. The younger generations don’t know what these posters are about, but the people who were involved with these movements are still articulate and vital and they could come in groups and surface these stories.

These group conversations become an archive in itself that could potentially be mined for decades.

GREG MORIZUMI: I have two questions: First, what is the accessibility to community?

And who does the museum (and similar institutions) serve with these collections?

It’s good to have tours with public schools and things like that, but I think you need to examine how you’re serving your community as a whole. It is important to me that we recognize the relationship between this institution and various communities in the Oakland area.

DE GUZMAN: This is a legitimate question. Digital stuff is just digital stuff and I would love this conversation to explore that. Maybe museums need to look at lending libraries as a model. We need more robust, aggressive ways to get this stuff in front of the public.

We can’t rely on the nineteenth-century delivery system of museums anymore—there’s no active participation in that model.

MORIZUMI: Is presenting a reproduction of an artwork the same as presenting the original art itself?

I think it’s important for communities to see original art. I’m not criticizing digitization or reproduction— screen-printing served a similar function because you could do original art and have it in twenty cities at the same time—but I want the community to have access to the originals.

GEOFF KAPLAN: The difference between the analog and the digital is key. The ephemera of the piece has an aura, through its scarcity and its singularity, while the digital has power through its distribution and repeatability. You now hold an archive with both aura and buzz. It is your job to take care of that aura, but what about the buzz part? From doing my book I know very well that there are so many archives where the images are in lockdown. I can’t access them and when I do it costs me out of pocket. I can’t produce new knowledge, so my knowledge production is limited to how much money I have, how much access I have to the archives, or the kindness of a particular artist. The images that you guys now have, the digital

reproductions, those are invaluable.

DE GUZMAN: With the digital content we’re hoping to create a situation where it could go viral: where people get so into it they start bumping it all over the place. Maybe this is naïve.

KAPLAN: There are models out there: the free culture model and the Creative Commons model. Creative Commons has produced a framework through which we can give stuff away for free that can then contribute to new knowledge.

KATHLEEN MCLEAN [MODERATOR] : Is there a value judgment between the aura material and the digital material?

KAPLAN: They are two very different economies of images. The images flow very differently through the two economies.

MCLEAN: You asked me upstairs why we didn’t put the original posters on display in the history gallery.

There’s a correlation here. If we put the real posters out we would have to change them every three months because they would deteriorate in the light.

We would have to put them behind glass, so there would be a lot of glare. We really struggled with that.

Does it work to have prints of the posters? Maybe not.

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From the CreativeCommons website: “Our mission Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

What we provide The infrastructure we provide consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates.

Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work—a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright—which makes their creative, educational, and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs.

For those creators wishing to opt out of copyright altogether, and to maximize the interoperability of data, Creative Commons provides tools that allow work to be placed as squarely as possible in the public domain.”

TELLEFSEN: Nobody would dispute the fact that the original has much more value in and of itself. In terms of political poster collections, this one is unique internationally, but for it to be entirely digitized is singular. I troll digital archives online all the time and I have just started to see people do interesting things online. I know that to have 20,000 fully digitized pieces like this is an opportunity for the Oakland Museum of California to do something on a global scale that has never been done before. Not to seize this moment where you have something at your fingertips that nobody else has— that would be such a waste.

MCLEAN: So tell me, they get digitized, they’re online, then what? What’s your vision?

TELLEFSEN: Something similar to Kapsul, where you can create your own galleries. Go wide, go deep, and even use 3-D imagery. You have fantastic content, accessible technology, and in the Bay Area we have exciting designers. I’m fascinated by interactive timelines and graphic relational databases. I see this collection coming to life in such a way that the user controls their experience.

As a museum, you think curatorially about the need to create the content and experience. The flip side is that everything waits while you’re working on this project or that project. My hope is that this project can function on different tracks, where you create these focus groups or days at the museum where you pull out a particular series, while at the same time you have other teams staking out the online potential.

Who owns the AOUON archive?

JESUS BARRAZA: Taking on this collection is a big responsibility, and part of that responsibility is sharing.

You should partner with all the Bay Area organizations who do the kind of work that’s represented in the posters and get the posters out into those spaces.

