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 critical 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.
4. A lithograph depicting the mob attack and murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837 was created by the African American artist Henry Tanner in 1881. The lithograph, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy, was printed by the Fergus Printing Company, Chicago.
5. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 311.
6. Ibid., 310.
7. J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade: 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 165.
8. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 315.
9. Falconbridge, a physician, took part on four slave-ship voyages and later became an abolitionist. His text “Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa” (1788) was a damning firstperson account.
10. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 338.
11. Ibid., 338.
12. Ibid., 324.
13. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 166.
14. Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, 327.
15. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 7.
16. Ibid., 354.
17. A rare illustrated pamphlet entitled The History of the Amistad Captives, compiled by John W. Barber in 1840, is reprinted in Sidney Kaplan, “Black Mutiny on the Amistad,” in Black and White in American Culture: An Anthology from the Massachusetts Review, Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan, eds. (Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 291–330. The fascinating pamphlet contains biographical sketches and illustrations of the Africans whom John W. Barber, a Connecticut historian, interviewed while the Amistad captives awaited trial in New Haven.
18. Reilly, Jr. “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” 57–58.
19. Ibid., 59.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. Reilly Jr., “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” 63.
22. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 143–144.
23. Bernard F. Reilly Jr. suggests that both prints may be the work of J. H. Bufford due to the stylistic similarities of lithographs published in Boston at the time, as opposed to those produced in New York and Philadelphia. An expert on American prints, Reilly Jr. was formerly the head of the curatorial section of the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. See Bernard F. Reilly Jr. American Political Prints 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991), 73–74.
24. Horton, and Horton Slavery and the Making of America, 157.
25. For an in-depth essay that covers the visual outpouring of graphics and prints in reaction to the caning of Sumner, see David Tatham, “Pictorial Responses to the Caning of Senator Sumner,” in American Printmaking Before 1876: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy: Papers presented at a symposium held at the Library of Congress, June 12 and 13, 1972 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1975), 11–19.
Chapter 4: Abolitionism as Autonomy, Activism, and Entertainment
1. William Still was an African American abolitionist who helped organize the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. Along with assisting fugitive slaves escaping north, he interviewed hundreds of fugitives and published these interviews in 1872 in the book The Underground Railroad. Although William Still was omitted from the lithograph The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a second “Resurrection” print (with the same title) was completed in 1851 by Peter Kramer that more accurately portrays the people who were in the room, including Still, at the time of Brown’s arrival. See Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2003), 114.
2. Frederick S. Voss, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 46.
3. Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 88, 89.
4. Ibid., 89.
5. Ibid., 117.
6. Negative reviews of Mirror of Slavery had the potential to derail their tour. This was the case when a Staffordshire Herald review in March 1852 blasted the performance as being a “gross and palpable exaggeration” of slavery. The negative review caused attendance for local shows to decrease from several hundred to forty. Brown sued the paper for libel, stating that his profits had been adversely affected and won the case, receiving £100 in damages. See Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 143–45.
7. Ibid., 117.
8. Ibid., 123.
9. Ibid.
10. Ruggles discusses possible scenarios. See The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 134–37.
11. Brown quoted in Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 145.
12. Daphne A. Brooks, ed., Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 77.
13. Audrey A. Fisch argues that the UK public responded favorably to any work that presented the United States in a negative light, for it increased the UK’s own sense of nationalism and superiority. Abolitionists were especially embraced for exposing the hypocrisy in America’s claim as being a beacon of democracy. See Audrey A. Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture, 74–75.
14. Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 174.
Chapter 5: The Battleground over Public Memory
1. In 1998, artist Ed Hamilton completed and installed The African American Civil War Memorial (The Spirit of Freedom) in the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, DC. The monument honored the 180,000 black soldiers in the Union Army and Navy and featured three black infantry soldiers and a sailor set against the exterior of a nine-foot semicircular column. The interior of the circle depicted a soldier departing from his wife and child, and an adjacent wall to the sculpture listed the names of all of the African American soldiers who served during the Civil War, including the white officers who led black regiments.
2. Frederick Douglas, “MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!” Broadside (Rochester, March 2, 1863), reprinted in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Philip S. Foner, ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 526.
3. In 1859, Massachusetts governor Nathaniel P. Banks had vetoed a bill that would have allowed black soldiers to join the Massachusetts militia, viewing it as unconstitutional. See James Oliver Horton, “Defending the Manhood of the Race: The Crisis of Citizenship in Black Boston at Midcentury,” in Hope and Glory, Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone, eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 19. President Lincoln had also initially obstructed the path of black soldiers. In July 1862, Congress lifted the legal ban on allowing black soldiers to join the military, but Lincoln was reluctant and did not endorse the large-scale recruitment of black soldiers until the following year. Lincoln did not want to lose the support of loyal slave states, nor did he want to lose the support of white voters who did not support black equality. Lincoln abhorred slavery, but his actions often charted a middle path. His preliminary announcement for the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, declared that on January 1, 1863, slaves controlled by people in rebellion against the United States would be declared free, while those slaves held by masters still loyal to the United States would not be affected by the proclamation. African Americans and abolitionists abhorred the qualification measure, but in fairness Lincoln lacked authority to outright ban slavery, for the Constitution protected slavery in slave states, so he employed a different option: freeing slaves under the powers granted during war to seize enemy property. Thus the Emancipation Proclamation shifted the Union cause from reunification to that of ending slavery. See Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves?” in Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 90–97.
4. In 1863, Massachusetts became the first state to form a black volunteer regiment under a federal mandate, but it was not the first time black soldiers served in the Union armies. In 1861, close to 30,000 of the 120,000 enlistees in the Navy were black soldiers, although most served in obscurity, working as cooks and laborers, and rarely saw combat. See Robert B. Edgerton, Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America’s Wars (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 25. The following year, some Union military leaders enlisted black soldiers in in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Kansas regardless of federal law. The first black regiment to see combat action was the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, which was later commanded by the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
5. Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 526.
6. Edwin S. Redkey, “Brave Black Volunteers: A Profile of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” in Blatt, Brown and Yacovone, eds., Hope and Glory, 22, 26.
7. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 132.
8. David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 163.
9. Blight, Race and Reunion, 106.
10. Ibid., 93.
11. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage writes, “Even in the North the typical common soldier monument advanced the primacy of the white male citizen by depicting the face of the nation as white. In the South, of course, the black soldier could not be represented without acknowledging the Union cause or the abolition of slavery.” See W.F. Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001), 72.
12. Additionally, the 55th Massachusetts Regiment and African Americans throughout the Sea Island communities contributed funds in the hopes of creating a stone monument on Morris Island. A monument on the sandy coastal island, the site of Fort Wagner, never came to be, but the effort was not in vain. The money instead was diverted to a project that many of the black donors felt was equal, if not more important: the building of the first free school of its kind for black children in Charleston. The school was named in honor of Shaw.
13. Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), 117.
14. Kirk Savage, “Uncommon Soldiers: Race, Art, and the Shaw Memorial,” in Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, eds., Hope and Glory, 163–64.
15. Ibid., 166.
16. Blight, Race and Reunion, 341.
17. Booker T. Washington, “Address at Dedication of the Shaw Memorial,” May 31, 1897, The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1897), 73–87, reprinted in Brown, The Public Art ofCivil War Commemoration, 128.
18. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Williamstown: Corner House Publishers, 1971, orig. pub. 1900, 1901), 253.
19. Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 1:332, reprinted in Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration, 122.
Chapter 6: Photographing the Past During the Present
1. Gerald McMaster, “Colonial Alchemy: Reading the Boarding School Experience,” in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, Lucy R. Lippard, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1992), 79.
2. James C. Faris, “Navaho and Photography,” in Photography’s Other Histories, Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 93
3. Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 177.
4. Ibid., 187.
5. Vine Deloria Jr., “Introduction,” in The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis, Christopher M. Lyman, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 11.
6. Ibid.
7. Lucy Lippard, “Introduction,” Lippard, ed., Partial Recall, 25.
8. Deloria Jr., “Introduction,” 13.
9. George P. Horse Capture, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, Martha A. Sandweiss, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 270–71.
10. Lippard, “Introduction,” 25.
11. Faris, “Navaho and Photography,” 95–96.
12. Lippard, “Introduction,” 29.
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Ibid. 22.
15. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” in Pinney and Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories, 45.
16. Ibid., 41.
17. Peggy Albright, Crow Indian Photographer: The Work of Richard Throssel (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 7–8.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 30.
21. Ibid., 71.
22. Ibid., 29–30.
23. Ibid., 34–35.
24. Ibid., 35–36.
25. Ibid., 37.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 38.
28. Around this time, Throssel had also “assimilated.” In 1916, at age thirty-four, he was selected to become a U.S. citizen, one out of twenty-three Crow who were also given U.S. citizenship. This was part of a government initiative to move Native people away from being wards of the state. However, Throssel did not ask to become a U.S. citizen. Albright notes, “It was issued to him without his authorization and, in fact, against his wishes.” Ibid., 51.
