A PEOPLE’S
ART HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
250 YEARS OF ACTIVIST ART AND ARTISTS WORKING IN SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS
Nicolas Lampert
NEW YORK
LONDON
© 2013 by Nicolas Lampert
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
A longer version of chapter 8 (“Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions”) was published in Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority, Josh MacPhee and Eril Reuland, editors (Oakland: AK Press, 2007). Permission to reprint this new version of the essay was granted by AK Press.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
First published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2013
This paperback edition published by The New Press, 2015
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lampert, Nicolas, 1969—
A people’s art history of the United States : 250 years of activist art and artists working in social justice movements / Nicolas Lampert.
pages cm — (New press people’s history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62097-133-8 (e-book)1. Art—Political aspects—United States.2. History in art.3. Art, American—Themes, motives.I. Title.
N72.P6L37 2013
701'.030973—dc23
2013014977
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To the activist-artists and the artist-activists
Contents
Series Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
1.Parallel Paths on the Same River
2.Visualizing a Partial Revolution
3.Liberation Graphics
4.Abolitionism as Autonomy, Activism, and Entertainment
5.The Battleground over Public Memory
6.Photographing the Past During the Present
7.Jacob A. Riis’s Image Problem
8.Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions
9.Blurring the Boundaries Between Art and Life
10.The Masses on Trial
11.Banners Designed to Break a President
12.The Lynching Crisis
13.Become the Media, Circa 1930
14.Government-Funded Art: The Boom and Bust Years for Public Art
15.Artists Organize
16.Artists Against War and Fascism
17.Resistance or Loyalty: The Visual Politics of Miné Okubo
18.Come Let Us Build a New World Together
19.Party Artist: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party
20.Protesting the Museum Industrial Complex
21.“The Living, Breathing Embodiment of a Culture Transformed”
22.Public Rituals, Media Performances, and Citywide Interventions
23.No Apologies: Asco, Performance Art, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement
24.Art Is Not Enough
25.Antinuclear Street Art
26.Living Water: Sustainability Through Collaboration
27.Art Defends Art
28.Bringing the War Home
29.Impersonating Utopia and Dystopia
Notes
Index
Series Preface
TURNING HISTORY ON ITS HEAD opens up whole new worlds of possibility. Once, historians looked only at society’s upper crust: the leaders and others who made the headlines and whose words and deeds survived as historical truth. In our lifetimes, this has begun to change. Shifting history’s lens from the upper rungs to the lower, we are learning more than ever about the masses of people who did the work that made society tick.
Not surprisingly, as the lens shifts the basic narratives change as well. The history of men and women of all classes, colors, and cultures reveals an astonishing degree of struggle and independent political action. Everyday people played complicated historical roles, and they developed highly sophisticated and often very different political ideas from the people who ruled them. Sometimes their accomplishments left tangible traces; other times, the traces are invisible but no less real. They left their mark on our institutions, our folkways and language, on our political habits and vocabulary. We are only now beginning to excavate this multifaceted history.
The New Press People’s History Series roams far and wide through human history, revisiting old stories in new ways, and introducing altogether new accounts of the struggles of common people to make their own history. Taking the lives and viewpoints of common people as its point of departure, the series reexamines subjects as different as the American Revolution, the history of sports, the history of American art, the Mexican Revolution, and the rise of the Third World.
A people’s history does more than add to the catalogue of what we already know. These books will shake up readers’ understanding of the past—just as common people throughout history have shaken up their always changeable worlds.
Howard Zinn
Boston, 2000
Preface
A FEW YEARS BACK, a friend caught me off guard when he asked, “Why aren’t the artists of today responding in force to the political crisis of the moment?” He mentioned some of the visual artists who were radicalized by the Vietnam War—Mark di Suvero, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ad Reinhardt, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre, and so on, and said that nothing approaching that level of engagement has taken place in the decades that have followed. My answer to him was simple. I told him that artists were responding, and more important, he was looking in the wrong places.
My colleague was drawing names from the art world (primarily the New York art world of galleries and museums), while I was looking elsewhere. I suggested that he look to the artists, designers, photographers, and creative agitators who took part in the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the Chicano/Chicana movement, and the red power movement. That he look to the artists in the antinuclear movements, the AIDS movements, the antiwar movements, the environmental movements, the antiglobalization movements, the prison-justice movements, and the feminist movements that did not end in the 1970s. If he wanted to go further back, he could look at the artists in the 1930s’ federal art projects and labor unions, those in the suffrage movements, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and so on.
