A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  One would have hoped that the conference attendees would see through the prank (considering how bombastic it was), but the opposite occurred. People asked detailed questions (primarily about the SurvivaBall cost feasibility and defense abilities against terrorist threats) and requested business cards.

  The Yes Men, SurvivaBall, diagram (Yes Men)

  The audience response provided little confidence that individuals who subscribe to the logic of corporate capitalism will ever embrace meaningful solutions that will significantly curb climate change, especially if profit motives are at stake. If anything, the Yes Men helped draw connections to how the oil and gas industries have lobbied extensively against regulations that would curb greenhouse gas emissions.16

  The Yes Men have unleashed SurvivaBalls in protest demonstrations throughout the country in their campaign, appropriately titled, Balls Across America. One action took the form of an attempted waterborne assault on the United Nations Building in New York. On September 22, 2009, twenty-one SurvivaBalls gathered on the banks of the East River to “blockade the negotiations and refuse to let world leaders leave the room until they’d agreed on sweeping cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, as Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has demanded.”17 Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum described the event as a “scenic and mediagenic way to call attention to what our leaders need to do in the run-up to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.”18

  The Yes Men, SurvivaBall, diagram (Yes Men)

  Police swarmed in by land, boat, and helicopter as activists dressed in SurvivaBalls waded in the water. Seven people were charged with trespassing, and Bichlbaum was handcuffed and taken to jail. His arrest was given prime-time media coverage by CNN. Bichlbaum stated:

  That’s the whole point of civil disobedience. Thanks to my momentary discomfort, our symbol of the stupidity of not taking action on climate change was seen by tens of millions of people. It all worked out great, and I remain grateful to the NYPD for having accidentally made our event successful beyond our wildest dreams.19

  The media coverage resulting from the arrest conjures past activist tactics of the woman’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and various labor struggles, all of which used representations of police arrests and abuse to their advantage. The Yes Men are part of this tradition of civil disobedience. Mike Bonanno states, “With ‘Balls Across America,’ our goal is to get arrested fair and square, all across this fair land of ours. It’s a great way to get attention for a crucial issue.”20

  The Yes Men, SurvivaBalls storming the U.N. Building, New York City (Yes Men)

  The Yes Men assert that their practice of impersonating and embarrassing corporations, administrations, and government agencies is not an end in itself. It is part of a broader movement, and part of a lineage of artists who agitate for change through creative and collaborative means.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Lucy R. Lippard writes, “There has long been a confusion between the notions of ‘political’ and ‘activist’ art, which is really a confusion between political and activist artists, exacerbated by the fact that they frequently cross over the unmarked boundaries. Loosely, very loosely, I’d say that the ‘political artist’ makes gallery/museum art with political subject matter and/or content, but may also be seen calling meetings, marching, signing petitions, or speaking eloquently and analytically on behalf of various causes . . . ‘Activist artists,’ on the other hand, face out of the art world, working primarily in a social and/or political context. They spend more of their time thinking publicly, are more likely to work in groups, and less likely to show in galleries, though many have ended up there. Activists may snipe at the power structures from the art world’s margins, or simply bypass conventional venues to make art elsewhere.” See “Too Political? Forget It” in Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, Philip Yenawine, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 49.

  2. Richard W. Hill Sr., “Art of the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes” in Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art from the Peabody Essex Museum, John R. Grimes, Christian F. Feest, Mary Lou Curran, eds. (New York: American Federation of Arts, in association with the University of Washington Press, 2002), 189.

  Chapter 1: Parallel Paths on the Same River

  1. Lynn Ceci, “The Value of Wampum Among the New York Iroquois: A Case Study in Artifact Analysis, Journal of Anthropological Research 38 (1982): 98.

  2. Ibid., 102.

  3. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 46.

  4. Ibid., 15.

  5. Ibid., 44–45.

  6. Ibid., 36.

  7. Ibid., 39.

  8. Also referred to as the Two Paths Belt, Two Rows Belt, Kaswentha, or the Covenant Chain.

  9. William N. Fenton, “Return of the Eleven Wampum Belts to the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy on Grand River, Canada,” Ethnohistory (The American Society for Ethnohistory) 36:4, (Fall 1989): 398.

  10. The approximate date of the formation of the Iroquois League is debated. All scholars agree that the formation of the League evolved over time. Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips suggest that the League was set by the second half of fifteenth century. Dean R. Snow suggests that the completion of the League was set by 1525 and that Iroquois oral tradition and archeological evidence suggests that the League could not have formed before 1450. William F. Fenton states that the League came into existence around 1500, give or take twenty-five years, and Daniel K. Richter places the establishment sometime late in the fifteenth century.