29. Ibid., 41–42.
30. Ibid., 41.
31. Ibid., 29.
32. Ibid., 46.
33. Ibid., 62.
Chapter 7: Jacob A. Riis’s Image Problem
1. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 266–67.
2. Daniel Czitrom, “Jacob Riis’s New York,” in Rediscovering Jacob Riis, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, eds. (New York: The New Press, 2007), 32.
3. Riis, The Making of an American,2 72–73.
4. Ibid., 268.
5. Ibid., 423.
6. Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939: Revised and Expanded (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 320.
7. Czitrom, “Jacob Riis’s New York,” 116.
8. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971, orig. pub. 1890), 22.
9. Ibid., 109.
10. Ibid., 43.
11. Ibid., 78.
12. Ibid., 77.
13. Ibid., 118.
14. Edward T. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 19.
15. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 83.
16. Cindy Weinstein, “How Many Others Are There in the Other Half? Jacob Riis and the Tenement Population,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 2 (2002): 211.
17. Bill Hug, “Walking the Ethnic Tightwire: Ethnicity and Dialectic in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives,” Journal of American Culture 20 (1997): 49.
18. Ibid.
19. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words?,” 16.
20. Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 254.
Chapter 8: Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions
1. William J. Adelman, “The True Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue” in Haymarket Scrapbook, Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986), 168.
2. Paul Avrich speculates that the bomb thrower could have been a lone militant anarchist. See Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 437–45. For more historical analysis on Haymarket, see Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Hay-market Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); and Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
3. James Green, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 129.
4. The Union League Club of Chicago, an exclusive club whose membership was limited to only European American men through the midpoint of the twentieth century was first established in 1879 and played a key role in establishing many of the city’s elite cultural organizations and events, including helping to fund the Art Institute of Chicago, Orchestra Hall, the Field Museum, and the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago in 1893. See James D. Nowlan, Glory, Darkness, Light: A History of the Union League Club of Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004).
5. Adelman, “The Time Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue,” 168.
6. “Police Groups Angered over Haymarket Statue Bombing,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1969.
7. “Daley Asks for Law, Order at Haymarket,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1970.
8. Harry Golden Jr., “We’ll Rebuild Statue: Daley,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 6, 1970.
9. Adelman, “The True Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue,” 168.
10. Nicolas Lampert, “Public Memories of Haymarket in Chicago: Michael Piazza Interviewed by Nicolas Lampert,” AREA #2 (2006), 9.
11. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, DC) and Civil Rights Memorial (Montgomery, Alabama) counter this notion by encouraging the public to interact with the monument, often by touching the surface. As well, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence-and for Peace and Human Rights (Harburg, Germany) invites the viewer to take an active role by carving words and marks into the surface of the monument.
12. It remains unclear who initiated and installed the tile mosaic. The Chicago Tribune article featured quotes from Evan Glassman, who asserts that he was the one who created and installed the mosaic, with Grifter as an “accomplice” who helped him with his project. However, in conversations that I have had with Grifter, she notes that the information that Glassman provided to the newspaper reporter is misleading. Instead, it was she who initiated the project, created the mosaic, and set it in the concrete. See Blair Kamin, “Mystery Solved: Mosaic Artist Raises a Flag in Protest,” Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1996. Glassman later commented on the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative blog on January 17, 2012: “Kim [Kehben] Grifter was indeed my assistant on a project I was contracted on in that neighborhood at Red Light Restaurant, the mosaic was indeed a collaboration between the two of us . . . Also I was the lone installer who hoodwinked a city sub contractor into helping me install it as Kim [Kehben] was not there that day and is only using my story as hers.” See http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2012/01/art_thoughtz_takes_down_damien.html.
13. Lampert, “Public Memories of Haymarket in Chicago,” 7.
14. Stephen Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial to an Attack’s Complex Legacy,” New York Times, September 15, 2004, A14.
15. The ILHS control of the martyrs’ monument was contentious for a number of reasons. To many anarchists, the monument at Waldheim was embraced because it was initiated by anarchists—the martyrs’ families, including Lucy Parsons (widow of the slain Albert Parsons), under the direction of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association. In this regard, the monument was disconnected from direct government funding and control. After the ILHS took over its deed, they decided in 1997 to register the monument under as a National Historic Landmark. Connecting the martyrs’ monument to the federal government was the last straw for many anarchists, and the National Historic Landmark plaque has been routinely vandalized with anarchist symbols and the commemorative events have been picketed.
16. Lara Kelland, “Putting Haymarket to Rest?,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 2 (2005): 35.
17. In 1986, Mayor Harold Washington, the first African American mayor in Chicago’s history, declared the month of May as “Labor History Month in Chicago” to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Haymarket Tragedy. Within his proclamation, Washington stated, “On this day we commemorate the movement towards the eight-hour day, union rights, civil rights, human rights, and by remembering the tragic miscarriage of justice which claimed the lives of four labor activists.” Washington in his speech also highlighted the program organized by the ILHS, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Haymarket Centennial Committee and urged “all citizens to be cognizant of the events planned during this month and of the historical significance of the Haymarket Centennial.” For a reprint of this statement, see http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas.
18. Jeff Huebner, “A Monumental Effort Pays Off: After Years of Struggle and Disagreement, a Sculptural Tribute to Haymarket Is Finally in the Works—With Almost Everybody on Board,” Chicago Reader, January 16, 2004.
19. Tom McNamee, “After 138 Years, Haymarket Memorial to Be Unveiled May Day, At Last, for a Cause,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 2004.
20. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”
21. Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial.”
22. McNamee, “After 138 years.”
23. Michael Piazza interviewed by the author, in person, December 9, 2005.
24. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”
25. To the new monument’s credit, an element of participation, if extremely limited, was built in. The pedestal of the monument has room for additional plaques to be installed connecting recent labor struggles to Haymarket. During the May Day 2005 ceremony at the monument, a delegation of union trade leaders from Colombia presented the first plaque to be added to the pedestal, honoring the 1,300 trade unionists murdered in Colombia between 1991 and 2001. Johnny Meneses, a union activist from Colombia, told the crowd, “You have one monument. But in Colombia, we would need many more than that.” In this case, the new monument served as an important location for solidarity campaigns, helping inform viewers of the troubling situation in Colombia, and making an otherwise static monument more flexible. However, one should note that the pedestal is relatively small, and only a small number of plaques will be able to be installed. Who will select the plaques and which struggles will be deemed important and which ones will be deemed unimportant? See James Green, “The Globalization of a Memory: The Enduring Remembrance of the Haymarket Martyrs around the World,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 4 (2005): 22, 23.
26. McNamee, “After 138 Years.”
27. Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial.”
28. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”
29. Donahue has voiced resistance to the proposed renaming of a city park to Lucy Parsons, wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. He also voiced objection to a street in Chicago being renamed after the late Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Party leader who was murdered in 1969 by the police during a raid. Donahue said, “It’s a ‘dark day’ when city officials honor a man who called for harming police officers.” See “Union head blasts plan to name street after Black Panther,” The Associated Press, February 28, 2006.
30. Diana Berek, interviewed by the author, by e-mail, February 20, 2006.
31. Ibid.
Chapter 9: Blurring the Boundaries Between Art and Life
1. Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology: New and Expanded Edition (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998), 201.
2. Ibid., 197.
3. Irving Abrams, transcript of interview by Frank Ninkovich, 1970, Labor Oral History Project, Roosevelt University, Chicago; Book 17, p. 14. Quoted in Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of the New York Press, 1989), 26.
4. “Revolution,” Industrial Worker, June 26, 1913 quoted in Salerno, Red November, Black November 41–42.
5. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn stressed this point in a speech to the workers where she stated, “I have nothing to lose so I can say whatever I please about the manufacturers as long as I express your sentiments.” See Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 56.
6. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 41.
7. Carlo Tresca, Patrick Quinlan, and Adolf Lessig (a Paterson IWW silk worker) were also key organizers during the strike.
8. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 71.
9. Ibid., 136.
10. Ibid., 162.
11. Ibid.
12. New York Call, May 21, 1913, page 2, quoted in Golin The Fragile Bridge, 163.
13. Anne Huber Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 142.
14. Ibid., 145.
15. New York Times, quoted in Current Opinion 55 (July 1913): 32 and Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 168.
16. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 212.
17. Ibid., 213.
18. Text of Flynn’s speech is reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 214–26.
19. Ibid., 221.
20. Ibid. Golin challenges the idea that jealousy played a significant role. He writes, “There is no evidence to confirm her charge that the Pageant caused jealousy and dissention; all other accounts agreed that immediately after the performance the Paterson strikers seemed more enthusiastic than ever.” See The Fragile Bridge, 173.
21. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 221.
22. Golin’s critique of Flynn ignoring so many positive aspects of the pageant (and how Flynn’s critique has influenced how historians frame this event) is detailed in The Fragile Bridge, 170–78. Art historian Linda Nochlin is one of the rare scholars who have argued that the pageant had a positive effect on both strikers and artists alike who were involved in the production. See Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America 52 (May–June 1974), 67.