One of the problems faced by arts organizations is that the money’s not there. But you are a respectably sized museum and there is money to put these posters in the community, whether it’s reproductions or framed originals.

Secondly, as a poster-maker myself, I would like to see all of these images up on the web. You can categorize them, tag them, and search them by subject. You can create lesson plans for kids. You can teach these posters and their historical context. You have to figure out how these posters are going to get out there. How are people going to see these? The idea that people will come to you—I don’t think that will work. You’ll have to be proactive to get these into the hands of the kids in East Oakland. The number of Black Panther posters that are represented in this collection have probably never been seen by a lot of people who live in Fruitvale, East Oakland, or San Antonio.

CAROL A. WELLS: You’re referring to the two contradictory missions that organizations like yours and ours have: public access and preservation. Both are parts of the mission, and both contradict each other.

The maximum way to preserve the material is to hide it away, and the maximum public access is going to destroy it. The posters will fade and eventually selfdestruct. How do we handle two contradictory missions?

When I started doing exhibitions thirty years ago, I came into it as an activist. I was focused on getting the work out there to as many people as possible. But then, all of a sudden, the stuff started to fade and get dog-eared. A couple pieces that we couldn’t replace got stolen. We began to get more conservative. I still prefer to exhibit originals but it’s helped that digital copies are getting to be higher-quality and cheaper.

Using originals is also limiting—for example, we’re being asked to travel an immigration exhibit to eight different places around the country, places that want to use thumbtacks and can’t pay $500 for shipping.

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The only answer is to do a digital exhibition, which is affordable but doesn’t look as good. Money is a real issue.

My last point is in agreement with Jesus: it is not enough to put it out and expect people to come.

DE GUZMAN: So how do we build an online community around this?

MORIZUMI: Technology can solve a lot of issues, but education and accessibility are primary. The nature of this particular collection is social unrest and racial discourse. It started in the 1960s and continues today. The Bay Area is a center of that discourse, so you need to have dialogue with local people.

You can have a collection of anything and have no clue of its relationship to the world. It’s the interpretation. A lot of the people that created the art and the messages in those movements are still alive and you should have a relationship with them.

JOHN FOX: I understand the need to be in close proximity to the original, or, if not the original, then the best representation of its context. The physicality of the history gallery [at OMCA] blew me away: the big train that says “Return to California” and this whole idea of movement; the military-industrial complex and the mass of frantic energy that built our state. In my mind the thing a physical museum can do that a digital one can’t is to build a physical kitchen. You can bring people here—if not the ones who were originally involved then the ones who were influenced by the movement. I don’t see that preservation and buzz are at odds with each other.

Copyright and accessibility JOSEPH DEL PESCO: I think you’re talking copyright, but I want to step back a moment and offer a more radical idea about archiving: the idea of a living archive rather than a dead mausoleum of treasures.

Carol’s idea of people being able to flip through the posters—to me that’s incredibly vital, not because of the aura of the objects but because those things represent real politics. There’s a difference between representation and things that have real political weight; there’s a difference in being about politics and being really political. Things need to have a real life in order to be political. They need to be in the real world, they need to be allowed to die, and there is certainly a tension, a dialectical tension between conservation and progression.

I think it’s absolutely crucial with this particular archive to consider supporting its political potential. It’s not just about education in this top-down sort of way.

We need to completely radicalize and make the posters accessible in every way possible. Getting clearance for copyright, for example, is one way you can do that. Let people handle them, let them be touched, let them be stolen. Upload the highest resolution files you can.

DE GUZMAN: I like to think of the Oakland Museum of California as one of the more progressive museums out there, so what is a really progressive policy around online images?

DEL PESCO: Museums are transitioning from a model of conservation and preservation to a model of production—creating futures and working with cultural figures and actors. It’s an incredibly important shift.

NADIA KHASTIGAR: The copyright issue is really interesting. We have to think about the original purpose of the posters. They’re not fine-art pieces, they’re

organizing tools. I love the idea of putting them out there so that people can use them. People in these movements don’t have a lot of money and resources, so how can we pay our homage to this work and use it to further the cause? As graphic artists, communications specialists, and organizers today, we need to be able to reference these materials. The Internet is essential to distribution. Is there a way to contextualize the posters online with stories from some of our elders?

