Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art [1 ed.] 9781443888363, 9781443883757

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Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art

Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art Edited by

Miguel de Baca and Makeda Best

Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art Edited by Miguel de Baca and Makeda Best This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Miguel de Baca, Makeda Best and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8375-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8375-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Crossing the Lines: Romaine Brooks and the War to End All Wars Tirza True Latimer Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15 A Brave New Industry: Liberalism and Design at the Think American Institute, 1939–43 Jill Bugajski Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Camouflage, 1942: Artists, Architects, and Designers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia John R. Blakinger Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57 Shock-Photo: The War Images of Rosler, Spero, and Celmins Frances Jacobus-Parker Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 75 From “Free Speech” to “Free Huey”: Visual Ephemera and the Collaboration of Black Power with White Resistance Jo-Ann Morgan Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 99 Catholic Art and Activism in Postwar Los Angeles Kristen Gaylord Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 121 Art Against the World: Collaborative Antagonism in 1970s Los Angeles Rebecca Lowery

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Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 141 Proving Grounds: Art and Activism after Three Mile Island Chris Balaschak Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155 Saigon in the Suburbs: Protest, Exclusion, and Visibility Erica Allen Kim Contributors ............................................................................................. 173 Index ........................................................................................................ 177

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover

Sharon Gilbert, details from A Nuclear Atlas (Rosendale, New York: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1982). © Sharon Gilbert

Chapter One Fig. 1-1

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Romaine Brooks, La France croisée (The Cross of France), 1914. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 33 1/2 in. (116.2 x 85.0 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Artist. Photo and permission: Smithsonian American Art Museum Red Cross recruiting poster, “Ten Thousand by June, Graduate Nurses Your Country Needs You,” c.1917 Postcard, produced by J. Courcier, c.1914 Anonymous, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry ambulance drivers attached to the Belgian Army at Calais, France, c.1918 Anonymous, ambulance drivers, Étaples, France, c.1915

Chapter Two Fig. 2-1

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“A large city as the bombardier sees it. A photograph from 24,000 feet.” From Robert P. Breckenridge, Modern Camouflage: The New Science of Protective Concealment. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942 “Regional Civilian Camouflage Schools Conducted under O.C.D. Guidance.” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Office of Civilian Defense civilian camouflage course certificate. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. “The Engineer School, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Third Civilian Camouflage Course, July 6, 1942 to July 18, 1942.” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

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Chapter Three Fig. 3-1

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Chester R. Miller, Free Workers, Free Industry, for the Think American Institute, no. 164, c.1942. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Chester R. Miller, Dictatorship, for the Think American Institute, no. 147, c.1942. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Harry Gottlieb, The Strike is Won!, 1937. Collection of Belverd and Marian Needles. Copyright by Amy Gottlieb. Chester R. Miller, Future U.S. Progress..., for the Think American Institute, no. 159, c.1942. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites

Chapter Four Fig. 4-1

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Martha Rosler, Vacation Getaway, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. Gouache and ink on paper. 18.5 x 23.75 inches. The Williams College Museum of Art. © The Estate of Nancy Spero. Licensed by VAGA, New York / Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York Vija Celmins, Bikini, 1968. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper. 13 3/8 x 18 ¼ inches (34 x 46.4 cm). Gift of Edward R. Broida. The Museum of Modern Art. Celmins, Vija (b. 1939) © Copyright. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Chapter Five Fig. 5-1

Ron Enfield, Marchers pass through Sather Gate on the UC Berkeley campus, November 20, 1964, lead by FSM Steering Committee members Ron Anastasi and Mike Rossman carrying the banner, Mario Savio beside Rossman, and faculty-supporter John Leggett, in dark glasses behind the banner.

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Gerhard Gscheidle, Demonstration to Free Huey at the Alameda County Courthouse, 1968. © Gerhard Gscheidle Gerhard Gscheidle, Bobby Seale speaking at the Alameda County Court House, with Emory Douglas to his right, January 1968. © Gerhard Gscheidle Ruth-Marion Baruch, Eldridge Cleaver talking to Panthers Kenny Demon and Charles Brunson, Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, California, #60 from the series Black Panthers 1968, August 28, 1968. © 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation Photograph of Huey P. Newton, 1967. Courtesy of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Green Library, Stanford University Eldridge Cleaver, Beverly Axelrod at home in San Francisco, January 1967. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Harvey Richards, Vietnam Day Committee Protest, October 15, 1965. Courtesy The Harvey Richards Media Archive Pirkle Jones, Bobby Seale speaking at Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, #9 from the series Black Panthers 1968, July 14, 1968. © 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation Ilka Hartmann, Young girls at Black Panther demonstration in San Francisco, CA, February 11, 1970. © 2014 Ilka Hartmann.

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Corita Kent, my people, 1965, serigraph. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles. Photograph by Josh White Corita Kent, people like us yes, 1965, serigraph. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles. Photograph by Josh White Barrio Mobile Art Studio, Community Workshop, 1970s. © 1976-2015 Self Help Graphics & Art, www.selfhelpgraphics.com. Photo Courtesy of

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List of Illustrations

University of California, Santa Barbara, Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Mary’s Day, 1964. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles Mass at Evergreen Cemetery, Day of the Dead, 1976. © 1976-2015 Self Help Graphics & Art, www.selfhelpgraphics.com. Photo Courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara, Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives

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Aviva Rahmani and Marni Gud, Two Nice Jewish Girls, installation and performance at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1972. Courtesy Aviva Rahmani. Crowds interacting with Aviva Rahmani and Marni Gud, Two Nice Jewish Girls, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1972. Courtesy Aviva Rahmani. Cyclona in The Wedding of Maria Theresa Conchita Con Chin Gow, 1971. Scrapbook page, box 5, folder 16. The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta - Cyclona Collection, 500, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

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“If We Lived Here, We’d Be Home,” from The Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, Let’s Shut Down Seabrook!, 1979, p. 3. Dona Ann McAdams, “Rancho Seco, Sacramento, California, Sacramento Municipal Utility District,” recto and verso of postcard from the series, The Nuclear Survival Kit: They’re Juggling Our Genes!, 1981. Courtesy of the PAD/D Archive at the Museum of Modern Art Library. © Dona Ann McAdams

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War Resisters League, Nuclear America, c. 1978, offset lithograph poster. © War Resisters League Sharon Gilbert, detail of 3-Mile Island Reproductions (1-8), 1979, Xerox. © Sharon Gilbert Sharon Gilbert, details from A Nuclear Atlas (Rosendale, New York: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1982). © Sharon Gilbert

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Brian Doan, the vandalized Thu Duc. Photo by the artist, reproduced with his permission Map of Little Saigon, Westminster, Orange County. Reproduced with permission from Matthew Allen Westminster, CA shopping strip, showing pre-1975 construction and signage with minimal modern-day alterations, 2008-13. Photo by the author Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Twelve Pillar Pagoda, 2008-13. Photo by author Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Vietnamese Veterans Cemetery section, 2008-13. Photo by author Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Boat People Memorial, 2008-13. Photo by author Khanh Ba Nguyen, Harmony Bridge, first version, 1996. Published in the Orange County Register, 23 January 1996, 1 (Quyen Do, “$4.5 Million revamp set for Little Saigon”) Khanh Ba Nguyen, Harmony Bridge, second version, 1996. Published in the Orange County Register, 26 April 1996, Metro 2 (Quyen Do, “Designing Little Saigon”) Tuan Nguyen, Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, 2003. Photo by author, reproduced with permission from the artist

INTRODUCTION MIGUEL DE BACA AND MAKEDA BEST, EDITORS1

By the first decades of the twentieth century, prominent American artists had embraced the function of art as a form of social critique and as a site for raising social awareness. Painter Robert Henri, the voice of the so-called Ashcan School, led the group of New York-based artists who turned the harsh realities of urban life and industrialization into a new aesthetic. Henri’s associates, including George Bellows and John Sloan, did not just make paintings. Rather, the group’s close association with journalism and interest in the realities of the conditions of urban life inspired some to also contribute artwork to the influential left-wing journal, The Masses (1911-17). Under the editorial direction of Max Eastman, the graphic works contributed by Sloan and others like Stuart Davis energetically translated the journal’s socialist platform and dramatically portrayed key events related to the labor struggles of the era, such as the Ludlow Massacre during which the Colorado National Guard clashed with striking workers of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The journalistic eye for key symbolism and the rough immediacy of the technique of Ashcan artists served the journal’s goals to illustrate and explain key events and ideologies simply and effectively. When The Masses was reborn as The New Masses in 1928, the journal continued to employ illustrations. Painter William Gropper made works that were sparing in detail, but that explored with nuance power relationships through dramatic juxtapositions of allegorical figures. Monica Bohm-Duchen observes that during the 1930s and 1940s, contemporary events, along with two key exhibitions in New York, the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810-20) and Pablo Picasso’s installation of Guernica (1937) on behalf of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, galvanized a new generation to produce their own antiwar statements.2 During this period, artists worked in a range of mediums and styles to respond to the conflict. Painter Ben Shahn produced posters for the Office of War Information that recalled the

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work of the German artist John Heartfield. Shortly after the United States officially entered the Second World War in 1941, a consortium of New York-based artists groups came together to create Artists for Victory, Inc., which sought to “render effective the talents and abilities of artists in the prosecution of World War II and the protection of the country.”3 Although African American painter and Army veteran Horace Pippin is well known for works such Mr. Prejudice (1943), which illustrate persistent racism in both American society and the Army, such works were part of a broader oeuvre that frequently contrasted American political ideals and its discriminatory attitudes. Just as the art reproduced in The Masses provided the public a way of visualizing what was portrayed in celebrated literary works such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), the relationship between the visual and textual only expanded within the burgeoning literary and media markets of the 1940s. A dynamic mid-twentieth-century print culture offered American artists new ways to communicate to a viewership outside of fine art settings. The regionalist painter Grant Wood provided an illustration of a shirtless farmer working a small plot of land for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, complementing the feature article: “For What Are We Fighting?” Few would have misunderstood the implications of his question. Norman Rockwell’s photorealist paintings translated easily into poster form, and he produced a number of seminal works and series, including This is America... Keep it Free! (1942). The rebellions of the 1960s spurred American artists to organize themselves on the historical model of labor unions. On the West Coast, Los Angeles-based artists formed the Artist Protest Committee (APC) and launched antiwar protests, including such artworks as the Peace Tower (also titled the Artists’ Tower of Protest; 1966). Peace Tower harnessed currents in contemporary sculptural design to the exigencies of political critique. Likewise in New York City, the civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and a newfound resistance to inequalities within the established art world gave rise to and supported many alternative gallery spaces, artist collectives, and organizations. In their actions and artworks, these East Coast countercultural artists assailed the predominating politics and structures of the social and professional institutions in which art is embroiled.4 As the critic Lucy Lippard writes succinctly of this period: “Artists perceived the museum as a public and therefore potentially accountable institution, the only one the least bit likely to listen to the art community on ethical and political matters.”5 Artists engaged in these confrontations gave special consideration to the impact and mass appeal of

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their actions, which led many of them to participate in collective and community-based, rather than individual, statements of opposition.6 The do-it-yourself attitude of the era encouraged artists to turn to new mediums and modes of address for their work, and this aesthetic was an essential quality of the oppositional culture of the era. Specifically, many of these late-1960s protest works were in the form of prints—works that took advantage of printmaking’s ease of production, dissemination, and historical associations with protest. For instance, the APC produced the eye-catching placard Stop: We Dissent in 1965. Getting the word out to the public beyond the art world was key. To that end, the decisively radical Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), which was founded in January 1969 in New York, published their first statement against the Vietnam War that same year in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. Perhaps the best known print of the era was the AWC’s lurid indictment of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam: the now-iconic offset lithograph of a photograph by Ronald Haeberle, emblazoned with the haunting words of the news reporter Mike Wallace’s interview with one of the witnesses, which also serve as its title, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies (1970). In her landmark survey of political prints, Chief Curator Emerita of Prints at the Museum of Modern Art Deborah Wye identified several classifications of postwar print culture spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s: conceptual pieces, iconic works, and the commemorative print.7 The APC and AWC prints exemplify Wye’s categories; they are thought provoking, bold expressions of the era of dissent. As is clear in Lippard’s criticism of museums’ accountability (or lack thereof) to the sociopolitical sphere, the AWC actions—including the strident piece in the Times—flagged New York’s major institutions’ lackadaisical stances toward the increasingly intolerable US military involvement in Vietnam. In questioning their apparent passivity, the AWC pursued networks of corporate and financial sponsorship within the art world at-large, and exposed how they benefitted from American investment in the war. It became increasingly clear that, regardless of medium, the artists who wished to articulate dissent through their work were participating in a growing and comprehensive critique of museums as institutions, which has endured well into our contemporary moment. The aftereffects of the AWC’s efforts additionally raised the larger questions of the politics and power relations implicit in any space of acculturation. No longer could museums, galleries, nor even the public domain, appear politically neutral. As a response, new institutions emerged to dedicate their programming to the demographics of the communities they sought to serve. Martha Vega, the founding director of

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New York’s El Museo del Barrio explained the goal of the museum to connect the Puerto Rican community with its heritage: “I was ashamed of being a Puerto Rican and I want my three kids to be proud of it,” she told the New York Times in 1971.8 Across the country, artists transformed public urban spaces into de facto museums in the community interest as rallying points for pride, political activism, and to create ethnic visibility within the visual arts. For instance, Judith Baca’s quintessential mural project The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976-83) engaged an entire community to transform a disused flood channel into powerful paintings about Mexican and Mexican American history and identity. The revolutionary role of art within the larger movements of social change continued to reverberate over the following decades. For many artists of color, neutrality was no longer an option. The graphic artist Emory Douglas wrote in 1977 to other African American artists: “In order to create accurate images of awareness we must participate in the changing of society and understand the political nature of art, because there is no such thing as art for art’s sake.”9 Here, Douglas repeated one of the central aesthetic imperatives of modernism—“art for art’s sake”—to dispose of it once and for all. Douglas’s invocation to African American artists is one example of the way racial identity played an integral role in the activism of the era. Douglas used his work in support of the Oakland, Californiabased Black Panther Party. Throughout the 1960s, women who participated in civil rights protest were honing skills that would be put to use in the following decade’s feminist movement. Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which originated as a caucus within the AWC, frequently launched demonstrations to advocate for the increased visibility of women’s art in New York’s flagship museum collections and exhibitions. The art historian Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), illuminated that the striking lack of women in the artistic canon derived from hundreds of years of patriarchal systems of patronage that favored men. All the while, other publications in the 1960s and 1970s helped redefine women’s attitudes toward their personal lives— including, very importantly, sexual liberation as a means for social transformation. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Womanhouse (1972) realized many of these feminist principles in formation. Womanhouse originated in these two artists’ experimental art curriculum at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), near Los Angeles. Having endured the isolating effects of deeply entrenched sexism within the art school setting, Chicago and Schapiro’s program for women artists instead emphasized mutual support