23. Golin argues that the main goal of the pageant was to create publicity, and that the production was staged even though organizers were warned beforehand that it might lose money. He writes, “The working committees finally decided to go ahead, not because they believed money could be made from a single performance—especially not one aimed primarily at working people—but because New York silk strikers who were present at the meeting insisted that the Pageant simply had to be put on and themselves lent money to offset production costs. The New York ribbon weavers knew what most historians have forgotten, that the real purpose of the Pageant was to publicize the dramatic class struggle then taking place in Paterson, in the hope of influencing the outcome.” See The Fragile Bridge, 161.
24. This point is contentious, for the IWW did carry on throughout the decade (surviving the harsh governmental repression during WWI), and the Wobblies continue to this day. However, Paterson (following the success at Lawrence) represented a major defeat in the IWW’s ability to organize and win large-scale strikes against manufacturers, a loss that harmed its overall reputation. Paterson also took a tremendous toll on the main IWW organizers. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn never led a major strike again, and Haywood (whose health fell apart during the strike) was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act. However, while he waited for an appeal, he skipped bail and fled to Russia, where he remained until his death in 1928.
25. Richard Fitzgerald argues that Greenwich Village artists “never regarded themselves as workers or identified their own interests with those of the working class. They saw industrial working-class struggles as real, but they did not consider them their own. They never regarded themselves simultaneously as both artists as workers. Thus, they saw their career options as open in a way no industrial worker could, and they responded in different ways to the situation which they confronted.” See Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 5.
26. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 110. Golin’s book, particularly chapters four through seven, focuses on a critical and historical analysis of the interaction between Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals, IWW organizers, and silk workers during the Paterson strike.
27. Ibid., 110.
Chapter 10: The Masses on Trial
1. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 180.
2. Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003) 353.
3. Eugene E. Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, 28.
4. Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 16.
5. “Editorial Notice,” The Masses 4 (December 1912), 3, reprinted in Fishbein, in Rebels in Bohemia, 18.
6. [Editorial: “The magazine is a success . . .”], The Masses 4 (January 1913), 2, reprinted in Fishbein, in Rebels in Bohemia, 18.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. The Masses 4 (December 1912), 3, reprinted in Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1973), 27.
9. Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 36.
10. Paul H. Douglas, “Horrible Example,” The Masses 9 (November 1916), 22, reprinted in Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 36.
11. The Masses’ support for women’s issues and workers issues was commendable, but they failed miserably at race issues. The editors, artists, and writers were overwhelmingly European-American men, and their inability to see and understand racism and form a deeper analysis of sexism is baffling. Eugene L. Leach writes, “At its worst The Masses purveyed racist stereotypes in cartoons and poetry; at its best it sporadically protested the same stereotypes. For the most part the magazine hewed to the myopic line that racism was a by-product of capitalism, so that no special emphasis had to be given to the peculiar oppressions borne by blacks. Like the white leaders of the Socialist party, The Masses shrank back in fear and confusion from confronting this deepest divide in American Society.” See Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 42.
12. For more on the Ludlow Massacre, see, Howard Zinn, “The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–1914,” in Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 7–55.
13. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, 21.
14. Ibid., 20.
15. Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator, 50.
16. Thomas A. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917): Odyssey of an Era (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 204–05.
17. This countered other information that they had received. The Masses had sought out the opinion of George Creel, chairman of the Committee on Public Information, who gave his assurance that the August issue had not violated any laws.
18. Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 60.
19. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 207.
20. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, 2 4–25.
21. Ibid., 25.
22. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 217.
23. Ibid., 212.
24. Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 205–06.
25. Eugene E. Leach writes about Eastman, “When party loyalists abused him for saying kind things about Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Eastman gave them a scolding for their sectarian stiffness: ‘Let us try to use our brains freely, love progress more than a party, allow ourselves the natural emotions of our species, and see if we can get ready to play a human part in the actual complex flow of events.’ ” See Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 38, originally printed in “Sect or Class?,” The Masses 9 (December 1916), 16.
26. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 217–18.
27. Ibid., 221.
Chapter 11: Banners Designed to Break a President
1. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 164.
2. Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1920), 21.
3. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), 11.
4. States to ratify in the 1910s included Washington (1910), California (1911), Oregon (1912), Kansas (1912), and Arizona (1912).
5. NAWSA President Anna Howard Shaw stated, “Do not touch the Negro problem. It will offend the South.” Quoted in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race: 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 417. Carrie Chapman Catt, who would also serve as NAWSA president argued that democratic rights had been given to “the Negro [men] . . . with possible ill advised haste” and that “perilous conditions in society were the result of introducing into the body politics vast numbers of irresponsible citizens.” Quoted in Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, New Updated Edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 1986), 85.
6. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 82.
7. Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 84.
8. Linda G. Ford, “Alice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy,” in Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote, 283.
9. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 124.
10. Ibid., 59.
11. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 92.
12. Ibid, 95.
13. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 167.
14. Ibid., 171.
15. Robert Booth Fowler, “Carrie Chapman Catt, Strategist,” in Wheeler, ed. One Woman, One Vote, 310.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid, 286.
18. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 216.
19. Ibid., 222.
20. Connecticut would also ratify in September.
21. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 339.
22. Ibid., 251.
Chapter 12: The Lynching Crisis
1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, September 2, 1911, 195, reprinted in Writing in Periodicals: Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections from The Crisis: Volume 1:1911–1925, Herbert Aptheker, comp. and ed. (Milwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1983), 16.
2. The Star of Ethiopia celebrated contributions of Africans and African Americans to society and was performed to large crowds in New York City in 1913 and again in 1921, in Washington, DC, in 1915, in Philadelphia in 1916, and in Los Angeles in 1925.
3. Jim Crow laws existed between 1876 and 1965 and erased the gains that African Americans had made during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. These gains were thwarted when Republican politicians sold out the civil and political rights of African Americans when they agreed to remove federal troops from the South in return for electoral commission votes for the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the disputed Tilden-Hayes election. This became known as the Compromise of 1877, and the equal protection guaranteed by Fourteenth Amendment all but disappeared, ushering in disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson cemented this disenfranchisement and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation. This allowed racism and race terror to flourish, especially in the Deep South.
4. Interracial working-class organizing sought to change this. In the late 1880s the Southern Farmers’ Alliance led a grassroots campaign to end the economic exploitation of black sharecroppers and impoverished white farmers alike. The Farmers’ Alliance (allied with the Populist Party) developed farmers’ co-ops to challenge the crop lien system in which small-scale farmers mortgaged their crops in return for supplies and household goods from merchants (usually the plantation owners), who charged exorbitant sums.
5. The Tuskegee Institute statistics were generally lower than those of the NAACP.
6. Many others were active leaders in the anti-lynching movement. Most notable was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who led a one-woman crusade to combat lynching after the murder of her three friends (Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart) who owned a grocery store in Memphis that competed with a white-owned store. Wells-Barnett—an African American investigative journalist—exposed that only one in every six individuals who was lynched was accused of rape, and that many of those accusations were false, resulting from either consensual sex between white women and black men, or black men simply being in the company of white women. Wells-Barnett’s own safety in Memphis was compromised when it became known that she was the author of the anti-lynching reports from the black-owned Memphis Free Speech. She fled Memphis and relocated to Philadelphia and then Chicago, where she continued to organize on behalf of the anti-lynching movement and the feminist movement. See Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad: An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2008).
7. Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 50.
8. Ibid., 49.
9. Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 34.
10. Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, New Updated Edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 1986), 78.
11. Ibid., 97.
12. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 12.
13. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 411–12.
14. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 5.
15. Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 34.
16. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 51.
17. Ibid., 76.
18. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, white women, and the Mob (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 32.
19. Elisabeth Freeman, “The Waco Horror,” Supplement to The Crisis 12, no. 3 (July 1916): 6.
20. Subsequent bills that were introduced included the Costigan-Wagner Bill that was defeated during the 1930s. The Wagner-Van Nuys Bill, drafted by NAACP lawyers and introduced to the Senate in 1934, was also defeated. President Roosevelt failed to throw much support behind the bill, but he did create the civil rights section of the Justice Department, which won its first conviction of a lyncher in 1946 and helped to reduce the proliferation of lynchings in the decades that followed.
21. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 74.
22. Ibid., 8.
23. Ibid., 135.
24. Oswald Villard reportedly first proposed the idea of a Silent Parade to Du Bois and Johnson. See Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 539.
25. The Ku Klux Klan was re-founded in 1915 after being dormant from the early 1870s. It experienced a rapid growth from two thousand members in 1920 to two million in 1926. Close to two-thirds of the members lived outside the South, including 50,000 in Chicago, 38,000 in Indianapolis, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and 16,000 in NYC. See Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, 118.
26. Lewis W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 506.
27. Ibid., 507.
28. Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 26.
29. See Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); The Library of Congress, with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Lewis, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: Amistad, an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2003).
30. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 46.
31. David Levering Lewis, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 514.
32. Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 42.
33. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 47.
34. Du Bois wrote, “The men who will fight in these ranks must be educated and The Crisis can train them: not simply in its words but in its manner, its pictures, its conception of life, its subsidiary enterprises.” Quoted in Lewis W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 494.
35. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 45.
36. “Opinion,” The Crisis 18, no. 5 (September 1919), 231.