WELLS: I may be in the minority here, but I am very uncomfortable with putting hi-res images on the Internet for anyone to take. I have no problem posting lo-res images without copyright—that’s fair use and we should distribute the images in the same way the posters were distributed. But there are a lot of people out there who are looking to take advantage of high resolution images that other people have worked on.

They make money, they don’t give credit, and the artists who have actually done the work get screwed.

DE GUZMAN: Can someone make a counter argument?

BARRAZA: With flash-based software, people can view hi-res images but they can’t download them.

ROBIN DOOLIN [STAFF]: I do rights and reproductions here at the Museum. Copyright is a real issue.

We’ve had politically conservative groups take Dorothea Lange images from our collection, especially the work that was collaborative with Paul Taylor and very liberal in its intent, and use it for their own purposes.

As an artist, I don’t want someone taking my photography and putting their own political spin on it. It’s not a matter of trying to control the images or making money off them—it’s a matter of protecting the artists who originally created the work, and the reasoning behind the image.

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ANNE WALSH: I hear you, but I feel like in this society, in this moment, if your work is photography as a medium, it’s fair game. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t feel badly if it’s manipulated in some way, but it’s an absolute inevitability that photography-based work is vulnerable. Whoever messed with the Dorothea Lange photos, if they didn’t get them from here, they would have gotten them from somewhere else, or they would have scanned them from a book.

OATES: Don’t you have a direct line into the collection, so you can control these issues around reproduction?

CUSHING: The copyright holder isn’t the collector, it’s the artist.

SASHA ARCHIBALD [STAFF]: But we do have contacts or could nurture contacts with many of the artists.

were scanned and the next week they were on eBay as T-shirts. People do it, you can’t stop it, and no one is really making any money. There are 15,000 different places where you can buy an Angela Davis T-shirt and I can guarantee that no one is making a lot of money. Trying to police that kind of activity as opposed to letting the world work and develop and percolate with exposure to the material—I cannot say strongly enough: err on the side of access and just grit your teeth.

What can we do that’s just not done by museums?

DE GUZMAN: I’m interested in the conundrum. Say you protect against the off-chance Rupert Murdock is going to make a million dollars off a Black Panther poster, but can we put a value on getting kids in East Oakland to use the material? Is it a fool’s journey to think that we can actually limit circulation of digital material?

WALSH: The museum should make the material known to a wide educator’s public. As a professor at Berkeley, I would be thrilled to have access to this stuff.

CUSHING: I hassled Shepard Fairey to get royalties from a Cuban artist when Shepherd ripped off his image, and he just said, “Oops.” I’m distressed with this tendency to hit and run. It ends up hurting artists and institutions. One of the first questions I asked OMCA was “How is this institution going to deal with requests for hi-res images?” People who actually need a high-res image for research are few and far between.

But they’re available, so upon request, you can get permission. One of the reasons I’m comfortable with the collection being here is that my perception is that the institutional culture is weighing on the side of fair use and public access.

TELLEFSEN: I feel your pain, but in the era of digital media there’s nothing you can do to stop that train.

Lincoln and Michael and I had many conversations about the size of thumbnails—a lot of the posters’ content you can’t get from a thumbnail. I saw what happened with the Cuban posters: the images were very rare until the books came out, and then they

MCLEAN: Let’s draw everyone back to the question of what does it actually mean for a place like the Oakland Museum of California to get this collection, with the primary purpose being distribution and access?

What does that mean as a new idea? What should they be doing that is just not done by museums?

SAMIS: I’m hearing that there are three sectors: influence, expansion, and dissemination. 1) The unique original that’s protected within the walls. The community can come in with the types of programs that Lincoln talked about and you can archive the histories. You get the stories on the record and into the galleries. 2) The local community beyond the walls.

You don’t want to have the nineteenth-century model where everybody has to come in to access the material. For this, it’s probably more prudent to do digital prints at different sizes and get them out into the communities, including the schools. 3) The third part is the global community, which is the online representation of the entire catalogue. At that point you can both harvest community memory from the outside, not just local community memory, but global community memory, potentially in multiple languages.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Still from director Michael Anderson’s film 1984; SHEPARD Fairey, OBEY.

