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Introduction

Around midnight, a half dozen of us walked surreptitiously down Madison Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. It was 1998, and the place looked like a ghost town, unlike the thriving, African American city center it had been in the 1950s and early 60s. Malt liquor ads were the only images on the streets. We slowly made our way, lugging buckets of gooey wallpaper waste, rolls of printed posters, and big brushes on poles, covering boarded up storefronts and abandoned advertisement hoardings with images of Malcolm X. After ten minutes of pasting these Celebrate People’s History (CPH) posters, we had attracted a small crowd. People came up to us asking for posters for their walls, and to give to their kids and friends. A number of passersby actually grabbed the paste buckets out of our hands, eager to help put the posters up.

The experience was an epiphany for me. It taught me that if we make art that speaks to people’s interests, history, and desires, and bring it into public spaces, people might actually engage with it. The streets aren’t dead to political dialogue. They are a place where powerful conversations can begin, and art can play an important role in making that happen.

The decision to make the first CPH poster of Malcolm X came out of a series of conversations with my friend Liz Goss, now a Chicago public school teacher. We chose Malcolm as a subject not only because he is an important American political figure, but also because of this quote that Liz discovered: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can charter a course for our future. Only by knowing where we’ve been, can we know where we are, and look to where we want to go.”¹ In many ways this idea—to make history present in our everyday lives—perfectly encapsulates my mission for this project. I want to engage people with history and share information, without any expectation or requirement that the audience buy something or go somewhere.

The linoleum block cut for the first CPH poster.

The contemporary Left political poster was developed in the 1960s. A Cuban internationalist group, the Organization in Solidarity with the People’s of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), hit on the brilliant idea of folding posters up and stuffing them into their publication, Tricontinental, which at its height was distributed to over eighty countries in multiple languages. Soon these posters graced the walls of student dorm rooms across the globe. By the late 60s, political movements in a dozen countries, from France to Mexico, had developed scrappy but effective community- and student-run print workshops of their own, churning out an explosion of new visual ideas.

The Celebrate People’s History posters are rooted in this do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda. From the beginning, CPH posters have been created with extremely limited resources, which inform their aesthetics. The posters are almost all two-color (as opposed to a more expensive four-color process), printed on inexpensive uncoated paper, and produced on largely outdated and analog offset printing equipment. Unlike slick digital images run off on glossy photo paper, the posters have a tactile feel, giving the sense that they were crafted by hand. In this way they hold great aesthetic affinity with the rushed screenprints of poster workshops run by striking students, or the off-register, poorly trapped, and hastily made posters printed on underground presses by Latin American or African revolutionaries.

CPH posters diverge from typical political posters, at least most made in the US today, in a few significant ways. There is a long tradition of Left posters that represent disasters or failures, either imaging or imagining the fallout from bad decisions made by politicians, or serving as a reminder of some previous or current atrocity. The best examples of these are the outpouring of anti-George W. Bush posters created between 2000 and 2008, and the tradition of antinuclear posters illustrated with ominous mushroom clouds, created by antiwar activists since the 1970s. In short, they are depressing yet important symbols of the problems of the world today. Another type of poster is one that serves as an immediate call to arms against a direct foe, rallying for a cause or protest. The most recent examples of this type are the text-heavy calls to come out to antiwar rallies.

It’s rare that a political poster is celebratory, and when it is, it almost always focuses on one of a very small canon of individuals, almost exclusively male: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, Che Guevera, or Nelson Mandela. Rather than create another exclusive collection of “heroes,” I decided I’d rather generate a diverse collection of posters that bring to life successful moments in the history of social justice struggles. To that end, I’ve asked artists and designers to find events, groups, and people throughout history who were inspiring in some way, who moved forward the collective struggle of humanity to create a more equitable and just world.

Screenprint poster designed by Alberto Blanco Gonzáles for OSPAAAL in 1982.

Secession of the Plebs CPH poster designed by Art Hazelwood.

Although I’ve long considered myself an anarchist, CPH has always been a nonsectarian, ecumenical project, pulling together diverse historical moments and activities coming out of multiple political traditions, from communist to national liberation, liberal to libertarian. The posters tell stories from the subjective position of the artists. They are very often the stories of the underdogs, those marginalized, or written out of mainstream histories. Some of the artists did an immense amount of research, tracking down all they could find, while I’m sure others might not have even picked up a book, but instead had a conversation that sparked their interest, or got to work after some quick online research. The goal of this book and poster series is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.