Chapter 13: Become the Media, Circa 1930
1. Russell Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s: Introduction,” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 24.
2. Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 29. David Platt, the national secretary for the F&PL and editor of its short-lived publication, Film Front, later downplayed the connections between Moscow and F&PL chapters in the United States. In 1977 he stated, “It is true that the CP USA played an important role, but the League of which I was a part was rooted in the conditions existing in the country in the early 1930s. It wasn’t necessary for anyone on the outside to press buttons to tell us our task was to cover the breadlines, flophouses, picket lines, hunger marches, etc. People interested in films and photos as weapons in the social struggle came over to the League as I did, partly out of admiration for the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovjenko, and Vertov, but mostly in response to the failure of the older independent documentarians, as well as the commercial film industry, seriously to concern themselves with what was going on in the streets, factories and farms in the years following the stock market crash.” See David Platt and Russell Campbell, “Dialog on Film and Photo League,” Jump Cut 16, 1977, 37.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s,” 23.
5. Ibid.
6. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 38.
7. Ibid., 39. By 1931, the F&PL began meeting at 7 East Fourteenth Street.
8. Russell Campbell, “Interview with Leo Seltzer: ‘A Total and Realistic Experience,’ ” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 26.
9. Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 103.
10. Campbell, “Radical Cinema in the 30s,” 23.
11. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 28.
12. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 101.
13. Alexander, Film on the Left, 17.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 26.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 27.
18. Ibid., 43. Samuel Brody argues that the Soviet films had an influence on working-class U.S. audiences: “It must be said, that intellectuals and artists in the 1930s who saw all of these great films couldn’t possibly totally escape the content. They saw that here was a different technique, a different aesthetic, and at the same time, a revolutionary content. And that helped push them towards a more Marxist and revolutionary outlook on life in general. How can you separate the Russian Revolution from October?” See Tony Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody: ‘The Camera as a Weapon in the Class Struggle,’ ” Jump Cut 14 (March 1977), 29.
19. Alexander, Film on the Left, 39.
20. Ibid., 40.
21. Ibid., 29.
22. Carla Leshne, “The Film and Photo League of San Francisco,” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006), 363.
23. Ibid., 364–65.
24. Ibid., 366.
25. Ibid., 368.
26. Ibid., 369.
27. Samuel Brody, reflecting on the demise of the F&PL, stated in 1977, “The split in the old Workers Film and Photo league in the thirties was the result of a principled disagreement as to whether we ought to continue doing short documentaries born in the heat of the class upheavals of the time or concentrate on enacted, recreated ‘features’ produced over considerably longer spans of time—blockbuster productions, so to speak. The result was a split away from the Workers Film and Photo League and others who looked upon us as the great unwashed who could not be initiated into the more lofty realms of cinema art.” See Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody,” 30.
28. Alexander, Film on the Left, 47.
29. Ibid., 46.
30. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, 65.
31. Ibid., 66–67.
32. Ibid., 68.
33. Leshne, “The Film and Photo League of San Francisco,” 371.
34. Ibid., 367.
35. Safford, “Interview with Samuel Brody,” 30.
36. Ibid. In the same 1977 interview, Brody added, “I am not a disinterested art-for-art’s-saker. The most ‘escapist’ art is, by that very fact, sterile at best and reactionary at worst. This art abdicates the artist’s responsibility to society and social progress.” Ibid., 29.
Chapter 14: Government-Funded Art
1. Chet La More, “The Artists’ Union of America,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 237.
2. Biddle is often given central credit for proposing the idea. See Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 14; Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5; and Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 226. However, it is likely that other artists were involved in this process. Lincoln Rothschild argues that the Unemployed Artists Group played a key role in urging advisers to FDR to form the PWAP. See Lincoln Rothschild, “Artists’ Organizations of the Depression Decade,” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 200.
3. Beniamino Benvenuto Bufano, “For the Present Are Busy,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 107.
4. Langa, Radical Art, 34.
5. Louis Guglielmi, “After the Locusts,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 114–15.
6. Holger Cahill, “American Resources in the Arts,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 36.
7. Ibid., 38.
8. Ibid., 43.
9. Throughout the essay, Holger Cahill cites the work of philosopher John Dewey as an influence in helping him to arrive at a more egalitarian view of art.
10. The book Art for the Millions details many of the various WPA-FAP projects and contains a wide array of short essays by artists, designers, and administrators. The book itself was written in 1936 as a national report by the Washington Office of the WPA-FAP. The essays are fascinating but tend to be overly optimistic. This is unsurprising, as they served the purpose of championing the WPA-FAP to help sway a reluctant Congress to continue to fund the arts. The original publisher, the Government Printing Office, failed to publish the text in 1937, and a private publisher fell through in 1938 and again in 1939. By this time, the WPA-FAP was in crisis mode and the book was never published. Holger Cahill held on to the manuscript and was unable to publish it before his death in 1960. In 1973, the art historian Francis V. O’Connor obtained the manuscript from Mrs. Holger Cahill. O’Connor published Art for the Millions (adding his introduction and photographs) and also deposited the original documents in the Library of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution. See Francis V. O’Connor, “Introduction,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 13–31.
11. For a more in-depth look at the WPA-FAP art centers in the U.S., see: John Franklin White, ed. Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.), 1987 and Francis V. O’Connor, ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973).
12. C. Adolph Glassgold, “Recording American Design,” in O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions, 167.
13. Ibid., 168–169.
14. Eugene Ludins, “Art Comes to the People,” in O’Connor, ed. Art for the Millions, 232–33.
15. Ibid., 233.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Langa, Radical Art, 43–45.
19. Cahill, “American Resources in the Arts,” 43.
20. Robert Cronbach, “The New Deal Sculpture Projects” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 140.
21. For a more extensive treatment of the right-wing governmental attacks against the WPA-FAP, see Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 149–71.
22. Langa, Radical Art, 205.
23. McKinzie The New Deal for Artists, 154.
24. Ibid., 155.
25. Langa, Radical Art, 206.
26. During the build-up to World War II and the war itself, the U.S. economy began to recover, aided by selling steel and materials to the Allies.
27. Vachon, quoted in James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 139.
28. Roosevelt, quoted in McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 169.
29. Jacob Kainer, “The Graphic Arts Division of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 166.
Chapter 15: Artists Organize
1. Boris Gorelick, “Artists’ Union Report,” in Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 183.
2. Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers During the Great Depression,” Archives of American Art Journal, 14, no. 1 (1974): 7.
3. Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists on the Barricades: The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal,” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1978): 22.
4. Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 10.
5. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8.
6. Ibid.
7. Stuart Davis, “Why An Artists’ Congress?,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 66.
8. Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Francis V. O’Connor, ed., (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 28.
9. Politically, McMahon took the middle road with the hopes that this path would ensure that the WPA-FAP would not be completely cut. She noted, “The conservatives were certain I was a ‘Red’; the liberals thought I was conservative. Both were wrong. Emotionally and practically I was dedicated to helping artists in distress and to furthering the WPA/FAP. Politically I was totally committed to the Roosevelt doctrine.” See Audrey McMahon, “A General View of the WPA Federal Art Project in New York City and State”, in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 74.
10. “Our Municipal Art Gallery and Center,” Art Front, February 1936. pg. 4.
11. “Self-Government and the Municipal Art Center,” Art Front, February 1936. pg. 5–6.
12. Ibid.
13. Einar Heiberg, “The Minnesota Artists’ Union,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 244.
14. Chet La More, “Crisis in the Rental Issue,” Art Front, January 1937. p. 16–17.
15. Joseph Solman, “The Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects, 120.
16. “The Artists’ Unions and Spain,” Art Front, December 1936, 3.
17. Langa, Radical Art, 185.
18. “On to Spain,” Art Front, March 1937, 3.
19. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 8.
20. Langa, Radical Art, 185.
21. Meyer Schapiro, “Public Use of Art,” Art Front, November 1936, 4.
22. Clarence Weinstock, “Public Art in Practice,” Art Front, December 1936, 8–10.
23. “Full Report of the Eastern District Convention of the Artists’ Union,” Art Front, June 1936, 5–7.
24. Monroe, “Artists As Militant Trade Union Workers,” 10.
Chapter 16: Artists Against War and Fascism
1. Gerald M. Monroe, “The American Artists Congress and the Invasion of Finland,” Archives of American Art Journal, 15, no. 1 (1975): 16.
2. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 11–12.
3. “A Call for an American Artists Congress,” Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Printed Matter, 1936–1942, n.d., Box 4, Reel 5898, Frame 314, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Printed-Matter–305715.
4. Gerald M. Monroe writes that Stuart Davis “secured the assurances of [Alexander] Trachtenberg [CP USA representative for cultural affairs] that the Congress would be free of any interference by the party.” He adds, “Although the Communist Party had an interest in the formation of the Congress, it could not have taken place without the support of noncommunist artists, who surely constituted the vast majority.” See Monroe “The American Artists Congress,” 14–15. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams present a slightly different argument: “Stuart Davis was assured that the Party would not interfere in congress activities, but it is possible that, as with the Artists’ Union, a small, perhaps shifting, group of Party members actually ran the daily affairs of the organization.” See Baigell and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism, 10–11.