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OATES: There are a couple of projects that might be interesting in this regard. The first is called the Grand Tour [below]. It was set up in London by the National Portrait Gallery. They put life-size reproductions of works of art in gilded frames outside Tube stations as direction signs. I loved that they were life-sized— some of these portraits are massive. The second is that there are several Twitter accounts that reproduce historical journals and such. Even Charles Darwin tweets. Maybe you can figure out a way of merging those two ideas together. You have amazing data on the posters: locality, time, place, an event, an artist, and a color. You could think about releasing them in a timed fashion at the original place where they would have been displayed. If there’s an event on March 30th in Berkeley you can put some posters up from 1968. Maybe they’re limited-edition screen prints that you can actually steal.

BARRAZA: You could print a whole bunch of posters that relate to the community, and hire a street crew to wheatpaste them over all the alcohol and tobacco ads.

WELLS: It’s the Museum of California, not just the Museum of the Bay Area, so you have to broaden your approach. There were posters made at every university around the state, so that needs to be on the table.

You also have to discuss in more depth how people can navigate the posters online. Putting up 25,000 images without direction overwhelms users.

CUSHING: Just to clarify, this collection was organized by basic subject area. If you wanted to see thirty or forty posters on Asian American artists or veganism, I could go grab a handful of posters based on that subject. What we’re doing now, as we accession the collection, is catalogue at a more intense level.

SAMIS: Every poster you put out there, even in the schools, you need to have it refer back to the museum.

OATES: There are all sorts of ways you can draw people back to the museum, but if that’s your initial intent I think it will go wrong because the gesture is about putting it out there.

Challenging content WELLS: There’s been a lot of talk about elementaryschool kids. It’s actually very difficult to deal with elementary-school kids. Michael’s collection shows anger, militancy, and violence. The collection has a very clear left slant. Also, remember that you’re a publicly supported institution. Your presentation might be critiqued on political grounds, depending on your source of funding.

For three years I’ve been a mentor at a local art school, as part of a project that pairs art students with a community non-profit. The students research, curate, and present their own mini-exhibition. It really gives them buy-in, and a historical understanding they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Once the posters are online, we could encourage teachers to do this with their students.

DEL PESCO: George’s and Jesus’s and Carol’s ideas are about identifying institutions as producers. I want to turn that back around to artists. I was the radical character a minute ago, now I want to be the conservative one. It’s important to remember that artists are better than anyone at coming up with new ideas around production. Museums have to trust their own investment in artists as creative thinkers.

A friend of mine, a French curator named Sebastien Pluot, is doing an interesting project right now with an archive. He records people, mostly artists, going through an archive—talking about the material and creating an interesting performance. The archive becomes more of a living archive, and the artworks become the main characters of the story.

[NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY’S GRAND TOUR PROJECT, PHOTO BY NICK GRANT (LEFT), PHOTO BY TRISTAM SPARKA (RIGHT).

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mine new content and invigorate the poster art form globally. There are some posters that are absolutely appropriate for young children. “War is not healthy”— take that and see what a 3rd-grade class could come up with.

Picture This “OMCA has a website called Picture This: California’s Perspective on American History, that we’re in the process of expanding and redesigning. The website is geared towards teachers and focuses on California’s ethnic diversity—all those stories you don’t find in the textbooks. This collection will be a goldmine to Picture This. We’re pilot-testing now. Your comments have been very inspiring, and have validated some of our ideas.

Our process started in 1994, when teachers said they didn’t have the materials to speak to what their students wanted to know. Or the opposite problem: students in the classroom are not diverse and the teacher needs the students to be aware of the diversity of the state.”

— Barbara Henry [staff]

DE GUZMAN: I think it’s important to disseminate and research and get as much meaning for each of these 23,000 posters as possible: cross reference them with Carol’s collection, use text, sound, and memory. I don’t want to create a ballet of political posters. Rather, we want to say that political dissent was in this form in this period of time, but that there are contemporary forms of political dissent as well. I want to inspire people to think about what these contemporary forms are. When we’re talking about issues of political expression and public space, I’m more interested in the Internet. What is the public space for our political expressions now? It’s not just physical space anymore.