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and collaboration, and women-centered experiences as a new and daring content for art. Faced with a lack of studio space, students worked together with women in the community to renovate an abandoned house near the campus and transform it into a temporary artwork. The culmination was Womanhouse, an immersive art installation reflecting upon the stereotypes and injustices faced by women societally. For instance, Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts, and Robin Weltsch’s Nurturant Kitchen interrogated the conventional role of woman-as-nurturer by covering the house’s kitchen from floor to ceiling with bright pink breast-forms. Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom presented a jarring display of abundant redpainted feminine hygiene products within a pristine white lavatory in order to question blood taboos and to expose the shame that women historically have been made to feel about their bodies. Womanhouse opened to the public with additional performances on the subject of women’s domestic roles. Womanhouse transformed the larger field of protest art in the following ways. First, Chicago and Schapiro’s work harnessed the politically neutral genre of “happenings” of the late 1950s and 1960s to radical critique, establishing a precedent for installation and performance-based art as protest. Second, understanding the “art school” to be implicitly patriarchal, and therefore intolerable, Womanhouse worked outside of traditional institutions to bring art into a formerly non-art context, and thereby launched a critique. Third, the collaborative atmosphere of artists included members of the community as integral participants in, as well as viewers of, the resulting artwork. Fourth, these artists employed a diversity of media, which finally laid to rest remaining vestiges of modernist mediumspecificity and allowed for a free range of materials to be employed commensurate to the artist’s aims. And fifth, Womanhouse provided a space in which women’s bodies were not represented as exclusively sexual, but rather a site wherein sexuality was addressed as a social construction. This last point—gender as a sociologically-defined role rather than something inherent to one’s sex—is an important one for the many women artists working in the 1980s and 1990s who wished to use their work as a site of resistance to the mass media. Just as we have seen in earlier decades, many artists working in the last forty years also have called out the pervasiveness of popular culture images in quotidian American life, and have brought new critical attention to its ramifications for defining personal and group identity. Gender is an especially pertinent example. The feminist film critic Laura Mulvey’s indispensible essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1974) exposed the subconscious heterosexism and

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patriarchy in movies, and has been applied to limitless modes of spectatorship beyond the filmic. The visual artist Cindy Sherman’s lateseventies Film Stills, for instance, use photography to meditate upon the artifice of cinematic femininity. Barbara Kruger’s feminist posters collage images from books, magazines, and other popular forms of print culture, onto which she overlays bold red-and-white text. Her iconic work Your Body is a Battleground (1989) adopts a popular slogan from the feminist movement, and was produced as a framed artwork for the gallery setting as well as a poster for a reproductive rights demonstration in Washington, DC. Other artists continued to think critically about gender and sexuality in the era of gay liberation after the Stonewall riots in 1969 and subsequent uprisings. However, the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s intervened upon this exploration, and brought profound changes to the political valence of artwork by gay artists. HIV infection and AIDS-related disease disproportionately took its toll on the gay community, and many of those affected blamed the conservative Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan for inaction in the face of a public health crisis. Artists within the gay community were swift to work together to heighten the visibility of HIV- and AIDS-related causes. A collective of gay male graphic designers, later merged with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), created the unforgettable “SILENCE=DEATH” logo in white letters on a black ground, paired with an upturned pink triangle (imagery appropriated from the triangles that homosexuals were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps) as a symbol of resistance to governmental indifference. Gran Fury, another group of artists within ACT-UP, designed posters for the cause. Their seminal Kissing Doesn’t Kill but Greed and Indifference Do (1989) dispelled myths about the transmission of HIV, and reached large audiences as advertisements on public transportation. These guerrilla tactics have long been used in American protest, and artists advocating for AIDS awareness were especially proactive about the dissemination and display of their mass media-inspired artworks. Collaboration, which as we have seen is one of the core features of democratic art activism since the dawn of the century, continued full force in the 1980s. Collaborative Projects (Colab), was established in New York in the late 1970s on the premise of facilitating experiences with art that were accessible to all. Their refusal to identify with a single issue, social group, or style embraced the anarchist ethos of punk rock. But at the same time, Colab welcomed the emerging hip-hop and rap scene, and celebrated underground graffiti artists as radical appropriators of the public domain. Group Material was another New York-based activist collective whose

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artwork pivoted on American involvement in global wars, elections, and rampant consumerism, echoing in many ways the radicalism of the AWC. The Guerrilla Girls, which was established in 1985, is perhaps one of the most identifiable groups. Using pseudonyms and wearing gorilla masks in public, the Guerrilla Girls’s disruptive performance style has drawn attention to an impressive array of domestic and international injustices, particularly related to gender inequality. Art about AIDS, together with the sheer force of collective art activism in the 1980s, shed new light on the growing divide between progressive attitudes toward self-expression, embraced by artists going forward from the raucous 1960s (not only in the US, to be sure), and a more conservative-leaning public sector. Critics invoked the nineteenth century German Kulturkampf, or “culture wars,” to describe the frequent controversies surrounding government funding of the arts in the late 1980s and 1990s. The most commonly cited chapter in the American culture wars is the contentious removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), a site-specific Minimalist monolith installed in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan, in 1989. The episode says much about the elitism of the arts establishment on the one hand, and deleterious effects of censorship on the other; however, in the broad view, the removal of Tilted Arc proved what many artists had known all along: that both the visual arts and the uses of public space were in a moment of intense political scrutiny. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, DC is a counterpoint to Serra’s Tilted Arc. The two sculptures share a stark Minimalist approach to design, but Lin’s monument eventually won in the court of public opinion, although not without contest. The memorial was harshly criticized in the years following its unveiling, especially by veterans, who thought that the black granite wall symbolized a “gash of shame” equated with American involvement in the war. Some believed that the V-shaped monument was implicitly antiwar because its form generally resembles the peace sign. Still other critics disparaged the lack of figurative sculpture as insufficiently honorific. However, supporters refute these claims, arguing instead that Lin’s non-traditional monument cultivates an appropriately solemn atmosphere of contemplation. Unlike other war memorials, the beholder sees a return vision of his body in the highly polished, reflective monument, crossed over with the names of the dead that are engraved onto its surface, thus cultivating a moment of empathy with the fallen soldiers. The opportunity to leave personal effects, and indeed, to take personal effects in the form of a pencil rubbing of the carved names, contributes to an interactive atmosphere that ultimately accounts for the memorial’s popularity.

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Public space continues to be the site of artistic intervention. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the site of the World Trade Center’s ruins—“Ground Zero”—became a staging area not only for memory, but also for protests for and against the ensuing “war on terror,” which continues in various ways to seriously impact global politics. Following the 2004 release of photographic evidence of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at the hands of the US military and its affiliates working at Abu Ghraib prison, many Americans wondered about the extent of unauthorized war violence and its effects on foreign relations as well as the military itself. The antiwar artists working under the pseudonym “Forkscrew Graphics” appropriated this imagery, deploying it as acrid, Pop-inspired posters that proliferated throughout New York and Los Angeles. But the early twenty-first century has inaugurated a new public space with which to contend: the Internet. New protest artworks ranging from graphics to videos and animations have come to live on websites such as YouTube and find new, worldwide audiences via social media. Websites such as Facebook now provide a forum for a convergence of people from vastly different backgrounds and identities, and present new opportunities for the formation of community based on common causes. The beholder’s access to social movements can be as immediate as a click of the mouse, but it brings up questions about whether such superficial encounters amount to political change.

Chapter Outline Conflict, Identity and Protest in American Art brings together the three concepts in its title to reveal their unique interconnections in the vital context of twentieth-century American art history. The anthology seeks to explore the relationship between artistic production and cultures of conflict in the United States. Such a theme continues necessarily to provoke practitioners and scholars across a range of media and disciplines, especially as definitions of the tools, acts and sites of warfare and protest, globalization, and digital media evolve and change. This topic generates a vital discussion of visual works in relation to national identity, the politics and contexts of artistic production and reception, and the expressive and political function of art within historical periods defined by waged wars, countercultural rebellions, and social revolutions. In addressing race and ethnicity, this anthology seeks to underscore the shifting nature of identity, and specifically how conflict—armed conflict as well as rhetorical conflict—gives rise to new identities. The following selection of essays were either included in, or inspired by, the conference session under the

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same title convened at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago, Illinois. In order to demonstrate thematic continuity among artists and movements, the essays in this volume are organized chronologically. In the 150 years since the American Civil War, distinct historical contexts have produced and shaped the interpretive possibilities of artistic media. Artists recognized and have understood specific media to register emotions and affiliations, and to enhance messages of memorialization, critique, and dissent. Rather than addressing individual artists, these essays address the contexts of art objects in the twentieth century. Along the way, we discover these artworks’ remarkable intersections with technology, politics, community, identity, history, and place. In 2006, Patricia Johnston’s anthology, Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture considered how different media interpret and represent social conflict. Its analyses include fine art, popular, ephemeral, and material cultural creative expression. The essays in Seeing High and Low focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: essentially the Civil War and its aftermath. The focal points of Johnston's volume are the emergence of and responses to American pluralism, American modernism, mass media, and industrial revolution. The essayists in our present volume build on the methodologies represented in Seeing High and Low, recognizing the exchanges between the fine and popular arts, and how medium affects representation and reception. However, this anthology remains significantly different. For one, it spans the twentieth century, with particular attention to the impact of the Vietnam War and related protest movements. The diversity of our authors’ subjects reflects the growing importance of the contemporary field within art history as a whole and the need to register new and heterogeneous methodologies for the study of this type of activist art. Additionally, this collection’s extended trajectory to the present allows for the project of reflection upon the cross-historical relationship between vital contexts and media, such as the Black Power movement and performance art, which has only begun in the last generation. Because the mass media historically served as a prominent influence on activists’ artistic processes, production, and reception, we believed it necessary to enlarge our purview to encompass a wealth of practices after the 1960s, when Pop Art famously visualized the subconscious desires and discontents of popular culture. As a related matter, our protracted consideration of artist collectives and vernacular practitioners is unique. Recognizing that collaborative action has long been an identifying feature of both protest and the establishment

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of group identity, we were interested in encompassing joint movements among artists in the crucible of unrest during the 1960s and after. Rather than focusing on New York as the epicenter of cultural output, these essays strive to represent diverse national and international geographies. Indeed, this anthology is truly a product of the contemporary demands in scholarship to engage the global (and globalizing) scope of American conflicts and the nature of the American experience. Several of our authors ask productive questions about immigrant identity or other outsider identities, and the global scope of American conflict as interpreted, memorialized, staged, and contested by immigrant communities abroad and at home. The definition of who or what is American has long been a central question within American art and American studies, and it is our hope to enlarge the question—complicate it, perhaps—and redraw its scope. Each essay discusses a specific case study, but four broad themes span these discussions. Each of these papers deals with appropriation: images and visual systems that were selected, arranged, or co-opted in order to transform the meanings produced by their sources. Such a politically charged maneuver draws our awareness to the relative agency of the borrower and the mutability of contexts. Second, these essays are united in their different treatments of the motif of memory. How are artworks— photographs, monuments—deployed as a way of stabilizing the past and building community identity? Or, do these images instead engage in a progressive destabilization? What role does memory play in the contemporary monument or moment—or how can it alter contextual frameworks, which are discursive and change over time? Third, many of these essays bracket the discussion of affect. And yet, emotionalism is undeniably a core dimension of activism and its reception. The presence or absence of emotional reflexivity in these works raises the question of what emotional stances and or receptive states are necessary to build collective resistance in the long term. Finally, these papers reveal the art object’s entrance into the civic arena as a form of public address. The distinct attributes of these gestures demonstrate the powers and limitations of media and technology to shape a collective consciousness of lived experience. Tirza True Latimer’s essay on the American expatriate World War I era (1914-18) painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) explores how wartime conditions in which women played a prominent role in the war effort and on the home front influenced a stylistic change in Brooks’s style, as demonstrated in the nearly life-size portrait of an anonymous nurse, La France Croisee (1914), which signals a departure from her prewar society

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portraits and registers the artist’s new conception of female agency. Female labor during the war instigated Brooks’s artistic exploration of feminine identities; while back in the United States, it was these kinds of changes in the labor force that government and civic organizations sought to exploit in their production of wartime propaganda. Jill Bugajski’s study of the Rochester, New York-based Think American Institute, and in particular how it conveyed themes of labor, civic loyalty, and patriotism through graphics, revises the usual association of silkscreen production during the 1930s and 1940s with political dissent. Instead, Bugajski exposes how the technical aspects of the medium—colors, typography— served to promote social order. John Blakinger’s paper, “Camouflage, 1942: Artists, Architects, and Designers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia,” continues in this vein. Blakinger breaks new ground in analyzing effects of war on art through an investigation of the unlikely reaches between the military-industrial complex and arts institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, during and after World War Two. This essay suggests that abstraction itself, enshrined by American Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s, was in fact deeply connected to modes of visuality originating in war. Several of our authors shed new light on the long 1960s, a decade at the root of so much contemporary expression of dissent. In “Shock-Photo: The War Images of Rosler, Spero, and Celmins,” Frances Jacobus-Parker introduces a more comprehensive understanding of the “politics of appropriation” of mass-mediated images to Pop Art in the 1960s, especially related to critical studies of gender. Jo-Ann Morgan examines West Coast radicalism in her essay, “From ‘Free Speech’ to ‘Free Huey’: Visual Ephemera and the Collaboration of Black Power with White Resistance.” Morgan situates the reader in the restless years of protest in late 1960s’ Berkeley, California, demonstrating that print and photographic ephemera played an essential role in the curious convergence of African American militant protestors and white student radicals. Kristen Gaylord’s “Catholic Art and Activism in Postwar Los Angeles” goes far beyond the existing biographical studies of Sister Mary Corita Kent and Sister Karen Boccalero to situate their voices within the enriching culture of social and political activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Moving forward from the 1960s, Rebecca Lowery examines the broader legacy of performance art and radicalism in “Art Against the World: Collaborative Antagonism in 1970s Los Angeles.” Lowery draws crucial parallels between the general climate of performance artwork in L.A. in the 1970s, daring interventions rooted in the Chicano movement— well-known but seldom addressed in the literature on this subject—and the

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nascent radical feminist presence enabled by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s presence at CalArts. The worst nuclear accident in American history, which occurred at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, led artists to adopt what Chris Balaschak describes as a strategy of harnessing print media and print techniques in works that graphically and symbolically “recompose” nuclear landscapes in order to protest nuclear power and question legislation that permitted the construction of plants in populated areas and that sought to promote nuclear energy as benign. This anthology concludes with Erica Allen Kim’s powerful consideration of the way in which the public memorialization of the Vietnam War (1954-75) remains a hotly contested issue in Vietnamese communities in Southern California. Allen Kim describes how across the landscape of suburban Westminster, California’s “Little Saigon” enclave, the public space of war memorialization has engaged questions of Vietnamese ethnic identity and Vietnamese and American nationalism. If, as the JacobusParker essay in this volume contends, the re-representation of mass mediated images of Vietnam can reveal much about the identity of the artist, indeed, visualizing the Vietnam War from within the Vietnamese community engages a range of personal interpretations of the conflict and its legacy. The current unabashed violence and seeming indifference of contemporary US culture has become something of a chestnut. However, in light of the essays gathered in this volume, it is apparent that constructive dissent has historically taken extremely heterogeneous forms and comes from all walks of life. Somewhat by design, these articulations of protest have evaded the watch of art history, or indeed, any institutional authority. But we must know these artists and their works. They lend us questions, they illuminate present injustices, and they demonstrate tactics to claim agency. From the ramshackle to the refined, no one can deny that dissent has and will continue to play a vibrant role in American art.