5. Stuart Davis, “Why An Artists’ Congress?,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 69.
6. Ibid., 69–70.
7. Aaron Douglas, “The Negro in American Culture,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 84.
8. Ibid.
9. Congress papers were subsequently turned into a book and sold for fifty cents. The print run was 3,000. Reprints of the papers are found in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism.
10. José Clemente Orozco, “General Report of the Mexican Delegation to the American Artists’ Congress,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 203–07.
11. Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Printed Matter, 1936–1942, n.d., Box 4, Reel 5898, Frame 331, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Printed-Matter–305715.
12. Ibid.
13. Other important exhibitions (not organized by the congress) included the 1938 exhibition Housing: Roofs for Forty Million, sponsored by the WPA-FAP and organized by the art cooperative An American Group. They also co-organized the 1937 exhibition Waterfront Art Show, with the Marine Workers Committee, which was held at the New School of Social Research and visualized the concerns of the dockworkers’ strike. See Helen Langa, Radical Art, 35.
14. Alex R. Stavenitz, “American Today Exhibition,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 282. A catalogue for the show was also published during the same year: America Today: A Book of 100 Prints Chosen and Exhibited by the American Artists’ Congress (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1936).
15. Harry Sternberg, “Graphic Art,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 137.
16. Ibid.
17. Francis V. O’Connor, “Introduction,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19.
18. Baron’s gallery also hosted the 1935 print show The Struggle for Negro Rights that was sponsored by five groups: the Artists’ Union, the Artists’ Committee of Action, the International Labor Defense, the John Reed Club, and the African American art group the Vanguard. The Struggle for Negro Rights was staged as a counterpoint to the NAACP anti-lynching exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching that was organized by the acting secretary of the NAACP Walter Francis White and held at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries a month prior to the ACA exhibition.
19. After showing at the Valentine Gallery, Guernica was moved to MoMA. Picasso had refused to allow Guernica to return to Spain as long as the country was under fascist rule. After Franco’s death in 1975 (and Picasso’s in 1973), Spain became a democratic constitutional monarchy and ratified a new constitution in 1978. The Museum of Modern Art, reluctant to part with arguably its most famous painting, finally ceded in 1981 when the painting was shipped to the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It has subsequently been moved to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Guernica has taken on such a level of fame that even the crate that was utilized to ship the painting from MoMA back to Spain has been placed on exhibit.
20. Langa, Radical Art, 210–211.
21. Baigell and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism, 30.
22. Ibid, 32.
Chapter 17: Resistance or Loyalty: The Visual Politics of Miné Okubo
1. Following Pearl Harbor, martial law was declared in Hawaii. On December 9, two days following the attack, 1,291 Japanese, 865 Germans, and 147 Italians were in custody in Hawaii and the mainland. See Gary Y. Okihiro, “An American Story,” in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 52.
2. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans: Updated and Revised Edition (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), 391.
3. Ibid., 388.
4. Okihiro, “An American Story,” 62.
5. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 391.
6. Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in California, Oregon, and Washington were sent to one of ten concentration camps: Amache, Colorado; Gila River, Arizona; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Jerome, Arkansas; Manzanar, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Poston, Arizona; Rohwer, Arizona; Topaz, Utah; or Tule Lake, California. Temporary camps/assembly centers included Arizona (Mayer); Oregon (Portland); Washington (Puyallup); California (Fresno, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Salinas, Santa Anita, Stockton, Tanforan, Tulare, and Manzanar). The U.S. Department of Justice also operated camps in Texas (Crystal City and Seagoville), Montana (Fort Missoula), Idaho (Kooskia), and New Mexico (Santa Fe) for “dangerous” suspects—that is, community leaders, fishermen, newspaper editors, and activists. See Stella Oh, “Paradoxes of Citizenship: Re-viewing the Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660,” in Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, Greg Robinson and Elena Tajoma Creef, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 155.
7. Miné Okubo, “Statement Before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians,” in Robinson and Tajoma, Miné Okubo, 47.
8. The U.S. government promoted this notion through the propaganda film The Japanese Relocation and by tightly controlling media access to the camps. The press had been allowed to film the evacuation process, yet access to the camps was limited and those who were allowed to photograph the camps faced restrictions. Images that showed armed guards, crowded camp scenes, prison towers, or barbed wire were discouraged. Ansel Adams (hired by the WRA) presented this rubric in his MoMA exhibition and book Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans. Other photographic images of the camps can be found in pictorial summaries that accompanied the “Final Report of the Western Defense Command,” and two high school yearbooks from the Manzanar camp that included photographs by internee Toyo Miyataki.
9. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 80. Creef adds that throughout Citizen 13660, Okubo “constructs herself as a marginal figure, often standing at a distance on the very edge and border of the frame looking at the crowds of internees as through she herself were an outsider among the exiled,” 80.
10. Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 71.
11. Creef, Imaging Japanese America, 88.
12. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983, orig. pub. 1946), 177.
13. Laura Card, “Miné Okubo’s Illustrations for Trek Magazine,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 132–33.
14. In fairness, Okubo also critiqued the questionnaire process within Citizen 13660. She writes, “Many of the Nisei also resented the question because of the assumption that their loyalty might be divided; it was confusing that their loyalty to the U.S. should be questioned at the moment when the army was asking them to volunteer.” Yet she sided with the internees who were “patriotic” and joined the military, which included her brother. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 176. Around 4,600 (22 percent) of the 21,000 Nisei males who were eligible for draft said “no” on the questionnaire as a protest against their internment. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397.
15. Another Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Endo v. United States, had a different verdict. Mitsuye Endo’s lawyer successfully argued that the U.S. government had no right to detain U.S. citizens whom the WRA had deemed loyal to the United States. On December 18, 1944, the court ruled that she should be released, since her loyalty had been established. This ruling opened up a legal precedent against the camps, resulting in their eventual end.
16. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397.
17. Heather Fryer, “Miné Okubo’s War: Citizen 13660’s Attack on Government Propaganda,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 97.
18. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 176.
19. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 398.
20. Ibid., 398–99.
21. Ibid, 399.
22. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 177.
23. Ibid., 199.
24. Ibid., 201. Okubo’s opinion on the loyal versus disloyal question shifted over time. In her 1983 introduction to the reprinted edition of Citizen 13660, she writes, “One camp, in Tule Lake, California was for supposedly ‘disloyal’ persons . . . Incidentally, no cases of disloyalty were found in the camps,” Citizen 13660, viii.
25. Greg Robinson, “Birth of a Citizen: Miné Okubo and the Politics of Symbolism,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 160. Greg Robinson also writes that in 1943 the WRA and the OWI teamed up to “produce an enormous pile of propaganda for public consumption, focusing jointly on the achievements of the WRA and on the loyalty and American character of the inmates. WRA efforts included informational pamphlets, documentary films, and speaking tours . . . The WRA and OWI also exerted pressure on publishers and film producers to promote responsible media images of Japanese Americans and avoid hostile depictions,” 163.
26. Okubo, Citizen 13660, x.
27. Gesensway and Roseman, Beyond Words, 72–73.
28. Okubo, Citizen 13660, xii, xi.
29. Gesensway and Roseman, Beyond Words, 73. Okubo had good reason to fear that civil liberties would be threatened again. In 1950, the Internal Security Act enabled the attorney general to apprehend and place people in detention camps without a trial by jury. The ambiguous language noted that any person suspected of “probably” engaging in espionage or sabotage could be apprehended. It was aimed primarily at communist activists in the United States during the Cold War era. See Okihiro, Impounded, 78.
Chapter 18: Come Let Us Build a New World Together
1. Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 26.
2. James Forman noted that by June 1962, the SNCC was $13,000 in debt. See James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 246.
3. SNCC formed in April of 1960 when Ella Jo Baker, the executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), gathered student leaders of the sit-in movement to meet in Raleigh, North Carolina, to discuss ideas for a more formal umbrella organization. Baker argued that the students should determine their own structure in contrast to the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker, who wanted students to be part of a youth wing of SCLC.
4. This approach differed from SCLC and the other two main organizations—the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The SCLC primarily organized shorter actions—marches, boycotts, and confrontation actions meant to incite violent police reactions and mass media coverage that would spur a national outrage and prompt the federal government to intervene. This work was critical and highly successful, but it did not carry the same risks that SNCC workers did when they embedded themselves in the rural communities of the South.
5. Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History: 1954–68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 16.
6. Julian Cox, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement: 1956–1968 (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008), 29.
7. Ibid.
8. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 30.
9. Ibid.
10. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 16.
11. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 299.
12. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 30.
13. Ibid., 80.
14. Ibid.
15. Vanessa Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations (New York, Routledge, 2006), 29.
16. Some 86 percent of African Americans in Mississippi lived below the national poverty level. Their annual income was $1,444—the lowest in the country. Only 7 percent of African Americans finished high school, and only 5 percent were eligible to vote. Those who attempted to register to vote risked losing their jobs and being evicted from their homes. Those who organized risked their lives. See Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 132.