BARRAZA: I’m afraid that this stuff is going to be decontextualized in the Museum. It makes me think, “Wait a minute. None of these artists would have ever been collected when this stuff was being made.” I’m afraid that it’s going to be the same story—the posters are collected because they’re old and the people are dead. People are comfortable saying, “This was a political action that happened a long time ago.” It’s sanitized by the passing of time. The artists that are doing this now should also be brought in and shown— that’s part of tearing down the barrier.

TELLEFSEN: I’m interested in how access can make the posters more relevant now. I was part of a great exhibit where grade school kids, contemporary artists, and designers in the Netherlands used some of the Che Guevara posters to create their own interpretive pieces.

WALSH: You could also do a curatorial project about the aesthetics of protest. There is quite a bit of writing, research, and interest in looking at the aesthetics of social movements, and this collection could link to a curatorial project about protest aesthetics.

Virtually every movement represented in that collection is still active today, so it’s an opportunity to

SAMIS: There’s an art museum social tagging project called steve. The Indianapolis Museum of Art has been leading the way with that, and I think you could

speak with them and get access to those tools.

It just came back to me again that Michael was a teacher, a lifelong teacher. Giving the posters a very robust presence in the teaching community feels essential when I think about Michael.

Political posters then and now WELLS: Seven years ago at Berkeley there was a conference on political organizing. I was at a panel on the political poster, and Josh Sanchez, one of the great Bay Area poster-makers, said silk screening is dead and poster making is over. Since then, not only have silk screening workshops popped up all over, but they’re teaching silk screening in art school. Thanks to George Bush and the Iraq War there’s been an incredible revival in poster making. Nothing provokes poster making more than war.

CUSHING: We’re not saying it’s the most useful tool, but it hasn’t died out.

DE GUZMAN: I don’t know if I could sell this to my nephew. He uses the culture of tweets, not the culture of protest. I think his generation will develop their own form of political protest in the public space they occupy, but for better or for worse, it’s not the street corner. We have to have a way to translate this collection to contemporary political expression.

WALSH: I disagree. If you grow up around protest graphics, even if you don’t understand them you take it in and it goes somewhere in you and it comes back later. Maybe I’m optimistic.

SAMIS: But you were saturated with that culture and René is saying that young people are saturated with a different culture. They see it as, “Oh, those baby boomers are trying to show that what they did was important; they’re trying to impose their stuff on us.”

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MORIZUMI: I have a constant dialogue with Emory Douglas, one of the most prominent artists featured in this collection. Emory is torn between putting stuff in museums and galleries and keeping it out. The issue is not nostalgia—these guys are still working artists. They never cared about galleries and museums, but now their work has become a commodity. You want the work to remain relevant.

WELLS: I hate nostalgia, but Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster changed US history, by helping Obama get elected. To say that a poster is not as effective now as it was in the 1960s or 1970s is just not the case.

I would suggest a committee that involves people from the community, people from the era, people who know the collections, the images, and the meaning of it. There has to be something different about the handling of this collection.

WALSH: I would argue that more people saw Fairey’s image on their phones than on the street. They are carrying their monitors.

CUSHING: Media changes. I learned to silkscreen with lacquer hand-cut stencils. We don’t do that anymore, but people are still making images, and people are still doing stencil art. It’s part of what makes democracy work in this country. It’s not just nostalgia; if we present it as a thing of the past, it’s the kiss of death.

WELLS: We still have demonstrations and the media takes pictures and then the media gets to people’s cell phones.

SAMIS: Street art is completely in sync with the ethos of poster making, and street art is completely contemporary.

KHASTIGAR: Posters are relevant—people come to our office and see the work and it resonates. We have to attack our enemies with many different tactics, and posters are just one of them. Certain people respond to visual imagery and they’ll get it.

SAMIS: It’s not just about posters, but also powerful graphic design, which can be on the web or on a poster.

MCLEAN: I don’t think we want to pit the digital twoby-two against the paper eighteen-by-thirty. It’s an excellent point that Fairey’s image started as a poster.