Notes 1

We, the editors, would like to extend our sincere thanks to Vyt Bakaitis and the Estate of Sharon Gilbert for graciously supplying the cover art to this volume. We would also like to thank our proofreader, Kaisa Cummings, for such attentive work, and of course, the individual authors for their bold and innovative scholarship. 2 Monica Bohm-Duchen, Art and the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 80-81.

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Bohm-Duchen, Art and the Second World War, 83. Julie Ault, “For the Record,” in Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3. 5 Lucy Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York Since 1969,” in Alternative Art, New York, 79. 6 Francis Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 57. 7 For more information on the historical links between protest and print culture, see: Deborah Wye, Committed to Print – Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988). 8 “Puerto Rican Museum Finally Gets Its Own Home,” New York Times, November 10, 1971. 9 Emory Douglas, “Art in Service of the People,” Black Scholar 9, no. 3 (November 1977): 55. 4



CHAPTER ONE CROSSING THE LINES: ROMAINE BROOKS AND THE WAR TO END ALL WARS TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Before the onset of World War I, the American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) earned critical acclaim in Paris for her novel approach to portraiture and the female nude. Her paintings of aristocratic sitters and the haute bourgeoisie broke with decorative traditions of female representation. Her society portraits revealed imperfections of character as well as physique and the women she painted stared confidently, sometimes arrogantly, back at the viewer. Her emaciated nudes turned away from traditions of volupté and erotic display. In her memoirs, Brooks described the monumental nude she painted in 1910, White Azaleas (for which the Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein posed) as “Olympia’s sister” because it was as unconventional as Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting.1 This nude, like Brooks’s early portraits, extend aesthetic trends of the long nineteenth century. Critics compared her to Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and the French Symbolists. With the wartime painting La France Croisée (1914), Brooks reached a crossroads in her artistic career. In the 1920s, she would generate a veritable pantheon of modern women painted in a more reductive modern style. La France Croisée, like the Great War itself, opened new representational horizons (fig. 1-1). On its face, this three-quarters figure of a Red Cross nurse, depicted against the backdrop of a war torn wasteland, reads as an allegory of France martyred by the latest German invasion. Yet Brooks layered the painting with more subtle registers of meaning. It is significant that the cross on the breast of Brooks’s protagonist, at the exact center of the painting, is not a military cross of valor but the emblem of a neutral humanitarian organization. The Red Cross symbol originated at the Geneva Convention of 1864, where diplomats from all European countries



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Chapter One

and several American states convened to forge an agreement ameliorating the conditions of those wounded in war. 2 The symbol of the Red Cross, an inverted Swiss flag (which features a white cross against a red ground), was adopted as a tribute to Henry Dunant, the French Swiss founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Painted in a bright vermillion, the emblem stands out against Brooks’s otherwise predominantly grey-blue palette. The title of Brooks’s painting also calls attention to the red cross. Yet for the French-speaking public, the phrase “la France croisée” must have seemed enigmatic. The customary English translation, “The Cross of France,” is not exact. Brooks’s title, which accurately translates “France crossed,” suggests but deviates from “the cross of France” to evoke not only the Christian cross and Red Cross insignia, but also the breached frontiers of France under military siege. At the same time, in the word “croisée” an echo of “crusade” (croisade) can be heard, summoning up righteous narratives of territorial recuperation. The title in its original French iteration, then, evokes not so much an object (a cross) but an action—the crossing back and forth of land warfare, battle lines drawn, then transgressed, troops pushed back and then resurging to redefine territorial boundaries. Brooks’s allegorical figure of France contributes to an iconography familiar to French men and women. In everyday life, allegorical representations of the motherland were commonplace. At the time Brooks painted La France Croisée, French stamps and coins (indeed, the basic unit of the economy, the franc) pictured the allegorical figure La Semeuse (the sower of seeds) striding forward to cultivate the land, robe agitated by the synchronized actions of her arms and legs. During the war, French stamps bore the Red Cross emblem in one corner and half of the purchase price was earmarked for the support of relief efforts. Another secular goddess, Marianne, recognizable by her distinctive Phrygian bonnet, became the symbol of liberty when the Convention of 1792 voted to use her image on the state seal of the new republic.3 The bust of Marianne replaced crucifixes and statues of the Virgin in public schools and town halls. La France Croisée visibly relates to Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) of 1830, perhaps the most famous artistic representation of Marianne. Brooks’s windswept figure, like Delacroix’s allegorical Liberty, exhibits fearlessness in the face of danger. Yet Brooks’s personification of France, unlike Delacroix’s Liberty, does not bare her breasts. On the contrary, she clutches the Red Cross cape across her chest, concealing her gendered anatomy. Moreover, while the drapery and corporeality of Delacroix’s



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Liberty reify classical standards of feminine beauty, La France Croisée presents something much more rare: a contemporary heroine. That Brooks’s heroine wears a Red Cross nurse’s uniform has complex implications. The painting does not, as Liberty Leading the People does, idealize armed revolt and soldierly prowess. Rather, it introduces a counter-discourse. The Red Cross nurse enters the battlefield not to overpower an enemy but rather to tend the wounds of those fallen, whether military or civilian, regardless of nationality. Because this nurse, in her dress and demeanor, aligns with the historical profile of women who actually served during the war, she could be understood as a modern feminine archetype as much as a personification of wartime France. This painting, indeed, anchored an iconography of heroic femininity that Brooks elaborated throughout the remainder of her artistic career. Striking the same pose in both a self-portrait Brooks painted in 1912, Au Bord de la mer (At the Seashore), and a portrait of the ballet idol Ida Rubinstein she painted in 1917, this female archetype looks like a cross between the two artistically accomplished women. With her sinuous neck, strong jaw line, prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and prow-like nose, the composite figure, if striking, is hardly a conventional beauty. The strong features of her face, painted in three quarters profile, express fearless determination. The near life-scale of the figure grounds her in worldly reality, as do the details of her attire. The dark blue cape (virtually black) with the red cross over the breast, white blouse, and white headscarf replicate the uniforms worn by Red Cross nurses from France, America, and England serving under the auspices of La Croix-Rouge Française. Typically, each nurse displayed, under the cross, an insignia indicating her specific affiliation and may also have worn, inside the cape on her shirt collar or apron, regimental insignia given to her by the injured soldiers for whom she had cared. Brooks’s nurse, though, lacks any such distinguishing marks. She should be viewed, for this reason, as a type, not an individual, just as the city aflame in the background, identified by Brooks as Ypres on the Belgian border, could stand for any one of many comparable sites. Yet Brooks’s nurse stands apart from the generic images of Red Cross volunteers that circulated throughout the war years. One recruiting poster, declaring “Five Thousand by June – Graduate Nurses Your Country Needs You,” features in the foreground a three-quarters figure of a nurse wearing a Red Cross cape (fig. 1-2). But this is where the resemblance to Brooks’s painting ends. The Red Cross “poster girl” holds her body stiff and upright. No wind of war buffets her perfect coif and starched white clothing. In contrast to the scene of devastation surrounding the nurse in



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Chapter One

La France Croisée, the backdrop here consists of military barracks, stretching out in orderly rows almost as far as the eye can see, with the flags of the United States and the Red Cross on proud display. The clouds in the sky are white and billowy, as opposed to those smoke grey skies painted by Brooks. The lithograph’s lighter palette contributes to the sense of optimism and buoyancy the image communicates. Downplaying the battlefield dangers inherent to the wartime nursing vocation, it exemplifies the propaganda images generated by the Red Cross on both sides of the Atlantic throughout World War I. In France, Red Cross postcards conformed to the same template. They typically feature a staged tableau that shows a nurse ministering to a soldier on the margins of the battlefield. 4 These postcards bore inspirational captions: “Soins Dévoué” (“devoted care”), “L’Ange de la Victoire” (“angel of victory”), “Courage – Dévouement” (“courage – devotion”) (fig. 1-3). They invariably picture a nurse wearing virtuous white from head to toe. Her young face is plump and pleasing, if plain. Implicitly or explicitly identified as an “angel,” she preserves traditional feminine characteristics of modesty, cleanliness, and maternal tenderness even under duress. Women who served during the conflict pictured themselves in somewhat different ways. They posed for photographs with their units, with one another in twos and threes, and with their vehicles (figs. 1-4 and 1-5). Between twenty-five and thirty thousand American women served as ambulance drivers or nurses staffing Red Cross hospitals and field stations during the so-called war to end all wars. Several prominent Americans, including the banking heiress Anne Morgan and the Singer sewing machine heiress Winaretta Singer (Princess Edmond de Polignac by marriage), founded relief organizations. Singer-Polignac worked with Marie Curie to convert private limousines into mobile radiology units. Morgan’s American Fund for French Wounded (AFFW), with a fleet of sixty-five vehicles, trucked medical supplies to hospitals, staffed ambulances, and delivered care packages to soldiers. Morgan’s so-called “Heiress Corps” operated not far behind the lines in the Somme, Aisne, Marne, and Meuse regions of northern France beginning in 1915, well before US military involvement in the conflict. Over 300 American women made their way to France to serve in the AFFW, and 5,000 more drove ambulances for various Red Cross units. They arrived by transatlantic steamer with their stripped down Fords and Dodges in tow. As a condition of service, they learned to perform mechanical repairs, change tires, patch inner tubes, and dig their axels out of the mud. The volunteers often worked without food or rest for days on



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end.5 They labored under the same conditions as the troops. “The mud is ten inches deep here,” one recruit wrote home to Boston, “and after four hours under my car making repairs, I am literally unrecognizable.”6 They may have worn white uniforms and ministered to soldiers but they did not resemble the pristine “angels” pictured in Red Cross propaganda. The French Red Cross, like the AFFW, focused recruiting and fundraising efforts on the economically privileged classes. This helps to explain the white washed character of their promotional imagery. Families of high social standing required reassurance that their daughters, sisters, and wives would remain ladylike even on the frontlines of wartime service. In France, this concern for the opinion of a recruit’s kin was no mere nicety. Under the Napoleonic Code, a woman had to obtain written permission from a male head of household (father, husband, or brother) to exercise any profession, even as a volunteer. The war required women to take on many traditionally male roles and alarmists warned that, by performing war work, women would become manly. A certain Dr. Louis Huot, writing about the changes French womanhood was undergoing as a result of war service, noted evidence of this masculinization in “the spiciness of their language and the hardiness of their attitudes.”7 Hence relief organizations strove to reconcile the demands and conditions of wartime service with acceptable feminine stereotypes. Red Cross recruiting campaigns were highly successful and nursing became, within highborn circles, socially de rigueur. In all, 70,000 female volunteers served in one of the three branches of the Croix-Rouge française during World War I: la Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires (SSBM), l’Union des Femmes de France (UFF), and the l’Association des Dames Françaises (ADF). The comtesse d’Haussonville presided over the SSBM. The Princess de Polignac, with whom Brooks had a brief affair, attended the opening of the avant-garde ballet Parade in 1917 wearing her nurse’s uniform.8 Elisabeth de Gramont, duchesse de Cleremont-Tonnerre, sponsored a fleet of Red Cross vehicles and prominent members of her circle signed on as drivers. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas volunteered to run AFFW supplies to Alsace in their Ford. Various other internationally prominent women—among them the poet Lucie DelarueMardrus, Sylvia Beach (founder of Shakespeare and Co. bookstore), cellist Evelyn Wyld, designer Eileen Grey, popular novelist Agatha Christie, and literary agent Elizabeth Marbury—drove relief vehicles. Marbury’s companion, the decorator Elsie de Wolfe, served in a mobile medical unit specializing in the treatment of burn and gassing victims. A nurse whose account appeared in the AFFW monthly report described the damage inflicted by the insidious new asphyxiating gas.