  11. Ceci, “The Value of Wampum,” 100.

  12. Ibid., 100.

  13. For instance, the Pequot controlled much of the wampum trade in the Massachusetts Bay Colony up until 1633. This changed when the Pequot were decimated during a series of skirmishes and attacks in 1637 and 1638 that pitted the Pequot tribe against English colonists and their Native allies—the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more were captured and sold into slavery to the West Indies. Also, King Philip’s War (1675–1678) exacerbated tensions throughout the region. Metacomet (or Matacom)—the Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag, called King Philip of Wampanoag by the colonial population—led the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nashaway, Nipmuck, Podunk, and other tribes in a three-year war against the colonial population (and their Native allies—Mohegan, Pequot, Nauset, and Massachusetts) in present-day New England. Twelve colonial towns were destroyed and upward of six hundred colonists and three thousand Natives were killed. The colonial victory opened up much of present-day Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to colonial settlement.

  14. John R. Grimes, Christian F. Feest, and Mary Lou Curran, eds., Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art From the Peabody Essex Museum (Seattle: University of Washington Press, in association with the American Federation of Arts, New York, 2002), 103.

  15. Ceci, “The Value of Wampum,” 100.

  16. Ibid., 101. Starting in 1627, Isaac Razier (Secretary of New Netherland) began championing wampum as currency while he was based in the Plymouth Colony. See William M. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles Used by the New York Indians,” Bulletin of the New York State Museum 41, vol. 8 (Albany, University of the State of New York, February 1901), 351.

  17. Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 44.

  18. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 45–46.

  19. War was the normal state of affairs. The Iroquois were at constant war with the Huron, the Susquehannock, the Algonquians, the St. Lawrence Iroquois, and other Indian tribes long before the arrival of Europeans. Every death required an act of revenge—a cycle of violence that defined what became known as the mourning wars. To ease the grief and the pain of losing family members, warring parties would raid another tribe for captives to replace those who had been killed. Some captives would be absorbed as
family members, taking on the names and positions of those they replaced. Others would be enslaved or killed. Diseases heightened the mourning wars. European diseases (smallpox, measles, mumps, and the chicken pox) decimated Native populations throughout the Western Hemisphere. In the early 1630s, a smallpox epidemic reduced the Great Lakes Native population by half. The Iroquois were equally ravaged. The Mohawk population dropped from 7,740 to 2,830 in a matter of months and some Mohawk villages had to be completely vacated. Epidemics also reduced the population of the Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga by half. Only the Senecas held their pre-epidemic number of around 4,000, and this was only by absorbing 2,000 captives from other tribes. Wherever Europeans settled, diseases followed. The most dangerous carriers of these deadly microbes were children. The arrival of Spanish children in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America had wiped out 75 to 95 percent of the population during the sixteenth century. The same scenario took place in North America a century later. The strongest age groups (ages fifteen to forty) had the most violent reactions to epidemics. Often secondary respiratory infections would be the cause of death. European populations had already adjusted to epidemics through repeated exposures; Native populations in the Western Hemisphere had no such immunity.

  20. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia), 6.

  21. Mary A. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties: Common Forms, Varying Interpretations,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, Francis Jennings, ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 89.

  22. Ibid., 93. Colonists did not have a significant numerical advantage in the seventeenth century over Native populations despite the waves of epidemics. Colonial population numbers in 1700 were around 250,000, an estimated figure that increased dramatically by 1750 to around 1.25 million, which included the African slave population. The Iroquois numbered close to 22,000 people by the mid-seventeenth century. See Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 7.

  23. William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in Jennings, ed., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 21.

  24. Michael K. Foster, “Another Look at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils” in Jennings, ed. The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 108.

  25. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties,” 93.

  26. Bulletin of the New York State Museum, 399.

  27. William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” 17.

  28. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 48–49.

  29. Ibid., 48.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 132. Additionally, women were involved in the decision-making process at the village level. Senior women from the dominant clan segments of each nation selected a man to serve as League Chief, or Sachem. If they failed to serve the community well, senior women from the dominant clans could have the men de-horned—removed from power.

  32. Ibid., 61.

  33. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 171.

  34. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 44–45.

  35. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties,” 87.

  36. Ibid., 89–90.

  37. Realizing the dangers of colonists ignoring the agreements made in councils, the Iroquois sometimes insisted that signed documents and treaty notes be provided to them.

  38. Chief Irving Powless Jr., “Treaty Making” in Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States, G. Peter Jemison and Anna M. Schein, editors (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 21.