Some of the stories told by these posters are well-known. Many people have heard of Emma Goldman, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. But how many know that Tubman carried out the only female-led US military attack ever with the Combahee River Action? We may know these individual heroes, but history is not simply a collection of great protagonists. It is a social fabric, a chronological quilt of actions and reactions, collections of people moving in concert and in conflict. How many know about the activities of Las Gorras Blancas, or that in the 1970s a group of prisoners in Walpole, Massachusetts, functionally ran the prison they were confined in? Many have heard of John Brown and his armed attack on Harper’s Ferry. But how many know of his relationship with Henry David Thoreau, a figure presented to school children across the US as the progenitor of liberal nonviolence? In fact, Thoreau had a much more complicated relationship to violence, and believed there were evils much greater than individual aggression, particularly slavery. By putting Brown and Thoreau back in dialogue with each other, not only can the posters correct historical inaccuracies, they can show that how we understand history effects how we understand politics, both in the past and in the present.

CPH posters on the streets of Chicago.

On the streets, we’re inundated with an endless barrage of brightly colored advertisements, street signs, and commercial window displays that evolve and change daily. So much of what we see are directives of some kind. “Buy this!” or “Be this!” Living in this ever transforming and saturated visual landscape, how do we understand the past of the spaces we move through? Where do we learn history? Physical spaces where important events happen are abandoned, bought, sold, torn down, or made into monolithic historical monuments. The creation of these monuments, whether statues of guys on horses or the preserved homes of Founding Fathers, is intended to acknowledge history, but more often than not it ensures that history is ossified. It becomes lifeless, a thing of the past.

CPH posters on the streets of Brooklyn.

Street art can be something else altogether, by navigating the narrow space between the pillars of past monuments and present advertisements. The CPH project has clarified for me a series of questions about history and public space: Can our streets become active galleries of ideas and information we can use to understand who we are and where we come from? Can these galleries evolve and change, instead of calcifying, fading, and cracking, and make room for new ideas, images, and conversations? Since that first night in Chicago, CPH posters have been pasted up in Philadelphia, Nashville, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Portland, and in over a dozen other cities. Each time they go up, I receive emails from people wanting to know more. Our streets can be a venue for asking these questions, and the CPH posters can play a role in answering them.

At the same time that my friend Liz was helping me develop this project, she was studying to become a teacher. She told me about the serious lack of radical political materials for educators. Indeed, soon after the first posters were printed, teachers began coming to me to ask for posters for their classrooms. The reasons they are interested in the posters generally fall into two categories: “I need these in my classroom as direct teaching tools,” or “I want to hang these in my class in order to piss off my principal.” The former seems the more important of the two, but I have to admit I also love the latter. There are clearly ideological battles that need to happen in schools, and it’s nice to know that the posters play a role in those struggles.

It’s been great to see the posters become part of curriculums, and to see lessons built around them. I’ve gone into many schools and presented CPH as a kick-start for kids to make their own posters. Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) has had high school students make posters as part of a printmaking class, with amazing results. Several undergraduate color theory classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) have used the CPH posters for exploring the uses of duo-tones and controlled color usage in design work.

CPH posters in use at the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago.

When giving a talk about the poster series a couple years back, I was approached by a graduate school student in training to become a teacher. It turned out that she was first introduced to the posters when they hung in one of her grade school classrooms, almost a decade earlier. She had encountered them throughout her life, and now she intends to use them in her future classes. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives told in schools, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.

To initially fund this project, I saved up money from my day job to pay for printing. Offset printing is relatively inexpensive—about two thousand posters can be printed for six hundred dollars. Over ten years into the project, I’ve been able to sell thousands of posters, so now they more or less pay for themselves. The idea has always been to make the posters inexpensive and accessible to most people: they sell from two to five dollars each, and you can get them online (justseeds.org) or at one of the dozen events, conferences, festivals, and fairs that I attend every year. Today CPH posters to grace the walls of dorm rooms, apartments, community centers, classrooms, and city streets. Over sixty different designs have been printed in the past twelve years, adding up to over 150,000 total posters.

Although I’ve organized and funded these posters myself, they have always been a collective project. Almost one hundred artists have designed posters. Multiple print shops have run the presses they have been printed on.² Dozens of people have run around at night pasting them on city electrical boxes and construction sites, and thousands have helped distribute them around the world.

Printing CPH posters at Stumptown Printers.

As individual works, these posters pay tribute to each artist, each poster subject, and to the idea of a people’s history. With the posters collected for the first time in this book, we can assess how they function in an entirely new way. It is important, for example, that as a whole they don’t simply speak to individual moments, but to broader sweeps of the past. They attest to the evolution and movement of over five hundred years of struggle for social justice, and yet speak to how much more there is to tell.

History is not simply something that has passed. It is the culmination of all that has come before us—something that is still alive, moving, evolving, and changing. It affects the way we see and interpret the present. I hope this book, and all the posters within it, will reinvigorate our collective desire not only to learn from yesterday, but to keep history alive today.

—Josh MacPhee

May 2010