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Chapter One

Imperceptible at first, once the gas permeated the clothing, coated the eyes, and infiltrated the lungs it burned deep into the tissue. “Its action is so corrosive that some of the nurses told me their arms had been badly blistered while dressing the wounds.”9 Nurses and drivers working near the front lines were issued gas masks. Nurses wearing this attire did not appear in Red Cross photo documentation or press coverage of women’s war work. About the masks, one nurse wrote, “They are horrible things to have to wear.” An “almost unbearable” smell of chemicals saturated the mask’s inner surfaces.10 Surrounded by “girls in uniform,” Brooks’s lover, the American playwright, poet, and novelist Natalie Barney (whose lifelong relationship with the artist began in 1915), claimed to be the only American woman in Paris who had not volunteered to drive an ambulance.11 Even as Barney, a confirmed pacifist, held anti-war meetings in her Left Bank garden (on the steps of her folly, the Temple of Friendship), Brooks tried to shape herself up for wartime service as an ambulance driver.12 In her memoirs, Brooks describes an attempt to harden herself by driving around in an open car in the cold weather. (The exercise, she admits, resulted only in a bronchial infection and a retreat to the spa in Aix-les-Bains. 13 ) The Red Cross volunteer Madame de la Boulaye described in her post-war memoirs the social pressures felt by members of Brooks and Barney’s class: “A socialite who could not point to service in a single hospital would seem an unreliable coward; the most suggestive tangos and the most flagrant fashions would never redress this failure and restore her position in elite salons.” 14 Unfit, by her own estimation, for service on the front lines, Brooks nevertheless found alternative ways to contribute to the war effort. For the benefit of the Red Cross, she exhibited La France Croisée at Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris in 1915, accompanied by a limited edition publication containing a photograph of the painting along with a sonnet by the Italian bard Gabriele D’Annunzio.15 The poem, titled “Sur un image de la France croisée peinte par Romaine Brooks,” vaunts Brooks’s Red Cross nurse as an allegorical representation of “the whole good race.”16 Did D’Annunzio mean by this the whole good Gallic race? Or the race of heroic modern women that Brooks’s nurse prefigured? The critic John Usher perceived the latter. Writing about the painting when it was exhibited in London ten years later, he described Brooks’s heroine as a synthesis of “all the countless young women who sacrificed art and career on the battlefield.”17 In the context of Brooks’s career, this painting participates in a consequential intertwining of artistry and heroism.



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Shortly after completing La France Croisée, Brooks began to paint Portrait de Gabriele D’Annunzio en guerrier (Portrait of Gabriele D’Annunzio as a Warrior). She pictured the poet in his aviator’s uniform, cape shrouding his shoulders, a look of resolve on his face. His sea-tossed hydroplane appears in the background. The portrait, undertaken in 1915 in Venice where Brooks leased a studio for several months to be near D’Annunzio, took two years to complete. D’Annunzio, the artist explained, “could only pose during the rare moments his military duties permitted.”18 Just as she was finishing the painting back in Paris in 1917, D’Annunzio wrote to her, “I won my third silver medal of military valor; you must now paint three blue ribbons on uniform.”19 The warrior portrait is a sequel to an earlier effort, Gabriele D’Annunzio, le Poéte en exil (Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Poet in Exile), started by Brooks in 1910, during a respite with the poet in Saint-Jean-deLuz on France’s Atlantic coast, near the Spanish border. D’Annunzio’s “exile” in France was self-imposed; he had fled Italy to escape creditors and disgruntled lovers. The aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, a mutual friend, introduced Brooks to D’Annunzio and a romantic friendship between the two artists flourished. Their alliance endured for the next thirty years, until D’Annunzio’s death in 1938. Brooks made sketches for the Poet in Exile during a visit to Saint-Jean-de-Luz and completed the painting in Paris in 1912. Foreshadowing the later painting of D’Annunzio as a warrior, the stylishly dressed aesthete, cape draped across his shoulders, stands with the crashing seas of the Atlantic at his back. Leaning slightly to the left, he appears to brace himself against the wind. The solitude of the backlighted figure, turbulent setting, and blue-grey palette relate this portrait of the poet to Brooks’s self-portrait, Au Bord de la mer, painted the same year. She may well have conceived the two paintings as pendants, although, in 1913, Brooks exhibited the Poet in Exile unaccompanied at the Prima exposizione internazionale d’arte delle secessione (First International Exhibition of the Secession) in Rome. 20 Still, the likeness between the two works is undeniable. Brooks, like D’Annunzio, sports a dark cape and leans into the coastal gale. The selfportrait Au Bord de la mer struck a chord with D’Annunzio and he responded with a eulogy to Brooks: “No fate will tame, by iron or flame / the secret diamond of your virgin heart. / Upright between the bleak sky and foaming waters, / you fear not the shock of the tenth wave.”21 The last line refers to the nautical axiom that waves grow larger in a series up to the tenth and largest wave, at which point the series begins again. D’Annunzio’s response to Brooks’s self-portrait evokes not only the



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Chapter One

artist’s heroic character but also the romantic sensibility she and the poet shared. In Milan, with D’Annunzio’s cooperation, the actress Georgette Le Blanc recited the paean to Brooks at La Scala. These events contributed to an international mise-en-scène, orchestrated by Brooks and D’Annunzio, linking the artistic vocation to heroism. The four images by Brooks described above—Gabriele D’Annunzio, le poéte en exil (1910-1912), Au Bord de la mer (1912), La France Croisée (1914), Portrait de Gabriele D’Annunzio en guerrier (1915-1917)—layer on one another to create heroic representational codes of artistic subjectivity that are interchangeably masculine and feminine. In 1920, Brooks earned a Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for her painting La France Croisée, and other charitable contributions to the war effort, to become a hero officially.22 She accepted this medal for her wartime activities, yet repeatedly claimed pacifist allegiances. In her memoirs, she made her point of view clear. The outbreak of World War I occurred while she was sojourning in Switzerland with Ida Rubinstein. Brooks describes her reaction to the declaration of war: “I remember being more indignant than anything else. How was it possible that presumptuous men failed again and again to avert these mass-suicides?” 23 She pronounced herself (despite her avowed admiration for the bellicose D’Annunzio) as “strongly against the war.”24 Yet she could not sit back and passively watch the invasion of her adopted homeland. “Upon my return to Paris, I took up painting with a new ardor, but of course this attitude proved impossible to keep up and soon along with everyone else I was doing all I could do to help.”25 Like many others in her circle, she contributed to the war effort in humanitarian ways. La France Croisée registers Brooks’s ambivalence about the war. If this woman in her Red Cross uniform could be viewed as sort of FrancoAmerican guerrière, she could also be seen as representing a neutral counter-model. After all, pacifists and conscientious objectors did serve in non-partisan humanitarian relief organizations during the 1914-1918 War. A group of Quakers, for instance, established Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) in 1914. Its 1,200 members were pacifists, mostly women who wanted to support the victims of war, but not the war itself.26 Like the Red Cross, the FAU was neutral. They cared for anyone who was wounded, regardless of nationality. They served in some of the most dangerous areas. For instance, when a French Red Cross unit withdrew from Dunkirk in the summer of 1915, they turned their ambulances and trucks over to the FAU, leaving the Quaker unit to cope with the high numbers of French wounded at Dunkirk.



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Barbara Burton, a Red Cross nurse and member of the FAU, recalled, “Every sort of bombardment—gas bombs and bombardment from the sea—came our way.” Occasionally, the pacifists also came under attack from those they served; some soldiers resented their anti-war politics. “One of our sisters (not liked too well) had her throat cut with a razor by a Frenchman,” Burton writes, “but her life was saved by our marvelous Principal Medical Officer. The French authorities presented her with the Croix de Guerre.”27 As Burton’s account suggests, the banner of the Red Cross could accommodate both heroism and pacifism. The Red Cross also brought together for the first time a veritable army of women. The connections these women formed on the battlefield, and the capabilities they demonstrated, transformed their lives and redefined their destinies as women. Similarly, on the war’s home fronts, a shortage of civilian men opened unprecedented professional opportunities for women and many refused to return to their pre-war domestic roles. During the war, France alone lost 1,300,000 men (out of a population of approximately 39,600,000 in 1914). Another 1,000,000 French soldiers were demobilized with crippling injuries. In the absence and diminishment of men, women performed traditionally masculine roles and occupied positions never before open to them. After the Armistice—with women infiltrating the labor force in new ways and demanding economic, sexual and political autonomy—France struggled to assume the burdens of war reparations and reconstruction. Amid postwar political and economic turmoil (no less than twenty cabinets formed and dissolved between 1918 and 1938), right-wing ideologues called for a “return to order.” Pro-natalist campaigns vilified “modern women” (women who failed or refused to procreate and/or assume traditional feminine roles). During the reconstruction period, anti-feminists and ultra-nationalists linked motherhood to both home and homeland security. They effectively promoted punitive social policies restricting women’s access to birth control and ability to sue for divorce. 28 Politicians on both the right and left opposed women’s right to vote. During the 1920s and 1930s, the so-called “woman question” served as a platform for larger ideological debates related to the navigation of rapidly changing social structures and relationships. 29 The nineteenth century’s rigid organization of gender within private (feminine) and public (masculine) spheres was visibly breaking down. Middleclass women no longer appeared in public exclusively as decorative accessories to men. Clad in new feminine fashions that included practical clothing—and sometimes clothing coded masculine—the “modern woman” came to personify the social, political, intellectual, and technological changes that



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Chapter One

shaped bourgeois life in Paris and other cultural capitals. Transgressive figures of modern femininity—sports champions, garçonnes, women drivers, women aiming cameras, women operating printing presses, office workers, aviators, explorers, and, yes, nurses and doctors—permeated European visual culture of the 1920s. And, after the war, Romaine Brooks contributed to the elaboration of this iconography. Although her earlier paintings almost all figure women, they differ from the post-war oeuvre both conceptually and aesthetically. Her pre-war society portraits, according to a Washington Post reporter, “shocked several continental society women who expected the conventional flattery in the portraits they commissioned the American artist to paint.”30 True, the artist’s coolly appraising regard did not pander to her wealthy sitters’ vanity. Yet these early portraits—which emphasize the luxurious feminine attributes of class (extravagantly plumed hats, embroidered mantles, and jet jewelry)—appear conventional, and indeed outdated, in comparison to the portraits Brooks produced after the Armistice. Significantly, the vast majority of the paintings Brooks produced during the 1900s and early teens pictured not named individuals but anonymous models. Their titles refer to the clothes—“the green bonnet,” “the red jacket,” “the flowered hat”—in which the models posed. 31 The painterly virtuosity Brooks demonstrates in these paintings harks back to past masters. (Her shades of black rival those of the Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez and her nuances in gray compare favorably to Whistler.) After 1914, in contrast, Brooks deploys new painterly techniques to celebrate (and even exaggerate) her sitters’ unique individuality. The portrait subjects are named Elsie de Wolfe (c. 1914-1915), Ida Rubinstein (1917), Miss Natalie Barney, “L’Amazonne” (1920), Renata Borgatti au piano (c. 1920), Una, Lady Troubridge (1924), Elisabeth de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre (c. 1924), Baroness Emile d’Erlanger (c. 1924), and Muriel Draper (1938). And these names constitute a register of influential cultural producers and arbiters. The portraits elaborate a bold new style, where the characterizing traits of the sitters are adroitly outlined. This treatment, so legible that it sometimes skirts caricature, reaches maturity in the wake of the 1920s. The Great War, to which Brooks responded with her heroic image La France Croisée, appears to have awakened in the artist a consciousness of female agency and power. During the post-war years of feminist struggle for equality and conservative backlash, Brooks devoted her career to projecting images of powerful women, visually opening new horizons of possibility. The artist kept the vast majority of the post-war portraits together in her personal collection. For decades, she and Natalie Barney lobbied, on both sides of



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the Atlantic, for the assimilation into a national collection, French or American, of what amounts to a pantheon devoted to modern women. Ultimately, the Smithsonian acquired the collection. There it remains today as a tribute to Brooks and her generation of women who dared to break social constraints and define new destinies.

Notes  1

Romaine Brooks, “No Pleasant Memories,” c. 1938, unpublished memoirs, 258; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (hereafter Archives of American Art). Regarding Brooks’s nudes, see Joe Lucchesi, “‘An Apparition in Black Flowing Cloak’: Romaine Brooks’s Portraits of Ida Rubinstein,” in Whitney Chadwick, Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks (Berkeley: University of California Press for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2000), 73-87. 2 The articles ratified by the Geneva Convention of 1864, and maintained by subsequent Geneva Conventions, include relief to the wounded without any distinction as to nationality, neutrality (inviolability) of medical personnel and medical establishments and units, the distinctive sign of the Red Cross on a white ground. 3 During the reign of Napoleon (1804-1814 and 1815), the head of state replaced Marianne’s image with his own. She was not rehabilitated until the Revolution of 1848. Her image appeared on France's first postage stamps in 1849, this time in serene classical profile, and her Phrygian bonnet replaced by a wreath. To celebrate the centenary of the Republic, La Marseillaise was declared the national anthem, July 14 the official state holiday, and Marianne was installed on a pedestal in the Place de la Republique in Paris. Over time, Marianne has appeared with different accessories—a republican pike, scales of justice, sheaves of wheat, and, often, Masonic symbols. Masons were among the first to embrace her as a secular symbol. Although not obliged by law, most city halls in France display busts of Marianne. 4 Between 1910 and 1914, the industrial production of postcards in France escalated from 100,000 to 800,000 a year to become the most popular form of postal communication. The military processed in excess of 15,000 postcards a day, as postcards offered a cost effective way to maintain the lines of communication. Military authorities distributed and mailed postcards free of charge. Both the army and the Red Cross produced postcards bearing images of soldiers in the care of nurses. 5 In America, the number of local Red Cross chapters jumped from 107 in 1914 to 3,864 in 1918 and membership grew during the war from 17,000 to over twenty million adult and eleven million junior Red Cross members. The public contributed $400 million in funds and material to support Red Cross programs. The Red Cross staffed hospitals and ambulance companies and recruited 20,000 registered nurses to serve military hospitals. In 1914, well before the US joined the military conflict,



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 the French Ambassador Myron T. Herrick created the American Relief Clearing House, which coordinated the actions of different relief organizations and liaised with the appropriate French ministries and charities, including the French Red Cross. 6 Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel (New York: Free Press, 1991), 97. 7 Dr. Louis Huot, “De quelques manifestations de l’évolution psycho-passionnelle féminine pendant la guerre,” Mercure de France 1918, quoted by Françoise Thébaud, Les Femmes au temps de la guerre de 14 (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2013), 253. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 8 Singer-Polignac had many affairs with women (including the pianist Renata Borgatti and British novelist Violet Trefusis). Her marriage, at the age of twentynine, to the gay, fifty-nine-year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer, was chaste. Her female lovers were also often married women. Her relationship with Romaine Brooks began and ended in 1905. Singer-Polignac was a patron of modern music and backed not only Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet but also Erik Satie, who wrote the score for Parade. She commissioned numerous works by up-and-coming composers, including Satie's Socrate, Igor Stravinsky's Renard, Darius Milhaud's Les Malheurs d'Orphée, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Organ Concerto, Jean Françaix's Le Diable boîteux and Sérénade pour douze instruments, Kurt Weill's Second Symphony, and Germaine Tailleferre's First Piano Concerto. She was also patron to Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Armande de Polignac, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, l'Opéra de Paris, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. 9 Anna Murray Vail, “A Home in the Ruins,” Monthly Report of the American Fund for French Wounded 2, nos. 21-22 (Sep.-Oct. 1917), 4. 10 Ibid. 11 Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 80. Natalie Barney’s mother, Alice Pike Barney, was president of her local branch of the Women’s Peace Party and her sister, Laura, was also a peace activist. 12 Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 29. 13 Françoise Werner, Romaine Brooks (Paris: Plon, 1990), 219. 14 M. de La Boulaye, Croix et cocarde (Paris: Plon, 1919), quoted in Françoise Thébaud, Les Femmes, 120. 15 Gabriele D'Annunzio earned laurels as a lyrical poet at the turn of the century. At the peak of his literary career, he volunteered for wartime service in Italy. As a fighter pilot, he quickly climbed the ranks to become a squadron commander. His bravado and dramatic feats won him a hero's reputation. 16 In addition to appearing in the deluxe edition published by Bernheim, the fourstanza poem appeared in the newspaper Le Figaro on March 5, 1915. 17 John Usher, “A True Painter of Personality,” International Studio 345, no. 83 (Feb. 1926): 47. 18 Brooks, quoted in Blandine Chavanne and Bruno Gaudichon, Romaine Brooks (Poitiers: Musée Saint-Croix, 1989), 141.