17. Ibid., 135.
18. Ibid.
19. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 146.
20. Ibid., 42.
21. Ibid.
22. SNCC was not the only group involved in the Summer Project. SNCC, CORE, the SCLC, and the NAACP had come together to form COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), which all took on different tasks. Part of the reason for the alliance was to equally divvy up the money gained from national fund-raising efforts. That said, Bob Moses of SNCC was a principal organizer of the project, and SNCC committed a vast amount of energy and people to the project, setting up numerous offices across Mississippi.
23. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 373.
24. Ibid., 372.
25. Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 63.
26. Leigh Raiford, “ ‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007): 1139.
27. The Southern Documentary Project included Herron, George Ballis, Fred de Van, Nick Lawrence, Danny Lyon, Norris McNamara, Dave Prince, and Maria Varela. Many of the images taken were distributed through the Black Star Photo Agency in New York and were featured in publications including LIFE magazine. See Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 150.
28. Ibid., 144.
29. Raiford, “Come Let Us Build a New World Together,” 1139.
30. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 141.
31. Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 58.
32. Ibid. 67.
33. The decision to exclude whites from SNCC was mired in controversy and remains contentious to this day. The debate took place during the December 1966 SNCC retreat at the Peg Leg Bates resort in upstate New York. Lyon writes, “Approximately one hundred staff members were present at the conference. At two o’clock one morning, when many of the staff had gone off to go to sleep, SNCC passed a resolution to exclude whites. Nineteen voted for the resolution, eighteen voted against it, and twenty-four abstained, including all the white people present . . . To this day, many SNCC veterans think that the whites were not thrown out but instead were directed to work in the white community.” See Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 175.
34. The shift to self-defense and militancy was cemented by Hubert “Rap” Brown—the SNCC chairman who replaced Carmichael—who, during a forty-five-minute speech in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 25, 1967, stated in response to the KKK attacks against the black community, “If America don’t come around, we are going to burn it down, brother.” Soon thereafter, gunfire was exchanged between the police and demonstrators, and seventeen buildings were damaged or completely destroyed by fire. Brown was later charged with arson due to his speech and served jail time. See Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 146.
35. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 135.
Chapter 19: Party Artist: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party
1. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1991, orig. pub. 1970), 62.
2. October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program, “What We Want, What We Believe,” in The Black Panthers Speak, Philip S. Foner, ed. (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 1995), 3.
3. Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007), 58.
4. Elton C. Fax, Black Artists of the New Generation (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1977), 273.
5. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 100.
6. St. Clair Bourne, “An Artist for the People: An Interview with Emory Douglas,” in Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 200.
7. Douglas would eventually be part of the BPP Central Committee, along with Newton, Seale, Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Kathleen Cleaver.
8. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 101.
9. Bourne, “An Artist for the People,” 200.
10. Seale, Seize the Time, 404.
11. Davarian L. Baldwin, “Culture Is a Weapon in Our Struggle for Liberation: The Black Panther Party and the Cultural Politics of Decolonization,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 296.
12. Seale, Seize the Time, 62–63.
13. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 236.
14. Ibid., 96.
15. Seale, Seize the Time, 181.
16. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 105.
17. Ibid., 296.
18. Seale, Seize the Time, 180.
19. Emory Douglas, “Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art,” The Black Panther, January 24, 1970; republished in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, William Bradley and Charles Esche, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, 2007), 166.
20. Malcolm X speech on the founding of the OAAU, June 28, 1964. See Malcolm X. By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 35–67.
21. Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” The Black Panther, May 18, 1968; republished in Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, 43.
22. “Douglas, Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art,” 166.
23. Greg Jung Morozumi, “Emory Douglas and the Third World Cultural Revolution,” in Durant, ed., Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, 130.
24. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams write, “Most estimates in the late sixties and early seventies hovered around 1,500 to 2,000; since those estimates, other sources have suggested figures as high as 5,000. In a recent essay on the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Jon Rice maintains (based on an interview with one Panther) that in spring 1969 there were 1,000 members of the Party in Chicago alone.” See “The Black Panthers and Historical Scholarship: Why Now?” in Lazerow and Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party, 4.
25. Erika Doss, “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at The Black Panther,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 186.
26. Chisholm was a progressive Democrat who was elected to the New York state legislature in 1964, and in 1968 she became the first black woman elected to Congress. In 1972, she was the first Democratic black candidate for president. She lost in the Democratic primary and survived three attempted assassination attempts during the campaign. Chisholm held her seat in Congress from 1969 to 1983 and advocated on behalf of inner-city residents; promoted bills for social spending for education, health care, minimum wage, and day care; and opposed military funding and the draft.
27. Fax, Black Artists of the New Generation, 278.
28. Edward P. Morgan, “Media Culture and the Public Memory of the Black Panther Party,” in Lazerow and Williams In Search of the Black Panther Party, 335.
29. The Black Panther, May, 18, 1968; republished in Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, 43.
30. Bourne, “An Artist for the People,” 203.
Chapter 20: Protesting the Museum Industrial Complex
1. Malevich’s painting was not chosen arbitrarily. He was a modernist abstract artist who joined the Russian Revolution, and his paintings became part of the visual language of revolutionary art. GAAG, thus, aligned themselves in solidarity with Malevich and suggested that his work had lost its radical meaning hanging on the walls of MoMA as an art object.
2. The Guerrilla Art Action Group, The Guerrilla Art Action Group: 1969–1976: A Selection (New York, Printed Matter, 2011, orig. pub. in 1978), Number 2.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., Number 3.
5. Ibid., Number 3.
6. “Guerrilla Art Action—Toche and Hendricks talk to Gregory Battcock,” interview, October 18, 1971, in ibid., Number 25.
7. The Guerrilla Art Action Group, The Guerrilla Art Action Group, Number 49.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., Number 10.
10. Ibid.
11. Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 154.
12. Ibid., 126.
13. Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York Since 1969,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985, Julie Ault, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press/The Drawing Center, 2002), 79.
14. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 120.
15. Ibid., 117.
16. Roman Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left: The Art Workers Coalition and the Emergence of a New Collectivism (A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 58.
17. Ibid., 74.
18. Equal gender representation in exhibitions was not included in the first list of demands, but it was later added—a sign of the frustration that many women artists had with the men in AWC who tried to control leadership.
19. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 113.
20. Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left, 74.
21. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 117.
22. Lucy R. Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984), 30.
23. Ibid., 30–31.
24. The AWC influenced others to organize as well. The Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement was drafted in 1971 by artist Seth Sigelaub and lawyer Bob Projansky. Their other influence can be felt in the passing of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. For more recent discussions on artists’ rights and artists’ economic issues, see, Temporary Services, Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, 2009, http://www.artandwork.us/.
Additionally, the AWC helped influence artists to start spaces. Their meeting space was a rented loft called “MUSEUM” at 729 Broadway. Petruniak argues that this space “set a precedent for the later development of the ‘Alternative Spaces Movement’ throughout the seventies and eighties”—most notably Artists’ Meeting for Cultural Change (1975), Collab (1978), Group Material (1979), ABC No Rio (1980), PAD/D, and REPOhistory (1989). See Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left, 101.
24. Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1990), 175.
26. Frazer Dougherty is often listed as Frazier Dougherty or Fraser Dougherty.
27. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 182.
28. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street, 149.
29. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 184.
30. The AWC had previously tried unsuccessfully to lobby Picasso to remove Guernica from MoMA as a protest against U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
31. Temporary Services, Jean Toche / Guerilla Art Action Group (self-published zine, part of the Temporary Conversations series, 2008), 25.
Chapter 21: The Living, Breathing Embodiment of a Culture Transformed
1. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 1970–75,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 35.
2. Faith Wilding, By Our Own Hands: The Women Artist’s Movement, Southern California 1970–1976 (Santa Monica: Double X, 1977), 10.
3. Wilding, By Our Own Hands, 11.
4. Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs,” 34.
5. Ibid., 35.
6. Ibid.
7. Wilding, By Our Own Hands, 14.
8. Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in Broude and Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art, 58.
9. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs,” 41.
10. Ibid.
11. Cheri Gaulke, “1+1=3: Art and Collaboration at the WB,” in Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, Meg Linton and Sue Maberry, curators (exhibition catalog, Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 23.
12. Ibid., 27.
13. Jenni Sorkin, “Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building” in Linton and Maberry, Doin’ It in Public, 60.
14. An incomplete list of some of the radical artists’ groups and radical alternative spaces that were established during the same period as the Woman’s Building, or after, include: Artists’ Meeting for Cultural Change (1975), Collab (1978), Group Material (1979), ABC No Rio (1980), PAD/D (1981), Guerrilla Girls (1985), Critical Art Ensemble (1987), REPOhistory (1989), Temporary Services (1998), 16 Beaver Group (1999), the Dirt Palace (2000), the Beehive Collective (2000), Mess Hall (2003), Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (2007), and InCUBATE (2007).
15. Gaulke, “1+1=3,” 29.
Chapter 22: Public Rituals, Media Performances, and Citywide Interventions
1. Cheri Gaulke, “Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Woman’s Building,” in The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978–1998, Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland, eds. (Gardiner, NY: Critical Press, 1998), 14.