  39. Rick Hill, “Talking Points on History and Meaning of the Two Row Wampum Belt,” Deyohaha:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre, Ohsweken, Ontario, March 2013, Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign, April 22, 2013, http://honorthetworow.org/learnmore/history/.

  40. In 2010, the federal government census recognized more than 565 Indian tribes and Alaska Native groups, tribes that speak more than 250 languages.

  Chapter 2: Visualizing a Partial Revolution

  1. Alfred F. Young, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 339.

  2. In colonial America, copyright protection did not exist. The standard operating procedure was for printers to reprint pamphlets and anything that found its way into their shops. Real copyright protection did not occur until the first U.S. Congress passed legislation in 1790.

  3. Clarence S. Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 52–53.

  4. Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution: 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 173.

  5. Jonathan Mulliken, a clockmaker from Newburyport, Massachusetts, also published an engraving that differed little from Pelham and Revere’s image.

  6. Marcus Rediker, “The Revenge of Crispus Attucks; or, The Atlantic Challenge to American Labor History,” Labor, Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, issue 4 (2004), 37, 38.

  7. Young, Liberty Tree, 42.

  8. Ibid., 31.

  9. Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York: The New Press, 2002), 149–50.

  10. Young, Liberty Tree, 189.

  11. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 232, 237.

  12. Ibid., 237.

  13. Young, Liberty Tree, 331.

  14. Ibid., 8.

  15. Ibid., 9.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 8.

  18. Ibid., 335.

  19. Revere sold copies of his engraving A View of the Year 1765 at a number of locations, including under the Liberty Tree itself. More appropriately, the Liberty Tree itself served as an important location for celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act a year after it had been passed. Due to the public outcry, Parliament was forced to repeal the act, and in May 1766 colonists in Boston celebrated by hanging forty-five lanterns from a tree that had come to symbolize organized resistance. By the second night more than 108 lanterns hung from its branches. See Young, Liberty Tree, 330.

  20. Revere also included an image of the hanging effigy of John Huske (an American member of British Parliament who favored the Stamp Act), which was hung from the tree on November 1, 1765.

  21. Broadsides were commonplace in urban centers and used for a host of reasons: communicating announcements, reprinting speeches, editorials, or opinions. During the war, broadsides communicated news as well as official addresses of Congress and state legislatures. Revolutionary songs were printed on broadsides. Even Massachusetts governor Thomas Gage widely employed broadsides. More often than not, broadsides often had no markers to identify the author or printer and were put up at night on doors, trees, posts, or left on doorsteps. It was common to list one’s enemies on broadsides. For example, broadsides would list the names of those who violated an import boycott. Others listed the names of boats that allowed the boycotted British tea ashore. One broadside in Boston read, in part “This is to assume such public Enemies of this Country that they will be considered and treated as Wretches unworthy to live, and will be made the first Victims of our Just Resentment.” It was signed “The People.” See Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 219.

  22. Young, Liberty Tree, 332.

  23. Another example of intimidation tactics was an instance whereby the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty placed a letter in the window of the printer John Holt warning him that the content of his paper should continue to resist the Stamp Act. It read, in part, “Should you at this cri
tical time shut up the press, and basely desert us, depend upon it, your house, person, and effects will be in imminent danger. We shall therefore expect your paper on Thursday as usual; if not on Thursday evening, Take CARE.—Signed in the name, and by the order, of a great number of the Free Sons of New York, On the Turf, the 2nd November, 1765, John Hampden.” See Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 170–71.

  24. Young, Liberty Tree, 351.

  25. Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 188.

  26. Ibid., 182–83.

  27. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 240.

  28. Young, Liberty Tree, 235.

  29. Ibid., 235.

  30. Ibid., 370.

  31. Ibid., 60.

  32. Ibid., 230.

  33. Ibid., 230–31.

  34. Ibid., 231.

  Chapter 3: Liberation Graphics

  1. These three points are made by Bernard F. Reilly Jr. in his essay “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed, Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 50–51.

  2. The historian Herbert Aptheker cites the rise in the Southern slave population in conjunction with the growth of the cotton industry and cites figures from a number of Southern states. Aptheker notes, “Overall, in 1807 the number of slaves totaled 1 million and cotton production, about 50 million pounds; thirty years later, the number of slaves had doubled and the cotton production had multiplied ten times.” See Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 4.

  3. To view a reprint of a cartoon depicting Garrison being beaten by a mob in Boston, The Abolition Garrison in Danger and the Narrow Escape of the Scotch Ambassador, Boston, Boston, October, 21, 1835, see James Brewer Stewart, “Boston, Abolition, and the Atlantic World, 1820–1861,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, Donald M. Jacobs, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 113.