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19 D’Annunzio, letter to Brooks as quoted in Chavanne and Gaudichon, Romaine Brooks, 142. 20 In 1914, the D’Annunzio painting was purchased by the French state and entered the American painting collection at the Luxembourg Museum, receiving coverage in the American press. “Her Painting a Sensation,” Washington Post, April 14, 1914, Archives of American Art. 21 Gabriele D’Annunzio, “À Romaine Brooks sur son Portrait Peint par ellemême,” repr. in Adelyn D. Breeskin Romaine Brooks: Thief of Souls (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), 14. 22 In addition to her donation of proceeds from the deluxe publication pairing her painting La France Croisée with D’Annunzio’s poem, Brooks sold some of her objects d’art and donated the proceeds, 150,000 francs, to relief agencies, in the name of artists fallen at the front. 23 Brooks, “No Pleasant Memories,” 265. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 In France, the FAU staffed Red Cross ambulances, trains, hospital ships, and hospitals. 27 Barbara Burton as quoted in “Conscientious Objectors and the Red Cross in WWI,” British Red Cross, accessed July 4, 2014, http://blogs.redcross.org.uk/world-war-one/2014/05/conscientious-objectors-andthe-red-cross-in-wwi. 28 It is especially notable that in 1923 France, for instance, abortion was a capital crime punishable by decapitation at the guillotine. 29 On the subject of the “woman question” in the interwar period, see Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 30 A portion of the pre-war output portrays upper class and aristocratic sitters from Brooks’s immediate circle. The portraits Princesse Lucien Murat (c. 1910) and Madame Legrand aux champs de course (1912) are exemplary. This quotation is from “Her Painting a Sensation,” Washington Post, April 14, 1914, clipping, Research Material on Romaine Brooks, microfilm reel #5134, scrapbook, c. 19101935, Archives of American Art. 31 Specific examples include: Femme au bonnet noir (c. 1904), La Veste en soie verte (1907), Chapeau aux fleurs (c. 1907), La Jacquette rouge (1910), Femme au bonnet vert (c. 1912).



CHAPTER TWO A BRAVE NEW INDUSTRY: LIBERALISM AND DESIGN AT THE THINK AMERICAN INSTITUTE, 1939–43 JILL BUGAJSKI

Artists throughout the twentieth century have embraced silkscreen printing as a uniquely democratic medium for grassroots political action due to its potential for bold color and manual manipulation. From its beginnings in the 1930s as an experimental art practice adopted by the United States Works Progress Administration (WPA), to its mobilization in university art studios during the tumults of May 1968, to Shepard Fairey’s iconic Hope poster of Barack Obama for the 2008 United States presidential election, silkscreen printing has often served as a visual marker for resistance to the status quo. In particular, its hand-pulled aesthetics countered the corporatization of other strategies of graphic mass production, especially the industry of advertising and the medium of mechanical offset lithography. Offering a new dimension to the radical lineages often traced by print and poster histories, this essay explores a moment at the peak of silkscreen’s early popularity in the US—the late 1930s and early 1940s—in which corporate America sought to appropriate silkscreen’s progressive features to aid in reinventing its role in the national economy and refashioning its relationship to the laboring classes. As a result, and perhaps surprisingly, the most visually striking and complex silkscreen designs of the Second World War were not pioneered by artist-activists as the term is traditionally understood, but by a cohort of Rochester, New York industrialists, the Think American Institute (TAI). With the vision of artist Chester R. Miller and the leadership of William G. Bromley, president of the Kelly-Read and Company, Inc. personnel development firm, the TAI adapted the distinctive new medium for larger-output, machine-driven production, and wielded it to promote conservative, pro-business values. As such, the eye-catching posters of this

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agency complicate the image of silkscreen printing as a radical, oppositional practice. Perhaps for this reason, Miller’s designs for the TAI have never been recognized for either their technical inventiveness or for how they co-opt activist vocabularies to stage a new type of what theorist Jacques Ellul in 1968 called “integration” propaganda—images Miller and TAI believed were essential to preserve social order, boost American morale, and help win the war.1 How do we conduct an art history of capitalist invention that considers different modalities of persuasion and resistance? Do conventional categories of power and dissent remain stable in a country mass mobilized for war? Miller’s innovative designs articulated some of the biggest fears of the moment, particularly the loss of American autonomy and economic failure. In the process, he challenged other wartime models of artistic nationalism, and complicated the question of who can be an activist, what they should strive for and how. In examining the posters of this prolific but understudied agency, I argue that the Think American designs represent a fleeting moment of experimentation in super-structural graphics that precedes the interpolation of market ideology into advertising and material goods characteristic of the globalized world during and after the Cold War.

Labor Unrest and the Founding of the Think American Institute Launched in 1939, the Think American Institute poster series was poised to respond to both local and global issues. According to a September 1941 letter to The Rotarian magazine written by Bromley, the poster initiative was established that August as a form of “employee education.” Bromley reported: “a group of Rochester industrialists came to us with a very serious problem. They were concerned about the mental sabotage of their workers by the infiltration of subversive propaganda from outside of their plants. This, they recognized, would mean serious trouble later on if it were not soon combated.”2 Posters dating from the first two years of operation are rare compared to those produced during the peak of the war, as early edition sizes were small, yet even these display Miller’s distinctive graphic style and reveal the mission of the agency, which the Rochester Daily Record reported as follows: “Think American Institute Inc.—To cherish, maintain, and extend the institutions of American freedom.” Poster number 88, for example, dates from the same period as Bromley’s letter in 1941. It depicts a ledger book of the United States on which is written an inventory of American assets: faith, loyalty, vision, determination, education, raw materials, machinery and unity. The

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caption reads: “Inventory–1941: We have more resources than any other people—and the freedom to enjoy them.” Conflating honorable personal values with those of industry, such a list promotes attitudes and behaviors conducive to maintaining the social order required to propel manufacturing: noble workers and a beneficent industry collaborate to maximize America’s status, resources and strength. The “freedom” evoked in the agency’s mission statement, and in this poster, however, had particular qualifications. It is important to note that, as of the date of Bromley’s letter to The Rotarian and the above-mentioned poster design, September 1941, the United States was not yet at war. Instead, the agency found footing during the tumultuous and factional months preceding the bombing of the Hawaiian air force base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As such, the poster series straddled two distinct ideological goals: to promote obedience and integration at the level of local labor, and secondly, to construct a national identity for American values relative to global politics. The stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression cast a pall of economic suffering over most of the 1930s. Yet it was a second market downturn in 1937, coupled with malaise and disappointment over the shortcomings of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, that brought the frailty of the economy strongly back into focus at the end of the decade. For labor activists, the end of the 1930s saw an upsurge of violence. For one, the Little Steel Strike hit thirty mills in the mid-west US culminating in a suppression now known as the Memorial Day Massacre. Thousands of workers walked off the job. A violent crackdown at Republic Steel in Chicago led to ten deaths and dozens of injuries—one disastrous conflict among many in the 1930s. Bromley’s word choice in describing the TAI’s mission, namely to combat “mental sabotage” and “infiltration of subversive propaganda” therefore reflects capitalist anxieties of the late 1930s: fear of the latent organizing power of labor, yielding an uncooperative work force, or at worst, rebellion, strikes, and uprisings. Against the background of this second-wave recession, a young congressman Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas, called for a special committee to investigate un-American propaganda and its dissemination, a taskforce then known as the Dies Committee, and later, in 1945, as the House Special Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC). Particularly during the Dies investigations of the late 1930s, being probusiness and pro-industry was coded as taking an anti-communist stance and “employee education” was a euphemism for rooting out, suppressing, or averting internal subversion by leftist activists.3 Moreover, what was

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interpreted as un-American was often conflated with what was simply “foreign.” This word was used both literally and figuratively to connote revolutionary or reactionary political ideologies inspired by movements primarily in Europe, but it is also a word that directly pointed to communities perceived as most vulnerable to, or carriers of, these ideas from abroad—first or second generation immigrants—who made up a significant portion of the US labor force. TAI took up the challenge of “Americanizing” these populations by instructing on what kinds of behaviors and attitudes to embrace or disavow: “Foxy foreign ideas,” one poster reads, “brought poverty, suffering and defeat to Europe. Let’s stick—faithfully—to our Americanism over here” (emphasis in original).4 Beyond breaking strikes, industry leaders had diverse tactics for mollifying or suppressing dissent in the working classes. At the automobile tycoon Henry Ford’s English School, graduation ceremonies featured spectacles of belonging and integration. Processions of immigrant students in ethnic garb, signing national songs and performing folk dances of their nations of origin would descend upon, and climb into, an enormous papier-mâché “melting pot.” In the “pot,” participants would change into American-style suits, ties and hats and emerge, waving tiny American flags, from the other side of the cauldron.5 These performances publicly celebrated and thus sealed the process of ideological conversion through embodied action and community sanction. Such performances of integration implicitly countered other forms of collective action, such as strikes or sit-ins—embodied actions of dissent. Where not as participatory as these spectacles, the graphics of TAI frame very similar concepts. As Ellul proposed, integration propaganda is not merely about securing desirable actions, but about establishing ideologies that become permanent, invisible and unconscious—naturalized and self-perpetuating. It is most effective when the vehicle uses existing social myths or entrenched stereotypes to mold new desirable values.6 The term “freedom,” for example, is a crucial watchword in this system for TAI, and it remains so today in the United States—a word often manipulated to serve special interests. For example, the institutions of freedom that TAI’s mission statement decreed to cherish, maintain and extend were not the same as the individualist principles later forwarded by Roosevelt in his January 6, 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address: “freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear.” Instead, TAI worked to strategically transform the rhetoric of freedom, reshaping it around institutions that signified the infrastructure of business and industry that secured economic prosperity for the nation, promoting employee obedience as a path to secure national values. Using other

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mythic terms with strong positive valences, like “faith” and “unity,” TAI worked to re-frame the image of “free” industry and private enterprise as cornerstones of American ideology.

Reshaping Americanism for a World at War TAI claimed use of its name and business identity from August 22, 1939, a portentous inaugural date.7 Gallup poll figures published in the Boston Globe on August 20 reveal that, as of that date, seventy-six percent of the Americans surveyed believed that the United States would soon be drawn into the budding European war—a figure nearly doubled from poll results the previous year.8 Amid reports of Nazi troops amassing along Polish borders, the news erupted on August 21 that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a substantial trade and credit pact for raw materials to fuel the Nazi war machine, undermining months of negotiations between France, Britain and the Soviets. Internationally, anxiety mounted through the following day, August 22, when it was announced that Germany and the USSR would indeed sign a nonaggression accord, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named for the two emissaries who brokered it on behalf of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, respectively—a “bombshell” according to the Los Angeles Times, inducing “anger and stupefaction” across the democracies.9 Resting between these now-allied nations, the military division of Poland seemed inevitable, and foreigners hurried to evacuate. Britain and France committed to come to the aid of Poland, which led them to formally declare war on Germany on September 3. In retrospect, the day TAI marked as its founding, August 22, was the same day it became apparent to the world that the war so many feared was imminent. This emphasis on freedom of industry and “free enterprise” in the TAI series masked an anxiety over the potential nationalization of businesses should the nation enter the looming war, which it did on December 8, 1941 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. During World War I, President Wilson established the National War Labor Board (NWLB) to serve as the “Supreme Court” of labor relations—an official mediator between industry and workers during the period of national emergency.10 Under its aegis, Wilson seized the railroad industry, telegraph lines (Western Union), and the Smith and Wesson Company (an arms manufacturer) after the NWLB cited these companies for unfair labor practices. For the most part, these industries returned to business as usual following the war. However, in the 1930s, Roosevelt’s left-leaning New Deal initiatives brought strong new dimensions to nationalized services