2. Suzanne Lacy, Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics: 1974–2007 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 96.
3. Suzanne Lacy, “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 269.
4. Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 65.
5. Groups and organizations that help co-organize Three Weeks in May included the Studio Watts Workshop, the City Attorney’s Office, the Commission on Public Works, the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women, Women Against Violence Against Women, the East Los Angeles Hotline, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Ocean Park Community Center Women’s Shelter. See Irish, Spaces Suzanne Lacy, 64.
6. Ibid.
7. Laura Meyer, “Constructing a New Paradigm: European American Women Artists in California 1950–2000,” in Art, Women, California 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 107.
8. Richard Newton, “She Who Would Fly: An Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” in Burnham and Durland, eds., The Citizen Artist, 11.
9. Irish, Suzanne Lacy, 71.
10. Lacy, Leaving Art, 122.
11. Lacy, “Affinities,” 267.
Chapter 23: No Apologies: Asco, Performance Art, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement
1. “Oral History Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr., 1999, Apr. 1–16,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
2. Ibid.
3. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Social UnWest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.,” Wide Angle, 20, no 3 (July 1998): 54–78.
4. See Mario T. García and Sal Castro: Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
5. Nora Bebavidez, “Harry Gamboa, Jr: L.A. Urban Exile,” interview, August, 23, 2010, http://www.harrygamboajr.com.
6. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderburg, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 203.
7. An Asco work that responded directly to the events of the National Chicano Moratorium March and the death of Salazar was their 1977 mural Black and White Mural, painted by Herrón and Gronk. The mural was painted at the Estrada Courts Housing Projects in East L.A., and Herrón and Gronk painted it to look like a series of black-and-white film reels or television screen shots. Images of the riot and Salazar’s death were interwoven with snapshots of Asco performances, abstract images, graffiti tags, and other images. See Max Benavidez, Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007), 22–33.
8. Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish, Viva La Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2008), 187.
9. Chavoya, “Social UnWest,” 54–78.
10. Sandra de la Loza argues that other factors also influenced Chicana/o murals at the time in Los Angeles: “Although dominant discourse on Chicana/o art of the 1970s tends to focus on overt examples of Chicana/o iconography and political imagery, there is no denying the aesthetic and ideological impact of psychedelia and the countercultural impulse of the time . . . Third World liberation movements, student strikes, antiwar demonstrations, and experimentation with music, drugs, sexuality, and lifestyles all contributed to a visual language that became popular in the larger culture and surfaced in Chicana/o murals.” See Sandra de la Loza, “La Raza Cosmica: An Investigation into the Space of Chicana/o Muralism,” in L.A. Xicano, Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, eds. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 57.
11. Steven Durland and Linda Burnham, “Interview with Gronk,” High Performance 35, vol. 9, no. 3 (1986): 57.
12. George Vargas, Contemporary Chicano Art: Color and Culture for a New America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 206.
13. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 205.
14. Asco’s name came about after the group had already been collaborating for three years. In September 1974 Gronk, Herrón, and Valdez staged an art show at Self Help Graphics titled Asco: An Exhibition of Our Worst Work. Shortly thereafter, Asco became the official name of the collective.
15. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 197.
16. Description of the work inspired by Noriega’s analysis, which reads, “Herrón’s tortured mural faces—perhaps a veiled reference to the tripartite ‘mestizo head’ symbolizing the racial mixture of Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the Americas—become so bored with their place within the racial mythology of Chicano nationalism that they walk off the wall and into the streets,” Ibid., 10.
17. Ibid., 196.
18. Ibid.
19. Vargas, Contemporary Chicano Art, 203.
20. Ibid., 206.
21. Photographic stills and media manipulation were the driving concept behind Asco’s project No Movies. Gamboa would photograph Asco members dressed up as film stars, playing pretend roles in pretend movies. Gronk describes No Movies as “making a movie without the use of celluloid. It’s projecting that real without the reel.” The stills would then be mailed off as representations of real movies. Conceptually, No Movies critiqued the lack of access that Chicanos had to the film and media industry. See Harry Gamboa Jr., in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., (Chon A. Noriega, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12.
22. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 194–195.
23. Valdez was not invited to take part in the spray-paint action, for the three men in Asco felt it was too dangerous and anticipated having to run from the police or getting arrested. Instead, she was photographed the following morning by Gamboa Jr. standing on a walkway above the tags. Valdez’s diminished role in this action left Asco open for criticism for reinforcing patriarchal attitudes.
24. Harry Gamboa Jr., “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or, Asco Was a Four-Member Word) (1991),” in Urban Exile, 79.
25. Chon A. Noriega, “Asco: Your Art Disgusts Me,” Afterall 19, no. 19, (Autumn/Winter, 2008): 109.
26. Gamboa Jr. “In the City of Angels,” 82.
27. “Oral History Interview with Willie Herrón, 2000 Feb. 5–March 17,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
28. Ibid.
29. By the late ’70s/ early ’80s, the four original members of Asco began to collaborate less with one another. They transitioned into individually based projects and other forms of expression, including music and running alternative art spaces. During this time, Asco took on more members, expanding to more than twenty artists. Past projects even became absorbed into museum shows, including LACMA, the same institution that they had so poignantly critiqued. That said, Asco members have not softened their critique of institutions. Gamboa Jr. stated in a 2004 interview, “Museums are basically display cases for the wealthy and for a particular audience. The museums here in L.A. are particularly anti-Chicano and so are their audiences. And I’m not about to waste another breath on them. The way that capitalism causes cultural amnesia it will be amazing if anyone remembers that our ancestors were from Mexico to begin with!” See Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Harry Gamboa Jr.: Ephemerality in an Urban Desert: an Interview,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 52–62.
30. Benavidez, Gronk, 40.
1. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 104, 137.
2. Ibid., 60.
3. Ibid., 236.
4. ACT UP was not the first group, and certainly not the only group, to address the AIDS crisis, but the organization gained the most media attention for their confrontational tactics.
5. Gould, Moving Politics, 188.
6. Major insurance companies would not cover people with AIDS or people at risk for AIDS. Medicaid would, but would not cover the costs of experimental drugs. See Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 28.
7. Gould, Moving Politics, 190.
8. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Michael Nesline,” March 24, 2003, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 014, 14.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 20.
11. Gran Fury (Tom Kalin, Michael Nesline, and John Lindell), “A Presentation,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, William Bradley and Charles Esche, eds. (London: Tate Publishing in Association with Afterall, 2007), 280.
12. Gran Fury’s members included Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco. McAlpin and McCarty also notes that Anthony Viti, Todd Haynes, and Ana Held were involved in the collective for a short duration. See Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Loring McAlpin,” August 18, 2008, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 098, 30; Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarty, February 21, 2004, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 044, 17.
13. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 72.
14. Gould, Moving Politics, 96.
15. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 73.
16. Karrie Jacobs and Steven Heller, Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era (Layton: Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992), 14.
17. The AIDS crisis was severely underreported by the New York Times during the early stages of the epidemic. Seven articles were run over a nineteen-month period, compared to fifty-four articles on the Tylenol scare in 1982.
18. Schulman, “Interview with Michael Nesline,” 32.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. Jacobs and Heller, Angry Graphics, 12.
21. A 1989 image, I Am Out, Therefore I Am by Adam Rolston (part of the GANG collective, not Gran Fury), illustrates this point, as it is nearly identical to Barbara Kruger’s 1987 image I Shop, Therefore I Am. The only difference is the slogan. Even the style of font is copied. Marlene McCarty recalled meeting Barbara Kruger in person and saying to her, “You know, we owed you a lot.” Kruger’s response was, “I know, but I’m glad you did it.” Kruger understood that the graphics produced by ACT UP operated in a different realm. They were not designed for art fame or to make a profit, they were designed to serve the needs of a movement where issues of artistic originality became irrelevant. See Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarthy,” February 21, 2004, “Act Up Oral History Project, interview number 044, 33–34.
22. Ibid., 34.
23. For a critique of the Benetton ad campaign, see Henry A. Giroux, “Benetton’s ‘World Without Borders’: Buying Social Change,” in The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility, Carol Becker, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 187–207.
24. The photo for the Gran Fury ad, according to Gran Fury member Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, was shot at a friend’s loft, where friends and people in ACT UP/NYC dressed up, posed in front of the camera and started kissing. The set was shot as still images and also as a video. Vazquez-Pacheco was paired with a woman and recalls, “A cousin of mine was one day crossing the street and this bus went by and she saw my face. She saw my face kissing a girl. She called me and she was like, ‘Robert, were you in a poster? Were you in a Benetton’s [sic] ad?” Which I loved, because everyone thought it was a Benetton’s ad. She was hesitant, like, ‘You were kissing a girl.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, what you do for art.’ ” Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Robert Vasquez-Pacheco,” December 14, 2002, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 002, 59–60.
25. Ibid., 59.
26. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 237.
27. Ibid., 238.
28. Ibid., 241.
29. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Loring McAlpin,” August 18, 2008, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 098, 39–40.
30. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarty,” February 21, 2004, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 044, 20–21.
Chapter 25: Antinuclear Street Art
1. Groundwork flyer, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, REPOhistory Archive, 1911–1999 (Bulk 1989–1999), MSS 113, Series 5: Members Files, Box 13, Folder 11.
2. Ibid.
3. Josh Daniel, “New York City’s Big Secret: The Nuclear Homeport,” EXTRA, May/June, 1988, 6–7.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Artists who participated in Groundwork, to the best of my research, include Rachel Avenia, Stephanie Basch, Terry Berkowitz, Mariella Bisson, Roger Boyce, Keith Christensen, Ed Eisenberg, Harry Eriksen, John Fekner, Shelly Haven, Carin Kuoni, John LoCicero, Robert Morris, Mike Murphy, Paul Nagle, Susan Rapalee, Kristin Reed, Robert Reed, Janet Restino, Gregory Sholette, Jody Wright, Eva Cockcroft, Olivia Beens, Janet Koenig, Mimi Smith, and Tess Tomoney.
7. Groundwork press release, October 27, 1989, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, REPOhistory Archive, 1911–1999 (Bulk 1989–1999), MSS 113, Series 5: Members Files, Box 13, Folder 11.
8. Terence J. Kivlan, “The Fighting Continues on Stapleton Homeport,” Staten Island Advance, April 25, 1990.
9. Thank you to Gregory Sholette, who discussed by phone some of the overarching goals of Groundwork and the community of artists that influenced its practice.
10. E-mail correspondence between Tom Klem and the author, December 6, 2010.
Chapter 26: Living Water: Sustainability Through Collaboration
1. Sue Spaid, Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies (Cincinnati, OH: co-published by Greenmuseum.org, the Contemporary Arts Center, ecoartspace, 2002), 139.
2. Linda Weintraub, In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2003), 360.
3. Richard Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon, Living Water,” conversations.org, December 25, 2009; 25 April 25, 2010, http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=222.
4. Ibid.
5. Mary Padua, “Teaching the River,” in Waterfront World Spotlight 17, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 105.
6. Ibid., 102.
7. Weintraub, In the Making, 360.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 356.
10. Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon.”
11. Terri Cohn, “Betsy Damon: Living Water Garden,” Sculpture 19, no. 2 (March 2000): 55.
12. Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon.”
13. “Living Water: Combining Art and Science to Rejuvenate Communities and Restore Waterways,” Bush Fellows News, Autumn 2000, 3.
14. Padua, “Teaching the River,” 107.
Chapter 27: Art Defends Art
1. Judith F. Baca, “Artist Statement: May 12, 2005,” Sparcmurals.org, April 25, 2010, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=8.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Save Our State Declaration, reposted on Sparcmurals comment page. 13 June 13, 2005; April 25, 2010, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
6. Ibid.
7. Video footage of the May 14, 2005, demonstration and counterdemonstration can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-GEj58Rb80.
8. Wendy Thermos, “Immigration Protest in Baldwin Park Is Peaceful,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2005.
9. David Pierson and Wendy Lee, “A Monumental War of Words,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2005.
10. “Protest Report from the Social and Public Art Resource Center: Baldwin Park, CA,” May 16, 2005, Sparcmurals.org, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=7.
11. Pierson and Lee, “A Monumental War of Words.”
12. “Protest Report from the Social and Public Art Resource Center.”
13. Baca, “Artist Statement: May 12, 2005.”
14. Ibid.
15. Guest post, “Truth, Reconciliation and Consequences,” Sparcmurals.org comment page, Sparcmurals.org, May 16, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
16. Cesar Lopez, “A Different Mirror,” Sparcmurals.org comment page, May 16, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
17. Judith F. Baca, public lecture, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, March 29, 2007.
18. Judith F. Baca, “Documenting Our Presence: History, Cultura, y Arte,” Sparcmurals.org, June 12, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=5.
19. “Statement of the Committee to Defend Danzas Indigenas,” Sparcmurals.org, n.d., http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=4.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Judith F. Baca, letter to supporters following the second demonstration, Sparcmurals.org, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=169&limit=1&limitstart=1.
24. Judith F. Baca, letter to supporters before June 25, 2005, counterdemonstration, Sparcmurals.org, n.d., http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=169&limit=1&limitstart=3.
Chapter 28: Bringing the War Home
1. “Operation First Casualty,” YouTube, June 5, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdXY3Y4q_Ds.
2. Nicolas Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” interview, Temporary Services (self-published zine), part of the Temporary Conversations Series, 2010), 17.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. Ibid., 20.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. OFC was not without precedent. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had performed “Operation Raw” in the 1970s—a sixty-mile road march, where veterans marched through small towns in the Northeast with fake weapons as if they were patrolling villages in Vietnam. Soldiers wore white face makeup to draw attention to the racism found within the military and the process of dehumanizing the Vietnamese.
7. Martin Smith, “Structured Cruelty: Learning to Be a Lean, Mean, Killing Machine,” in Warrior Writers: Re-Making Sense: A Collection of Artwork by Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Lovella Calica, ed. (Iraq Veterans Against the War, 2008) 32–33.
8. “Operation First Casualty.”
9. Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” 21.
10. Ibid. 21–22.
11. Ibid., 22.
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Robin Caudell, “War, What Is It Good For? Combat Paper,” Press Republican.com, May 9, 2009, http://www.pressrepublican.com/0705_people/local_story_129223929.html.
14. Nan Levinson, “The Power in Their Pain: Iraq War Veterans Create Art to Protest,” Boston Globe, April 22, 2008, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/04/22/the_power_in_their_pain/?page=1.
15. Combat Paper Project, http://www.combatpaper.org/about.html.
16. Jan Barry, “Culture Warriors,” Earth Air Water, December 15, 2008, http://earthairwater.blogspot.com/2008/12/culture-warriors.html.
17. Elise Hennigan, “Art as Catharsis—The Combat Paper Project,” Juxtapoz, November 11, 2009, http://www.juxtapoz.com/Features/art-as-catharsisthe-combat-paper-project.
18. Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, “Shredding War’s Dark Memories: Iraq War Veterans Release Their Angst by Turning Their Uniforms Into Paper,” Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2009.
19. Julia Rappaport, “War in Pieces: Combat Paper Project Sees Veterans Use Uniforms to Heal,” Vineyard Gazette Online, July 25, 2008, http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?17547.
20. Ibid.
21. Russ Bynum, “Veterans Shred Uniforms to Heal Themselves Through Art,” Stars and Stripes online edition, August 6, 2009 http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64052.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” 17.
Chapter 29: Impersonating Utopia and Dystopia
1. The Yes Men Fix the World, Dir. Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr, 2009, Film.
2. The Yes Men developed out of an earlier project, RTMark, which was an Internet-based infrastructure developed to fund and help facilitate activist art projects. The premise was that artists and activists would list projects that they wanted to create and visitors to the site could select which ones they wanted to fund. In essence, it was a tool kit for creative disruption and anticorporate activism that reached a zenith during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. The Yes Men would go on to impersonate the WTO, falsely representing them at conferences, and going as far as to announce their dissolution at a meeting in Sydney, Australia. During the hijinks, the Yes Men announced the formation of a new Trade Regulation Organization that would abide by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, instead of a system based upon maximizing corporations’ profitm argins. See http://www.rtmark.com.
3. Dave Gilson, “Trust Us, We’re Experts,” Mother Jones, March/April 2005, 82–83.
4. Ibid.
5. The Yes Men, http://theyesmen.org/faq.
6. “Dow ‘Help’ Announcement Is Elaborate Hoax,” DowEthics.com, December 3, 2004, http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/bbc.htm.
7. The Yes Men, http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal.
8. Ibid.
9. David Darts and Kevin Tavin, “Global Capitalism and Strategic Visual Pedagogy,” in Critical Pedagogies of Consumption: Living and Learning in the Shadow of the “Shopocalypse,” Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 238.
10. Gilson, “Trust Us, We’re Experts, 82–83.
11. Anne C. Mulkern and Alex Kaplun, “Fake Reporters Part of Climate Pranksters’ ‘Theater,’ ” NYTimes.com, October 20, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/10/20/20greenwire-fake-reporters-part-of-climate-pranksters-thea-39576.html.
12. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), 281.
13. Brooke Shelby Biggs, “Yes-Men Taunt Halliburton,” CorpWatch.org, May 10, 2006, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13568.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. One of the most notorious offenders is Exxon Mobil. See Greenpeace’s research project Exxon Secrets—“highlighting the more than a decade-long campaign by Exxon-funded front groups—and the scientists they work with—to deny the urgency of the scientific consensus on global warming and delay action to fix the problem,” Greenpeace.org, http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets/faq.
17. The Yes Men, “Yes Man Sprung, Police Misconduct; Direct-Action Campaign Launch,” press release, September 23, 2009.
18. Ibid. Copenhagen was the site for the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, where political leaders failed to establish an agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. Activists demanded that nations reduce greenhouses gases to 350 parts per million—the maximum level of CO2 that the atmosphere can safely bear. In 2009, greenhouse gases were at 387.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.