That suggests that the poster is a contemporary object.

LEFT TO RIGHT: SHEPARD FAIREY, HOPE, 2008; HOPE ON AN iPHONE, PHOTO BY EMUII FROM FLICKR.

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Parting thoughts: radical ideas of distribution MCLEAN: I would like to ask each of you to give us your parting thoughts. Really go way out there in terms of your ideas.

BARRAZA: Get it all online and don’t make it overly complicated. Put it into the hands of the community, make exhibits, have people do their own exhibits from the database. Put it out there in the community, because that’s where these posters came from.

TELLEFSEN: The most radical thing the Oakland Museum could do is to put the entire catalogue online for the world to use. Put your best and brightest minds to the task of creating an interactive online interface.

OATES: I don’t believe that access contradicts preservation. I actually think the opposite. The more access you give to materials, the better they’ll be preserved.

Generally I would encourage getting these posters to as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible. Go as hi-res as you can because people expect that at this point.

SAMIS: We’re all extolling the same ideas here about the ways that posters can exist both locally and remotely. Don’t wait to over-document them before putting them online. That would be the Bancroft way, or the SFMOMA way—it’s the traditional way of large institutions. Use them as prompts to harvest everything they stimulate in the world. Bring those responses in, organize them in myriad ways so that people can slice and dice them however they choose.

Include the original artists, who probably surrendered copyright the moment they made the poster in the first place. Let them be able to comment or say, “I’m still alive and this is what I’m doing and here’s a link to my website.”

FOX: Once it’s all digitized and reproduced, put it in public spaces with hidden cameras. People will do double takes and say, “What year is this?” You walk down Valencia Street and the same type of imagery is there today. I would argue that if these people had other tools, they would be using them. It’s not different from cave painting, it’s not different from kids in the Bronx tagging a building. They all want to prove: I exist. You don’t think I exist because you don’t see me down in Grand Central, but I exist.

The value in this thing is not the original object, it’s the annotated layers of interpretation and meaning.

If you didn’t do it on the street, you could have an exhibit here where you could reproduce the original posters in as original a context as possible. What did a wall in Oakland in 1969 look like? Whether you’re talking about 2010 or 1968 depends on where you entered the exhibit. That’s the unique opportunity we have with a cultural artifact that reverberates across decades.

MORIZUMI: As a curator, I would like to borrow some of these posters and put them up in East Oakland and Berkeley. It’s been illegal to put posters up on streets for decades now; at UC Berkeley you can’t even put up flyers. The democratic space has been limited, and our freedom of expression has been limited. I would like to see a gallery of the streets sponsored by some clandestine group of the Museum. (If you don’t want to do that, I can do it for you.)

“I clearly believe in the project of history but there are no new images, there are only reanimated images. Free culture for free people. That’s my slogan.”

— Geoff Kaplan

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KHASTIGAR: I would like to see the context and the history from these posters put in context with parallel struggles that continue today. I would also like to see hi-res images available for download.

DEL PESCO: The conversation today has mostly been about the researcher or scholar. Then there are educators, for whom access is obviously very important.

Then there are the makers, which we’ve touched on less. What’s the most radical way of making this available? Commission artists to work with the collection directly and really engage with it. Have them reinvent it, research copyright laws, and distribute the images in creative ways.

CUSHING: As an art historian, the part of all this that makes me nervous is stripping the historical background from the object. I don’t mind people playing with stuff—all art is derivative for the most part. But the notion that you take it entirely out of context troubles me. It still needs to say somewhere, in tiny type, “This is originally from a poster from Paris from 1968.”

It’s important to honor the history that produced the original stuff.

WELLS: The dream is—assuming time and money and labor are not an issue—to present the posters with the music, the poetry, and footage of the demonstrations, so that people could actually see how these were used: Berkeley in the 1960s, LA in the 1970s.

WALSH: I don’t think that idiots come along and steal hi-res images and ruin them. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t know what gets ruined. Make a gesture of real generosity towards culture. You pay so much to go to a museum, you pay so much to be a member, you pay, you pay, you pay. Enough already.

“One of the most radical things you can do as a museum is to be generous.”