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and protections for the labor force. A war in the 1940s would mean opportunities for industrial growth and hyper-production, but also more government intrusion into industry than previously attempted by the New Deal recovery programs.11 The challenge for business leaders would be to carefully cultivate the former while fending off the latter. With the founding of numerous government war agencies in January 1942, Roosevelt reestablished the NWLB. One of the “freedoms” for which the TAI would advocate, therefore, was the autonomy of business from government intervention. In these years in which some conservatives likened New Dealers to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin—icons of the left, particularly the International Communist Party—the organized protection of the interests of industry against both labor uprisings (from below) and government regulation (from above) became a key concern for the industrialists who approached Kelly-Read in 1939.12 One of the ways the poster series promoted the concept of freedom of industry was to correlate it with the personal freedom of the workers. If employees came to see freedom of enterprise as an extension of personal freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution—as extensions of themselves, essentially—laborers would perhaps be more committed to protecting the interests of their employers. There are a number of posters that carry a message similar to Free Workers, Free Industry, number 164 (c. 1942) by Miller (fig. 2-1). The design consists of two side-by-side image frames, balanced stylistically and chromatically unified. On the left, the heading declares “Free Workers” and depicts an image of a man, a machinist, dressed in a work shirt, cap, overalls and protective glasses. His hand grasps a knob on a vertical milling machine. Behind him, in a shadow outlined against the yellow sunlight of a large window, we see a woman machinist as well, who operates a similar machine. This is one of the few industrial scenes of the series to show a female laborer, although the suggestion of her shoulder-length hair and curve of her bust are merely discernable. The man’s machine in the foreground provides a strong vertical dividing line between the interior space of the laborers and the broader view of the city depicted in the right-hand panel bearing the title “Free Industry.” Against a saturated lemon-yellow sky, three realms of industry are depicted: architecture, notably tall, modern skyscrapers; a factory replete with smokestacks belching smoke to signify intense production, and in the foreground a speeding, coal-burning locomotive churning up a cloud of dust from its wheels and a billow of smoke from its chimney. The bright yellow background unifies both spaces, and the orange of the male laborer’s shirt and flesh matches the orange of the factory at right. This vivid orange is meant to contrast with the bright blue

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ground on which the text is written. The juxtaposition of these complementary colors draws attention to the message and the central images, leading the viewer’s eye to the key elements of the composition. In effect, it is a split-screen of one enormous metropolis-as-machine, documented from the inside and out, from the individual to the conglomerate. At the bottom it reads, with emphasis: “United—we’ll win!” (emphasis in original). The war thus presented an opportunity to reorient the relationship between industry and labor that had been in conflict for most of the 1930s, particularly, to mobilize patriotism as an antidote to worker dissent. The conflation of “free workers” and “free industry,” however, established unsettling groundwork for “corporate personhood” litigation, still controversial today, that extends the rights of individuals to the corporate apparatus that collectivizes them. Harnessing this nationalistic language for industry likewise meant disempowering labor unions who, with the onset of war, found themselves in an untenable position: work stoppages, strikes, or collective bargaining to benefit laborers would heretofore be cast as unpatriotic sabotage that imperiled the production of resources needed to fight the war. The unions were effectively silenced, and with this, a new and unopposed corporate identity began to take shape. A second way the TAI series sought to repair the bonds of trust between labor and industry and to soothe worker dissatisfaction was to draw attention to new enemies and new victims that paralleled the American industry-worker relationship abroad. In poster 147 (1942–43), Dictatorship, designed by Miller, a bestial hand violently slashes at a paycheck with a bloody knife (fig. 2-2). The text notes that US wages have climbed thirty-four percent in recent years where in the countries ruled by “Axis Dictators” salaries have dropped twenty-five percent. The dripping blood on the blade reminds workers that their paychecks are, quite literally, their livelihood. A vivid composition, Security, poster 205 (1943) by Miller, depicts a hairy hand with swastikas printed on the shirt cuff transferring a slice of grotesquely moldy bread to the hand of a chained prisoner. The green of the moldy bread stands in bright contrast with the saturated firecracker red of the background, making for an eye-catching, balanced composition with a disconcerting message. The text explains that this meager “security” is all that unfortunate Europeans currently enjoy, “—but the best kind of security is still the kind we make for ourselves by plain hard work.” Other ominous images are straightforwardly captioned “We’re fighting to prevent this!” Miller’s poster 145 (1942–43) depicts a scowling Nazi guard looming over a bedraggled, work-worn laborer dressed in tattered

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rags. Another, number 186 (1943), shows a hand grasping a crumpled, burning bunch of paper. A military-style sleeve with swastikas imprinted on the cuff and ring identifies the perpetrator, and the text printed on the burning papers identifies them as the “Bill of Rights,” “American Constitution” and perhaps most significantly, “Labor and Business Freedom.” The message of these unsettling compositions, however, is not to mobilize American labor to help rescue the persecuted populations of Europe. On the contrary, the message directs workers to be grateful for what they have, and work harder, because others have it worse. The threatening, Orwellian tone communicates that bread, clothes, a paycheck, and personal rights are extensions of a beneficent private industry warding off a rapacious totalitarian state. This is not the propaganda of mobilization, but rather the propaganda of obedience, allegiance, and submission, aimed to acclimate workers to a new corporate order under the guise of national emergency.

The Color Wars: Artists versus Industry The method by which the Think American posters were printed bolstered their attractiveness and appeal, yet despite this the series has been largely overlooked in the art historical literature of the period for three reasons: its commercial origins, harnessing of machine-driven reproduction and embrace of conservative ideology. In art scholarship, the history of using silkscreen for poster design and for experimental fine art printmaking has largely been told through the lens of the WPA adoption of the process and the (mostly New York City-based) artists who advocated for it in the mid- to late-1930s, particularly Anthony Velonis, and in California, the early innovator Guy Maccoy.13 Less frequently acknowledged is the fact that the medium was first adopted and technically pioneered by printers in commercial industries a decade or two earlier. As Guido Lengwiler has documented thoroughly, beginning around World War I, commercial sign designers, the textile industry, advertisers and package designers began developing more efficient and consistent forms of screenbased printing.14 However, those who advocated for the fine art applicability of the process in the 1930s and 1940s, including the curator and print dealer Carl Zigrosser, critic Elizabeth McCausland, and artists who wrote about the process such as Velonis, Lynd Ward, and Harry Sternberg, tended to downplay or ignore innovations in the commercial realm.15 These artists were intent on shaping a new group identity linked to technical and formal path-breaking, promoting emphatically manual and experimental projects invented by fine artists. In order to situate this

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experimentation strictly within the canon of artistic tradition and on a continuum with the historical graphic arts it was important for these early promoters to distance their practice from those of ignominious commercial cousins. In fact, many of these artists did not want their experiments associated at all with mass culture-intonated “reproduction.” The medium’s potential for brilliant, saturated color fields led artists into an argument over whether to frame silkscreen as more in line with painterly traditions than with the graphic arts. Artist Rockwell Kent at one point proposed that artists should use the phrase “silk screen paintings” to promote the process, in contrast to Zigrosser who attempted to introduce the term “serigraphy”—evocative of “lithography”—into the artistic lexicon.16 The problem with positioning silkscreen as a variant of painting was that the medium was already being used commercially to reproduce paintings. Ultimately, such an association was unpalatable to artists and contaminated the aura of originality they promoted. In the end, aligning silkscreen with the legacy of the “multiple original” artists’ prints of the etching revival, adding a “fourth [the screen] to the three traditional graphic arts [intaglio, planographic and relief]” in the words of Ward, won out.17 With the onset of the war, however, a new contradiction arose. The need for the mass-production of images and the strong desire for artists to participate in the war’s visual culture economy came into conflict with the artists’ hard-won efforts to frame silkscreen as an entirely manual process propagated by the hand of the artist. Harry Sternberg, in an impassioned plea for a national artist-led campaign to produce war posters using silkscreen, suggested not that artists could make use of the mechanized innovations of the commercial industry to mass-produce silkscreen designs, but instead, that all posters could be hand-screened in a massive mobilization of human labor on the model of Soviet hand-stenciled war posters.18 Sternberg wrote, “five hundred prints of a three-color poster could be printed by two people in three days for as little as two cents each”—a cost estimate of ten dollars that, tellingly, must not include an hourly wage for the laborers. A similar structure, to a more limited extent, was employed at the Works Progress Administration’s poster shops. Essentially Sternberg was proposing an extension of the recently cancelled WPA programs, repurposing them for a nation at war. However, Sternberg was fighting a losing battle against the bureaucratic apparatus of the US government and the speed of the offset lithographic presses they employed. In the end, the idea of government supported, artist-led brigades hand-screening posters for national defense never took root. Instead, the corporate-backed TAI produced the most significant series of

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wartime silkscreen posters. The TAI silkscreens were also the most impressive in scale, each at twenty-eight by twenty inches. Because the Think American Institute posters were sponsored by private industry and embraced machine-driven mass production, the series, though prolific, was an anomaly that contradicted the fine arts origin story of the silkscreen medium artists and critics promoted in the 1930s. Thus Miller’s designs have largely fallen between the cracks. Yet the series was also an anomaly for an ideological reason: it did not fit within the grassroots leftist vein of activism for which artists of this era often mobilized the medium. Sternberg’s reference to the Soviet Union is a clue to how many of these artists were positioned on the political spectrum. Artist Harry Gottlieb’s eye-catching and often reproduced 1937 silkscreen design The Strike is Won! is the kind of print now singled out by design historians like Steven Heller as iconic for its moment (fig. 2-3).19 Yet in composition and content this print depicts the relationship between labor and industry in a manner quite converse to Miller’s Free Workers, Free Industry earlier discussed. In Gottlieb’s vivid print, the factory is monotone, minimized and relegated to the far background, separated from the space of the workers by a firmly delineated red brick wall. In the foreground, Gottlieb highlights the faces of the workers with brilliant illumination, where Miller left the face of his laborer in shadow (and the female figure is herself a shadow). In Gottlieb’s print, the eight workers form a united mass, linked through proximity and touch. They gaze up and out of the frame, presumably toward a labor leader on a dais who announces the phrase captured in this print’s title: “The strike is won!” The faces of the workers, in telegraphic but evocative stylization, register individual emotions: satisfaction, jubilation, and relief. The several clenched fists in the composition cite a recognizable gesture of Communist solidarity. The theme is the successful outcome of collective labor activism, racial accord, and union efficiency. In many ways, Free Workers, Free Industry is a counter-image to Gottlieb’s 1937 The Strike is Won! In the larger context, Miller’s later print marks both the disempowerment of artist-activists and of organized labor during the peak years of the war, and more broadly signals to the shift in ownership of the means of visual production in the 1940s.

Designing Conformity The firm Kelly-Read and Company was not attracted to silkscreen for the same reason as artist-innovators like Velonis, Gottlieb, and Sternberg, and their colleagues in the WPA Silkscreen Unit and the independent

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“Silkscreen Group” of artists in the 1940s. In truth, it appears that the commercial firms were far ahead of the artists in terms of technical innovation, but they had very different priorities. Silkscreen appealed to fine artists because of its potential for saturated color and the fact that prints could be hand-designed and hand-pulled to secure total artistic control. This was a crucial point in artists’ promotion of the medium in the period in which the TAI series was conceived; silkscreen was celebrated as counter-mechanical in many respects. In contrast, the executives at Kelly-Read likely chose silkscreen for its lush visuality only and not for the manual artistic control offered by its analog variants (screen, squeegee, and paint). Hand-screening each individual poster hardly would be cost effective, considering the time and manpower required, if technology provided a feasible alternative. Yet, even with the invention of machines to speed the printing process, mechanized printing for silkscreen was still in its infancy and primarily presented the difficulty of inks sticking or pooling or paper bowing, as well as extended drying times. Kelly-Read, it appears, had found a means to resolve these problems. Perhaps weighing one method against another in a measure of efficacy and efficiency, the series experimented with two different forms of design and printing. The first was photographic and photomechanical. Designs on this model featured an offset-reproduced photograph in the top quadrant, and a line of text on a colored background, often silkscreened, in the bottom quadrant. The images were vertical and black and white with a documentary aesthetic, though a few had the look of hand-applied color on a black and white photographic print, an “old fashioned” look reminiscent of family albums and thus evocative of traditional values. Unlike the silkscreen prints, the photographic designs were not credited to a particular artist and design-wise the posters printed on this model were rather conventional and aesthetically mediocre. The second stylistic variant of the series, however, was illustrative and silkscreened entirely in bold colors, as shown in Free Workers, Free Industry and others of Miller’s aforementioned designs. The relative advantages and disadvantages presented by the two different media—aesthetically, technologically, and logistically—would have been a trade-off for Kelly-Read and their choices offer insight into the goals and method of the series. Foremost, graphics of persuasion needed to be seductive. The silkscreen posters appealed first to the eye, and second to the emotions. In combination with clever designs and striking typography, the saturated colors and heavier weight of pigment application inherent to the process certainly contributed to the impact value of the series. Secondly, with the goal of motivating workers, the

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posters needed to be immediately legible and widely appealing. Where photography provided a certain identification value critical to emotional conditioning, it lacked the visual appeal that might draw a spectator in for repeat viewing, further imprinting its message. Chester Raymond Miller was not the only designer to contribute to the Think American series, but he was most prolific and produced the most alluring images. Born circa 1898-99 and a native of Oneonta, New York, little is known about Miller personally or professionally, outside of his work as Art Director for Kelly-Read. During the war, he signed his designs C.R. Miller, and after the war as “Chet” Miller. He was largely self-trained, and did not participate in either the fine art communities of New York City or the ideological discourses around medium selection at this fraught moment in history. He was neither an “ad-man” nor a selfpromoter, and he did not appear to have a stake in the legacy of this prolific series of designs. Kelly-Read was lucky to have him, however, because of his skill in crafting eye-catching compositions. Miller excelled in designing for the idiosyncratic properties of silkscreen. His drawing is evocative of early comics with dark outlines, motion lines, and blocky, scalloped shading techniques. Though thin, the inks sit on the surface of the paper, yielding a sense of dimension and mimicking a painterly aesthetic. High-contrast color selections maximized the visual impact of the tactile, surface-sitting inks. Making use of color layering and juxtaposing strong warm and cool tones like orange and blue or red and green, many of Miller’s posters appear illuminated from within. In closeup details of faces or hands, in particular, he renders the modulation of flesh tones using up to six colors. His output makes him one of the most prolific, and most surprisingly unrecognized, poster designers of the 1940s. The motivational tone, plucky typography, and bright, graphic quality of Miller’s designs are indebted to earlier models, particularly the British firm Parker-Holladay’s series featuring the archetypal working man “Bill Jones” (also published in Chicago and Canada) and the Chicago-based Mather and Company motivational series designed by Robert Beebe, Willard Frederic Elmes, Hal Depuy, and others, all from the 1920s. These vivid lithographic prints targeted a male, middle-class, white-collar audience, urging thrift, diligence, punctuality, reliability, and other traits conducive to success on the job and ethical living. Bold, primary colors, flat designs, and eye-catching type brought attention to maxims of sales and profits and provided guidance on how to achieve success as a selfmade man. Miller’s designs were certainly inspired by the compositional balance, shallow visual field, and witty, telegraphic punch of these earlier