However, his point was clear. Many people look to the world of museums and galleries when they think of visual art, including political art. My argument was that these places are not the primary site for activist art. Politically engaged art can and does exist in museums a
nd galleries, but activist art is altogether different and is firmly located in movements and in the streets and communities that produce these movements.1 My deeper point was that there is another art history that is overlooked—a history of activist art.
This study addresses this parallel history. Some examples draw upon movement culture—the art, objects, ephemera, photographs, and visual culture that emerges directly out of movements by the participants themselves. This work is done by individuals who may or may not self-identify as an “artist” or a producer of media. These individuals more likely consider themselves activists first—people who organize and at times employ visual tactics to help their causes succeed.
In contrast, other examples in this study focus upon individuals who identify first and foremost as an “artist”—individuals who were often trained in art academies and art schools. These individuals (or art collectives) chose to locate their art within a movement—rather than a gallery or a museum—because they were inspired by the cause and decided to join the movement in solidarity as an artist.
Both paths taken—movement culture and the work created by “artists” aligned with social-justice movements—are equally significant. And both paths fundamentally change the role of art in society. Likewise, when the definition of an artist becomes more flexible (for example: an artist is anyone who creates visual culture), it breaks down the elitism in the visual arts and challenges the notion that only a select few people with special talents can participate in the visual-art field. In short, it makes art accessible to all.
Curiously, or perhaps not, the term “visual artist” is often the biggest impediment to artists themselves in the modern era. “Visual artist” comes with its own set of cultural biases, internalized dilemmas, fixed paths, and stereotypes—isolated, aloof, fringe, eccentric, and so forth—labels that define the artist from the outside. These labels and misnomers are detrimental: they present artists as fundamentally different, when in fact most artists are much like everyone else—working-class people with working-class concerns.
Additionally even the term “art” is suspect when one looks at material items from the past four centuries. Different cultures see the world from different perspectives, and the central thesis of this book—artists working in movements—is less applicable in describing traditional Native art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mary Lou Fox Radulovich, the late director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, stated that “Indian people have no word for art. Art is part of life, like hunting, fishing, growing food, marrying, and having children. This is an art in the broadest sense . . . an object of daily usefulness, to be admired, respected, appreciated, and used, the expression thereby nurturing the needs of body and soul, thereby giving meaning to everything.”2
Contemporary artistic practice also blurs our understanding of art. Arguably, some of the most profound examples of activist art, especially during the past four decades, is work that negates traditional ideas about art—projects where the art is difficult to define. This type of work shares commonality with the tactics of social-justice movements—art as a form of civil disobedience and art that intervenes in public space and the mass media, becoming a form of tactical media itself.
Yet if anything connects the multitude of examples that are presented in this study, it is the recycling of tactics that are redeployed with minor variations—a practice that is wholly welcomed. Tactics that succeed do so for a reason, and if activist artists can draw inspiration from the past and adapt them to the present, then all the power to them.
Significantly, this study is not an all-encompassing survey of activist art throughout U.S. history. If so, I would have included essays on Thomas Nast, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Black Mask, Bread and Puppet, and others, along with key struggles like the ones led by the Young Lords and the United Farm Workers, to name just a couple. Rather, my decision-making process was to move through U.S. history chronologically and to focus upon a select number of examples that inform us about various visual art disciplines and tactics used in activist campaigns. Some that worked. Others that fell short. At times, I was particularly drawn to the examples that were complicated, where the decisions made by artists were controversial and confounding. My logic: analyzing histories that are deeply complicated helps us learn. A history of only success stories does not.
Collectively, my hope is that this study serves as a call to action for more artists to become activists, and conversely for more activists to employ art, for the benefits are vast. When social movements embrace artists, they harness the power of those who excel at expressing new ideas and reaching people in ways that words and other forms of media cannot. They harness the power of visual culture. And when artists join movements, their work—and by extension their lives—takes on a far greater meaning. They become agitators in the best sense of the word and their art becomes less about the individual and more about the common vision and aspirations of many. Their art becomes part of a culture of resistance.
Acknowledgments
WRITING A BOOK IS a unique opportunity to collaborate, and to be in communication with many brilliant people. I am forever grateful to Marc Favreau, Maury Botton, Azzurra Cox, and all at The New Press for supporting this project from the start. I thank them for their thoughtful suggestions, edits, and patience in allowing me ample time to develop my manuscript. Gratitude is also extended to colleagues and close friends who reviewed the manuscript—most notably to Josh MacPhee. Josh’s suggestions for edits were invaluable, as has been his support in other facets of my creative life. He brought twenty-five of us together to form the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative in 2007, a community that has continuously nurtured my hybrid practice of producing art for social-justice movements, writing about activist art, and curating activist art exhibitions.