— Anne Walsh

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Staff Discussion DOOLIN [STAFF]: I share the same hope as all that this material becomes widely accessible. But the issue is not so much a matter of limiting access, as of protecting the original context and the intent of the artist. I would hate to see a poster that was designed for an anti-racist campaign be used by a racist group.

We need to keep a watchful eye on how these things are used. It’s not really to censor people, but to make sure that people aren’t taking advantage of the collection in a way that could have terrible effects.

CARSON BELL [STAFF]: I’m hearing both sides, and what I’ve gotten out of this is how passionate everyone is about this subject. That’s what is really coming through and that’s what I want to see come through in the project. You can get into what we should and shouldn’t do, but it’s the passion behind the posters and the passion that came with the posters that’s really interesting.

BRIDGET BARNHART [STAFF]: When you put a poster up, anybody who is walking by can see it: the audience is completely random. When you put things online, on Facebook or Twitter, it’s a very select and narrow audience. It’s like reading the newspaper online now—everything is filtered and focused to your interests. In presenting this collection online, how are you going to ensure that people get exposed to stuff they might not have been looking for?

SAMIS: Yes, how do you break out of the niche market of radical poster making?

MACARRON [STAFF]: I am a collections person at the Museum, and one of the people taking care of the posters. For me, the most radical thing I can do is preserve these posters as best as I can, and to distribute them as best as we can. I agree with what the Egyptians thought: “You’re immortal as long as somebody says your name.” Your message will be immortal as long as somebody picks it up. We can put whatever spin we want on the distribution but I think the stor-

age—I don’t mean the physical storage, but the digital storage—is essential for other generations to appreciate this material. As registrars, part of our work is exhibiting stuff on the walls, part of it is correctly storing it, and part is putting it out there in the world.

BARBARA HENRY [STAFF]: When we talked to web designers about technology, we thought we wanted to do all this interactive stuff, but across the board the tech folks and the educators just said, “Get us the images!” We thought we needed creative interactives, but it’s much simpler than that.

SAMIS: People just want a story. You can put your bells and whistles and gizmos up, but people really just want a story. The more stories you can put in there the better, especially if the images are high quality.

CAROLYN RISSANEN [STAFF]: I’m also a registrar here and I have a question: What is it about hi-res images? What do people want them for? Conversely, what are we afraid of?

TELLEFSEN: For a lot of these posters, you can’t read the small text unless it’s hi-res.

DOOLIN: We’re afraid of a giant corporation obtaining the images and selling them for hundreds of dollars, which has happened.

MCLEAN: What do we really need to be afraid of?

OATES: Maybe you can measure the actual risk. Presumably not every one of the 23,000 posters is equally prone to being stolen by a corporation. Maybe a subset requires permissions, but not all of them.

TELLEFSEN: I’m a huge proponent of accessibility, but I’m absolutely fine with people not being able to download hi res images. Being able to see the detail on the poster is the most important thing.

JOY TAHAN [STAFF]: We’ve been struggling with this, because digitizing a collection and putting it online is new for us. We had a meeting just yesterday about the philosophy behind getting it out there. Is our goal just to have a lot of images? We could essentially put a ton of the posters up with no data on the web, or we could put a small number up with a lot of data. We’re struggling with that decision.

SAMIS: I say put it out there and fill in the information over time.

CUSHING: Making cataloguing collaborative with the public is a radical step.

OATES: There’s actually a precedent for that. The George Eastman House, a photography museum, put basically a cardboard box of photographs on Flickr Commons. They scanned them all and literally left titles like “Img_233.” The general public leapt in and identified people, places, and times. The institution lifted their skirts and said, “We don’t know much about these; what do you know?” And it worked.

SCHIFFILEERS: I’m curious about what Michael Rossman wanted to see happen with this collection.

CUSHING: He wanted it to be as accessible as possible. That was his goal, and that’s part of the reason it’s here and not at the Bancroft Library.

MCLEAN: Thank you all for coming.

TARA PETERSON [STAFF]: If there’s a high-res file online that’s not downloadable, is that seen as accessible? Is it better to have a high res image that can’t be downloaded, or a low res one that can?

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