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models. However, in the 1920s designs, the worker’s compliance with the motivational message of the poster was driven only by the looming threat of personal failure. With the Think American designs of the later period, the stakes were considerably higher: national ruin, widespread economic collapse, slavery to dictatorship, or death, particularly for the fighting troops abroad, as well as the constant threat to a multitude of ambiguous freedoms. The audience also shifted, though still implicitly male, from the white-collar businessman to the factory laborer. An additional feature the TAI adopted from the earlier motivational poster models is their serialized form, which itself was inspired by pop culture visual precedents like newspaper comics or film shorts with popular appeal. As historian David A. Gray has argued with respect to earlier motivational graphics, the serialized textual and verbal inculcation of workplace posters attempted to prompt a system of self-discipline similar to what the philosopher Michel Foucault called “technologies of the self”—practices of auto-disciplinary self-fashioning that govern an individual’s identity, behaviors and choices within the systems of power in which one lives.20 As a bridge between labor culture of the 1930s to the wartime 1940s, the TAI series worked to reconstruct working class identities from the inside out. In his 1941 letter to The Rotarian, Bromley conveyed that TAI designs were distributed to 5,000 of the largest industrial, business, financial and educational organizations in nearly every state. Images were produced weekly, each with the goal of promoting “vividly and intelligently a virtue or an advantage of the American way of life.” The posters were meant to be displayed in factories or offices at points of heavy employee traffic: “In these days when we are doing everything in our power to speed material preparedness and to prevent material sabotage, the need for mental preparedness and the prevention of mental sabotage cannot be overlooked. THINKAMERICAN is helping to do both of those jobs. Its messages are now reaching 7 million people weekly throughout the nation.”21 Sometimes, the posters were distributed with editorials affixed on a separate sheet of paper and expanding on the main idea in the image. These persuasive supplementary texts could be “retyped on company letterhead… or reproduced in your company house organ.” In all, Think American produced more than 1,000 designs and operated through 1960 or 1961, with Miller at the helm, it appears, for the entire run. By 1954, the Rochester Review noted that Kelly-Read managed personnel development for 7,500 companies in the United States and Canada. TAI issued about 300 or more unique designs during the war, and perhaps 1,100 in total. If we take Bromley’s figures at face value, this is a

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total of perhaps 5,000,000 prints or more over the duration of the series— an enormous marketing campaign that, we can deduce, helped to reshape worker ideologies for a new corporate era.

Mobilizing for Victory For the first three years of production (1939-42), the TAI posters were numbered but undated. In 1943, beginning approximately with poster 170, the agency began adding dates to the credit line, and 1943 and 1944 were prolific years of poster production for the Think American Institute. It is these years that are most abundantly represented in graphic art collections and on the secondary market today. This comes as no surprise; by 1943 graphic production for the war effort had kicked into high gear across the nation, from private agencies to government branches, to poster design competitions sponsored by museums. Though edition sizes are not noted on the posters themselves, if we take Bromley’s 1941 assertion that posters were distributed to 5,000 organizations across the nation, this provides a starting number that likely doubled or more by the peak of the war. These numbers, however, are still relatively small by the standards of mass production. Edition sizes of the most prolifically printed offset lithographic posters during the war could reach 100,000 prints. In comparison, the TAI series was still relatively boutique, though the prints were geared towards a focused segment of the American population: workers in industry, business, finance and education. What they lacked in numbers, the TAI series made up for in a specifically targeted audience and lush eye-catching designs. Poster design in the 1940s in the United States was exceptionally pluralistic. Even though government programs run by the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF) and later the Office of War Administration (OWI) during the war attempted to centralize one message for the American public, essentially any private company or organization with a designer and access to a printing press could create whatever images they wanted. Further, there were definite advantages to privatizing production. Smaller firms with in-house operations could enjoy shorter approval and printing timeframes, thus quicker turn-around, and an increased amount of control over the content. During the war, artists often complained about the bloated approval processes necessary to get designs printed and distributed through the government agencies.22 This, and other pitfalls, plagued the more “democratic” process of soliciting designs from artists out-of-house and the general public, or holding poster competitions. Instead, many private companies chose to design and print war posters in-house. Firms

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like General Motors, with their “Keep ‘em Trucking” campaign, or the Stetson Hat Company “Keep it Under Your Stetson” crafted memorable slogans and a cohesive design aesthetic notable today. Perhaps most famous from a design standpoint, the Container Corporation of America adopted one of the more modernist approaches of private industry, and hired Europe-trained innovators who had fled Nazi persecution in their home countries. What the multitude of wartime posters had in common, however, was the fact that a great majority of them were mass printed using offset lithography. Because of the urgency of the moment and the desire to reach a large audience, papers and inks were often of a lesser quality, durability was compromised, and designs were often hurried without proper vetting. With some now famous exceptions, the visual language tended towards the mediocre and the imagination banal. Against this background, Miller’s designs for TAI stand out all the more. A graphically-restrained TAI design of 1943 has the telegraphic simplicity of the now-iconic 1939 British Ministry of Information “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster—a design, as it has been proven, that enjoyed much less exposure in the 1940s than it did following its archival rediscovery in the year 2000. Considering the fact that “Keep Calm and Carry On” was not distributed after it was printed, the likelihood that American designers would have seen the print between 1939-43 is implausible if not impossible. Still, the TAI version employs a similar, solid rocket-red background with sans-serif text silkscreened in white capital letters down the center of the poster. To emphasize the strong vertical stacking of the text, a Nazi sword is printed in the background with glittering silver paint. The text reads: “The Nazis conquered Poland in 37,440 minutes… Minutes count. Keep on the job” (emphasis in original). Striking metallic paints appear in other posters, as well, such as number 206 American Democracy, Private Enterprise of 1943, or number 166 Armistice Day of 1942, in which the entire background of the posters are screened in luminous silver. As an industrial center, there were certainly resources in Rochester, NY that a firm like Kelly-Read could have tapped in the development of a graphic arts program. Printers like Schaefer-Ross (founded in 1915) had a license for the Selectasine silkscreen process and had developed a strong reputation in the printing industry by the 1920s.23 Selectasine had pioneered a way to use a single stencil screen that could be blocked for multiple colors, greatly streamlining the process of multi-color printing.24 The TAI series was likely printed on a motorized automatic silkscreening press similar to the one patented by Rochester inventor Louis Bland in 1931, or a later adaptation.25 Other firms, including government offices,

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printed silkscreen posters during the war but none among them could match the design complexity, color range and prolific print quantity of the Think American Institute. This was as much due to the technology that enabled more expedient multi-color printing as it was to Miller’s imagination and perspicacity.

Imagining Postwar Prosperity The series added a new dimension to its message beginning in the late war period: a vision of the prosperity of postwar reconstruction, particularly consumer and industrial utopias. Essential to its industrialist backers, the TAI turned its ideological conditioning towards messages of how to sustain the intensified wartime work ethic in order to repurpose industry for the rebuilding of the postwar economy. In this way, the series is fairly unique among wartime graphics, in that its future-focused message reached beyond the winning of the war itself, and into how industry and workers would transform their time and output to suit a new economic sphere following victory. Part of this required the manufacturing of new consumer desires, long dormant due to the depression and the thrift of wartime rationing. These types of images also show that the piquing of consumerist desires in American audiences started well before victory. In the case of TAI, they began as early as the end of 1942. Number 159 Future U.S. Progress… designed by Miller near the end of 1942 depicts a luminous and bustling city of the future, featuring pale skyscrapers that appear to be themselves cast out of new industrial materials (fig. 2-4). These streamlined buildings allude to the 1933 “White City” at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, or more current to memory, the 1939 World’s Fair—the “World of Tomorrow”—with the techno-futuristic urban utopias of the Trylon and Perisphere, and the General Motors pavilion Futurama designed by Norman Bel Geddes and Albert Kahn. Evoking these visions reminded viewers that, at a point in the recent past, hope for the future once centered on wonders of technology and invention and not merely the defeat of dictators. Much like Futurama, a central element in this elegant landscape is a highway and its exit-ramp, showcasing a colorful abundance of modish, sleek automobiles. Miller’s clever color contrasts animate this vision, with the cool blues, greys and whites of the city landscape, evocative of serenity and order, in sharp relief to the saturated crimson sky—an energetic hue that Miller cleverly repeats only in the red of the tiny American flag at center and in several of the cars on the highway, drawing the eye down through the composition.

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Several more posters focus exclusively on the new consumer luxuries that the postwar industry would bring to domestic life. Number 207 (1943) designed by Miller, America Leads in Inventions, shows the Earth emblazoned with a glowing outline of the United States and orbited by a ring of American inventions: a chemical beaker, toaster, refrigerator, washing machine, automobile, vacuum cleaner, iron and stove. The text sounds an anxious warning: “over here men can profit from their efforts. Remove profit and you destroy progress.” Even more futuristic, Miller’s Under Private Enterprise… number 196 (1943) uses an unorthodox color combination of salmon pink, pale blue and white to illustrate very modern looking innovations: a sleek bullet train, dramatically streamlined car, elaborate television console, refrigerator, telephone, helicopter and a Le Corbusier-inspired modernist dwelling. Significantly, Miller skipped the dark outlining and heavy use of black in many of his images of future prosperity. The caption promises, “we Americans have enjoyed—and will enjoy again—after victory—more conveniences than any other people on earth.” Poster 204 Privately Owned and Operated Business… and poster 210 Our Private Enterprise System both emphasize that a diversity of jobs in the postwar world will be provided by the private sector, rather than government-supported sources. There is a sense of urgency to these claims, and, as expressed by America Leads in Inventions, an undercurrent of anxiety at what kinds of political and economic shifts the postwar era would bring. Both work together, as the consumer innovations act as a kind of carrot to conceptually draw workers away from bigger socialist-inflected visions for reconstruction, distracting them with the lure of shiny personal luxuries. Supplanting the wartime rhetoric of selflessness and subservience, these posters stoke spectators’ acquisitive desires. Yet the mixed emotion inherent in the messages refracts the dual jubilation and trepidation of their year of production. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad, and then at Kursk, in 1943 seemed to solidify a crucial turning point in the war, paving the way for the Allied retaking of Europe. The euphoria of the Soviet-American alliance was at its peak, and yet this display of power and renewed confidence also kindled fears of what kinds of demands the USSR would forward as an equal partner in victory. The need to conjure a particularly American vision of postwar utopia was thus a response not only to the material deprivation of the 1930s and 1940s, but also a counter-vision to the values of the socialist utopia that was proving to be undefeatable. The urgency of designing solutions for the complex struggles of the 1940s opened great opportunities for graphic inventiveness and experimentation that seemed to diminish with the stability of the 1950s.

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Miller continued to design for Think American following the end of the war, although his style changed significantly: less complex or chromatically diverse compositions, more simple messages with modernist graphic vocabulary and inventive typography reflective of 1950s trends in advertising design. These images were produced in smaller edition sizes and are not as memorable as those Miller produced in the peak years of the war. He seemed to be in search of new ways to articulate workplace obstacles and solutions for this new era. The challenges Miller faced were not unique. As the war came to a close, the tremendous artistic energy expended by artists and designers in the many different economies of visual culture in the 1940s, like the products of industry itself, needed to be redirected. Adding to this, the final cancellation of WPA art programs in 1943 meant hundreds were left without economic support. Private enterprise, as it turns out, with its budding culture of advertising, brought a new ideology of selling— products, dreams, emotions, identities—to what we might have previously, in more straightforward terms, understood as propaganda. The Think American series documents an arc of evolution in the self-identity of the American industrial bourgeoisie, its goals and fears translated into conduct and priorities. Most significantly, the TAI series is a visual record of industry’s conflicted relationship to labor between the prewar, wartime and postwar periods. As such, a study of the modalities of TAI and Miller’s choices begin to fill a significant lacuna in the history of visual culture of the period. Moreover, the TAI graphics provide an alternative history to the narrative of the first generation of American silkscreen as it is conventionally understood, and contribute new insight into its historical affiliation with leftist activism. Activism usually signifies a struggle to find agency within or against a dominant power. Yet when that dominant power speaks back, the images can be revelatory of the dreams and fears of a generation.

Notes 1

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Knopf, 1968), 74–76. 2 William G. Bromley, “Posters Aid Defense,” The Rotarian 59, no. 3 (September 1941): 4. 3 Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, H. R. 282, Before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, 75th Cong. 3 (1938) (statements of Hon. Martin Dies [chairman], presiding).

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C. R. Miller, designer, Think American Institute image #148, date unspecified (c. 1942), silkscreen. Emphasis in the original. Collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites, Indianapolis, Indiana. 5 Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 38–39. Archival photographs of the ceremony are held at the Bensen Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, and some have been digitized and are available online: http://collections.thehenryford.org. 6 Ellul, Propaganda, 74–76. 7 Think American filed for copyright in 1940, claiming use dating from August 22, 1939. 8 George Gallup, “Majority See U.S. Taking Sides in War,” Daily Boston Globe, August 20, 1939; see also: “76% Here Fear U.S. Would Enter War,” New York Times, August 20, 1939. 9 Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr. “London Staggered: Nazi-Soviet Pact Blow Received in Anger and Stupefaction,” New York Times, August 22, 1939. 10 Valerie Jean Conner, “National War Labor Board,” in The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, Anne Cipriano Venzon and Paul L. Miles, eds. (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 406-09. 11 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, The Oxford History of the United States, vol. 9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 623. 12 Ibid., 281. 13 See, for example, Dave Williams and Reba Williams, “The Early History of the Screenprint,” Print Quarterly 3, no. 4 (December 1986): 287–321 and Dave Williams and Reba Williams, American Screenprints (New York: National Academy of Design, 1987). 14 Guido Lengwiler, A History of Screen Printing, (Cincinnati, OH: ST Media Group International, Inc., 2013). Before Lengwiler’s text, very few substantial resources existed on the early history of silkscreen in the commercial sector, among them Elinor Noteboom’s two articles, “Screen Printing: Where Did It All Begin?” Screen Printing 82, no. 10 (September 1992): 52-56 and “Screen Printing in the Advertising Trade: A Historical Perspective,” Screen Printing 83, no. 12 (November 1993): 152-59. See also industry-based primary sources such as the Signs of the Times periodical and book projects, including Harry L. Hiett, Screen Process Production (Cincinnati, OH: Signs of the Times Publishing, 1936). 15 Carl Zigrosser, “The Serigraph, a New Medium,” The Print Collector’s Quarterly 28, no. 4 (December 1941): 442–77. See also the foreword written by Lynd Ward to the First Exhibition of Silk Screen Stencil Prints (New York: Weyhe Gallery, 1940). 16 Rockwell Kent to Doris Meltzer, Chairman of the Publicity Committee of the Silk Screen Group, August 22, 1941, Rockwell Kent papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 17 Ward, “Foreword,” n.p.