I also thank Gregory Sholette, Dylan A.T. Miner, Alan W. Moore, Susan Simensky Bietila, Tom Klem, and Sandra de la Loza for reviewing specific chapters, along with James Lampert for his careful edits and for everything. Vast appreciation is also extended to John Couture for his insight during the early stages of the project, along with Gregory Sholette and Janet Koenig. Thank you also to Rachelle Mandik for her copyedits of the final manuscript.
In Milwaukee, I thank all my colleagues in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee who have allowed me the opportunity to teach my practice—art and social justice—from day one. Special thank-you to Kim Cosier, Lee Ann Garrison, Yevgeniya Kaganovich, Denis Sargent, Josie Osborne, Raoul Deal, Nathaniel Stern, Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Shelleen Greene, and Laura Trafi-Prats, along with other colleagues across the University—Greg Jay, Linda Corbin-Pardee, Lane Hall, and Max Yela for supporting my scholarship, art, and teaching on topics that relate specifically to this study.
Thank you also to the teaching and learning community outside of academia—the many collective spaces and independent publications that have allowed me the opportunity to present on activist art and to contribute essays and interviews to the dialogue. In Chicago: Mess Hall, AREA Chicago, Daniel Tucker, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Lisa Lee, InCUBATE, Proximity, Ed Marzewski, and Mairead Case. In Milwaukee: the Public House and “Night School,” Paul Kjelland, Woodland Pattern, Michael Carriere and all colleagues at ReciproCity. In Madison: Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Dan S. Wang, and Camy Matthay and Sarah Quinn for the opportunity to present radical art history inside the prison industrial complex. In Detroit: Mike Medow, Jeanette Lee, Josh Breitbart, and all who organize the annual Allied Media Conference. In Bowling Green and elsewhere: Jen Angel, Jason Kucsma, and all involved in the past Allied Media Conferences, and the greatly missed Clamor magazine.
I also extend my gratitude to those who have supported my research and have invited me to contribute writings to various books and publications, including Temporary Services (Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer, Brett Bloom), Jennifer A. Sandlin, Brian D. Schultz, Jake Burdick, Peter McLaren, Therese Quinn, John Ploof, Lisa Hochtritt, Josh MacPhe
e, Erik Reuland, Erica Sagrans, the Compass Collaborators (the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor), and James Mann. Thank you also to those who have provided me with art and research grants: the Mary L. Nohl Individual Artists Fund in Milwaukee, and the Jean Gimbel Lane Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University. Special thank-you to Polly Morris and Michael Rakowitz. Thank you also to Nato Thompson, Gretchen L. Wagner, Lori Waxman, and Linda Fleming.
I am also indebted to the many co-collaborators who have allowed me the chance to collaborate as an artist in a movement. Thank you first and foremost to all in Justseeds, and to Dara Greenwald, whom we miss dearly. Thank you to Aaron Hughes and the Chicago chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW); TAMMS Year Ten, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Jesse Graves, and all involved in the mud stencil action; the Chicago chapter of the Rain Forest Action Network (RAN); and all involved in the Warning Signs project.
Much appreciation is also extended to the activist art archives, in particular the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles, the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and Radicalism Photograph Collection at NYU, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, the LGBT and HIV/AIDS Activist Collections at the New York Public Library, and the Woman’s Building Image Archive at Otis College of Art and Design. And thank you to the art historians and the artists who informed this study. The book is a tribute to your work.
Much gratitude is extended to all the artists, art historians, historians, scholars, librarians, and archivists who provided images for this book, provided insight, and directed me to various collections. First and foremost thank you to those who reduced or waived image permission fees. It would not have been possible to compliment the text with so many images without your generosity. Special thank-you to Seiko Buckingham, Suzanne Lacy, Russell Campbell, the Yes Men, Betsy Damon, Aaron Hughes, Sue Maberry at the Woman’s Building Image Archive at Otis College of Art and Design, Faith Wilding, Nancy Youdelman, Judy Baca, Pilar Castillo at SPARC, Harry Gamboa Jr., Chon A. Noriega at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC), Francis V. O’Connor, Penelope Rosemont, Sandra de la Loza, Jon Hendricks, Marc Fischer, the Jump Cut editors, Mike Greenlar, Lincoln Cushing, Michael Shulman at Magnum Photos, Josh MacPhee at the Interference Archive, Carol A. Wells at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), Julie Herrada at the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, and Evelyn Hershe at the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark. I am a firm believer that art created for social justice movements should be part of the public commons and our shared collective history and not restricted by copyrights and expensive image permission fees, something that many activist artists and activist groups have embraced, often through Creative Common licenses. In closing, thank you to Azzurra Cox and Ben Woodward at The New Press for assisting me with the image permission process.
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