Actions, Conversations, and Intersections

Can Design Stop a War?
Slide lecture by Carol A. Wells

Art inspires and empowers the disenfranchised. There has never been a viable movement for social change throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, without the arts—theater, poetry, music, posters—being central to that movement. Political posters in particular are powerful living reminders of struggles worldwide for peace and justice. Communication, exhortation, persuasion, instruction, celebration, warning: graphic art broadcasts its messages through bold images and striking designs.

Poster art challenges the powerful. The posters in this presentation are selections from “The Ant-War Show,” an exhibition documenting over fifty years of continuous opposition to U.S. interventions into the domestic affairs of sovereign nations. Political, economic and military interventions, many of them covert, have repeatedly resulted in unpardonable deaths and misery for millions. These posters show hopes and dreams, and the pain of dreams destroyed. Their graphic intensity results from expressing the rage engendered by U.S. actions through art. For some, these posters may also provide insights into the sources of the seemingly senseless rage that resulted in the atrocity of September 11, 2001.

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is an educational and research archive that collects, preserves and exhibits graphics of social change. With more than 70,000 political posters, CSPG has the largest collection of post World War II human rights and protest posters in the U.S. Through traveling exhibitions, workshops and publications, CSPG is reclaiming the power of art to educate and inspire people to action.

Carol Wells is an activist, art historian, poster collector, and founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG). She writes and lectures on art and politics and has curated over sixty traveling political poster exhibitions since 1981.

The LA Anarchist Bookfair kicks-off the exhibition with a full day of radical booksellers, political organizations, panels, workshops, and discussions.

Starts at 11am on Sunday, January 24.

Participants:
Semiotext(e), Earth First Journal, Taala Hooghan: Infoshop & Youth Media Arts Center, Modesto Anarcho, South Central Farmers, Skylight Books, Institute for Anarchist Studies, Critical Resistance, Las Vegas Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Catholic Worker, Anti-Racist Action/Turning the Tide, Anarchist Black Cross Federation L.A., PM press, Microcosom Publishing, AK press, Little black cart, Make/Shift magazine, R.A.C., I.W.W, Rad-dad, CUNTastic, Dos Lunares, Friendly fire collective, Poison Oak Collective, Anarcha L.A., Insane Dialectical Posse, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Imix books, Quiver distro – rebel communications, News & Letters, Groundwork Book collective, Black Is a Culture, Workers Solidarity Alliance, Los Angeles Independent Media Center, KPFK 90.7 Pacifica, The Icarus Project, South east l.a info shop, D.I.Y. Zine