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18 Harry Sternberg, “War Art From the Bottom Up,” Magazine of Art 36, no. 1 (January 1943). For more on this, see the author’s “Ambassadors for Intervention” in Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, Peter Zegers and Douglas Druick, eds., (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). See also chapter 4 in the author's “Totalitarian Aesthetics and the Democratic Imagination in the United States 1937-47” (Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern University, 2014). 19 Steven Heller, Graphic Design Time Line: A Century of Design Milestones (New York: Allworth Press, 2000), 98. 20 David A. Gray, “Managing Motivation: The Seth Seiders Syndicate and the Motivational Publicity Business in the 1920s,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 1 (March 2010): 106, 110. 21 Bromley, “Posters Aid Defense,” 4. 22 Harry Sternberg, “War Art From the Bottom Up,” Magazine of Art 36, no. 1 (January 1943). 23 Lengwiler, A History of Screen Printing, 206–07. 24 Ibid., 116. 25 Louis Bland, Power Silk Screen Process Printer and Coater, US patent 1,815,021, filed May 31, 1930, and issued July 14, 1931.

CHAPTER THREE CAMOUFLAGE, 1942: ARTISTS, ARCHITECTS, AND DESIGNERS AT FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA JOHN R. BLAKINGER

Art and Science at Belvoir In a striking aerial photograph, taken at an elevation of twenty-four thousand feet, the city of Baltimore, Maryland—its shipyards and highways, its factories and parks, the repeating patterns of its urban street grid—dissolves into a luminous blur (fig. 3-1). At a height of nearly five miles up, the landscape below transforms into a vast abstraction stretching from horizon to horizon. The world becomes a world picture. This image is hardly an ideologically neutral representation, however, for it actually appeared in an obscure 1942 volume titled Modern Camouflage. The book’s author, Major Robert P. Breckenridge, employs the photograph to illustrate “what the bombardier sees” in a hypothetical strike on a land objective.1 Seeing was crucial in precision bombing; the exceedingly complex technology of aerial attack ultimately relied on human vision. After the bombardier identified a ground target and adjusted the bombsight, an optical targeting device requiring the eye for operation, the rest was mechanical. Hundreds of pounds of incendiaries would release from the aircraft’s bomb bays automatically, timed with precision so that the parabolic trajectory of their fall would ensure accurate impact. Breckenridge’s illustration therefore represents not the wonder of modern aerial vision so much as the terror of modern aerial warfare. For the bombardier, to see was to destroy. And for the civilian below, to disguise was—hopefully—to defend oneself. The spectacle of aerial vision thus assumed new meaning under the threat of aerial bombardment, especially after Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. American civilians, now fearing strikes on domestic shores, were

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captivated with the idea of concealing themselves from an enemy who would come from above. The point of this essay is to explore such efforts at concealment, specifically through the United States government’s World War Two camouflage education program. This narrative takes place at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a military installation on the banks of the Potomac River south of Washington, DC, which housed the Engineer School of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Here, the urgency following Pearl Harbor elicited highly unusual professional collaborations, bringing artists and scientists together in a military context over the course of a single year for a common project of learning and teaching what was called “industrial camouflage.” The goal of industrial camouflage was to prevent enemy identification of possible ground targets—factories, fortifications, airfields, bridges, railways, roads, shipyards, oil tanks, even civilian landmarks that might orient enemy bombers—by distorting the image of the earth as seen from the sky. No doubt Belvoir—so far from the museum, the gallery, and the studio—is an unfamiliar setting for American art. To be sure, art historians have yet to fully explain the role of the arts in these undertakings; the complete scope of Belvoir’s training program has remained a secret history, obscured by bureaucracy and concealed under reams of government paperwork.2 Using hundreds of formerly classified documents held by the National Archives and Records Administration, I reconstruct this previously hidden—or, more aptly, camouflaged—episode, casting light on how warfare motivated a new set of shared aesthetic engagements. I examine the events at Belvoir in 1942 in order to demonstrate with historical specificity how a moment of crisis dramatically altered the conventional roles of the artist, the architect, and the designer. In his foreword to Major Breckenridge’s Modern Camouflage, Ulysses S. Grant III, Brigadier General of the US Army and Chief of the Protection Branch of the Office of Civilian Defense, offers a suggestive commentary on the theory and practice of disguise. Grant ruminates on the volume’s subtitle (“The New Science of Protective Concealment”) as well as the great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous discussion of warfare as an art and a science.3 In agreement with von Clausewitz’s dual characterization, Grant declares that camouflage ideally satisfies the requirements of both fields. In camouflage, the theoretical principles of disguise are “established with scientific precision” and the practical application of these principles “must be with scientific accuracy”; nonetheless, “the solution of individual problems is still an art.”4 This loss of distinction between intellectual disciplines is not a rhetorical

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provocation but an appropriate description of the Belvoir program. What ends did such interdisciplinary entanglements between art and science actually serve?

Theorizing Camouflage: The World Picture To begin, I turn to Martin Heidegger’s 1938 lecture “The Age of the World Picture,” a text in which the philosopher presents a resonant phrase for theorizing camouflage during the Second World War. Describing how modernity—specifically modern technology—mediates our experience, Heidegger refers to the transformation of the world into image, into what he terms the “world picture.” The essence of modernity lies in this “conquest of the world as picture.”5 Read literally, Heidegger’s phrase illuminates the perceptual transformation through technological mediation that occurred in aerial bombardment.6 For the bombardier, suspended above the earth at a vertiginous height and projected through the atmosphere at an extreme velocity, the physical reality of the world appears to collapse into abstraction. Seen through a bombsight and from an aircraft, the three-dimensional environment flattens into a twodimensional image; the world becomes a picture of itself, a world picture. The purpose of industrial camouflage was to fool both aerial eye and aerial camera, preventing either from identifying ground targets by disguising this perceptual picture. But because vertical reconnaissance photographs could often be deciphered—the enemy could uncover even expertly camouflaged sites through careful study, often using stereoscopic optical tools—it was the bombardier’s oblique view from the aircraft in flight that was especially important. Regardless of advance knowledge of a target’s location, the bombardier ultimately relied on visual identification of ground targets. Instilling just enough confusion might prevent the enemy bombardier from identifying a target in the crucial seconds before bombsight alignment and bomb deployment. If the enemy bombardier failed to locate his target, a second fly-by would be required, subjecting the aircraft to increased flak fire. Disguising the aerial view clearly provided significant defensive advantages. To state the obvious: industrial camouflage thus had little to do with the ubiquitous fabric pattern we know as “camouflage” today. Rather, it was a sophisticated form of visual study. The camouflage specialist submitted the abstract aerial image to a type of formal analysis, determining how changes on land might impact the view above. In practice, industrial camouflage required elaborate engineering projects— the construction of rooftop projections to alter a building’s cast shadows,

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the fabrication of textured netting to cover an airstrip’s reflective tarmac, or the wholesale replication of fake suburban streets over factory roofs. But on a theoretical level, industrial camouflage was actually a simple game of perception: the goal was to blend figure and ground by collapsing the image of a target into its surroundings, often the literal ground on which a structure stood. This image was understood as a picture that might be manipulated in the same manner as a painting or drawing; the camouflage specialist’s task was like applying paint to canvas or pigment to paper, but at the exploded scale of the physical environment. Artists, architects, and designers, wielding their expertise in visual images and visual experience, were thus uniquely able to understand this abstract way of seeing.

Organizing Camouflage: The Office of Civilian Defense How did the US government’s particular interest in industrial camouflage originate? We can trace the beginning of this story to May 20, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8757 establishing the Office of Civilian Defense, a government agency that would manage the “protection of the civilian population in emergency periods.”7 Known as the OCD, an acronym appropriately—if unintentionally— registering the obsessive-compulsive nature of the Office’s work, the office handled tasks both urgent and mundane, like establishing procedures and protocols for air raids, fire protection, gas mask procurement, and for the mobilization of the American populace should the US come under attack. Although it was headquartered in Washington, DC, the OCD became a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus, with nine regional offices that coordinated with hundreds of local councils; volunteers even staffed individual city streets as block leaders. Within this vast organization, a small bureau known as the Engineer Section, part of the Protection Branch, worked to “safeguard the civilian population by such means as blackouts… camouflage and protective construction.”8 And within the Engineer Section, the Camouflage Unit worked to implement industrial camouflage. The Chief of the Engineer Section’s Camouflage Unit was an architect-turned-military bureaucrat from New York City named Greville Rickard, and it was Rickard who set into motion the art-and-science partnerships at Belvoir. Before Pearl Harbor, Rickard had chaired the Civilian Camouflage Council of New York, a group that educated the public about camouflage techniques and advocated for official camouflage policy (the Council was conceived by Homer Saint-Gaudens, a pioneer

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camoufleur of the First World War, as well as the Director of the Carnegie Institute Museum and the Carnegie International art fair; Saint-Gaudens also oversaw the camouflage of Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War as Chief of the US Army’s Eighty-fourth Engineer Battalion). After the attack, however, Rickard’s work became urgent; worried about the “serious lack of enough trained advisors in camouflage in the event that bombing raids might require such service,” Rickard alerted the OCD’s Protection Branch and its Engineer Section about a dire need for nationwide camouflage education.9 He suggested a program in which the government would sponsor camouflage courses at established schools across the country. Rickard even prepared a syllabus for such training; titled “Civilian Camouflage Instruction for Professional Men,” the course plan envisioned interdisciplinary lectures from outside specialists on topics ranging from “Orientation of Vision by Camera and Eye” to the “Methods and Techniques in Camouflage Application.”10 Rickard’s frantic letters succeeded in securing him a position at the OCD where he could make these proposals a reality. After he was hired by the OCD, Rickard appealed to the US Department of Education for funds through what became the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) program. The Department of Education had begun subsidizing college-level training for civilians in war-related subjects in order to increase the number of qualified personnel available for particular military jobs, and its ESMWT program served as a stopgap for a shortage of trained technical experts available for national defense positions. But the Department declined to offer the necessary funds, suspicious that camouflage was not a legitimate field for sponsorship; after all, the ESMWT funds were reserved for training in “an Engineering school, for engineers, on [an] engineering subject” and camouflage was suspiciously non-technical, even aesthetic. “We did the best to convince the two Deans [Seton and Case, of the US Department of Education] that camouflage was an engineering matter but to no avail,” notes Rickard.11 Without financial support, the OCD would have to forgo direct sponsorship of camouflage courses and instead train civilian instructors “in whatever way might present itself”—namely, through the military’s existing educational programs.12 Since the beginning of the war, the Army Corps of Engineers taught camouflage for military, not civilian, personnel at the Engineer School at Belvoir. The subject was part of basic military training. Aside from a few “Special Courses,” there were no classes dedicated exclusively to the subject until April of 1941.13 But at that point, increasing demand prompted the formation of a regular program of two-

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week Military Camouflage Courses for officers of the Ground Forces, Services of Supply, and Air Corps, as well as other military personnel joining camouflage units; more than seventy such courses graduated many thousands over the duration of the war.14 In May of 1942, the War Department decided to open these courses to non-military specialists. The Civilian Camouflage Courses would take place at Belvoir, using the same facilities, instructors, and materials as the regular military courses. The OCD’s ultimate plan was to establish a network of “Regional Camouflage Schools” across the country, with each civilian instructor graduated from Belvoir establishing a course under OCD guidance at his home institution. The War Department’s decision resulted in an unusual situation: a civilian course organized at a military establishment. The question, as Rickard asks in his official report on the program, concerned who really deserved such unique training: “Who should be invited to this course?”15 Indeed, there was a great uncertainty about the true identity of the camoufleur. This expert was a dual character, rational yet innovative, practical but also experimental: so was he more likely to be an engineer or an artist? In a letter seeking advice from an architectural colleague on possible candidates for camouflage training to be offered through the OCD, Rickard indicated his preference for professionals “who have been in business, who have handled men and responsibility, who are tactful, can get along with people.” But he also emphasized interest in those professionals “who have initiative, who have imagination… who are pliable enough to take up without difficulty a new kind of activity.”16 This tension played out on an individual but also institutional level. A ranked list of “first-choice,” “second-choice,” and “third-choice” schools that might host the OCD-approved courses shows how Rickard prioritized particular educational centers. The OCD evaluated first- and secondchoice schools by their strengths in “Architecture,” “Landscape,” and “Structural Engineering” (these schools included elite universities like Yale, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]). But they ranked third-tier schools by a different set of criteria, including “Art,” “Design,” and “Museums.”17 The OCD privileged architecture but placed top arts institutions—among them the Rhode Island School of Design, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the American School of Design in New York—two tiers below established centers of engineering and technology. These rankings, however, contradicted the reality of camouflage training: many arts institutions had already initiated courses independently of the OCD’s organizational initiatives. For example, the painter Herbert F. Barnett, then head of the Worcester Art Museum School, boasted of his

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institution’s wartime credentials. In a letter to Rickard, Barnett suggested—without any sense of irony—that the art museum rivaled the most exalted scientific center as a school for industrial camouflage: “Our military course by all opinion is the best in New England,” the artist declared. “Our industrial course for some time has been classified with those of Yale, Harvard and M.I.T.”18 Indeed, because of these contradictions, Rickard sent standard form letters to a wide range of institutions soliciting individual names for participants. He included those representatives who had already contacted the OCD with questions regarding funds for camouflage courses at their universities or schools, including numerous artists. László Moholy-Nagy, for example, was among them.19 Rickard also pulled names from various trade groups like the American Institute of Architects and from university course bulletins.20 Rickard’s solicitation read: The Office of Civilian Defense has given careful consideration to the formulation of a national policy with respect to camouflage. There are many important questions involved in the determination of such a policy, namely, the activities of the War and Navy Departments with respect to the camouflage of plants engaged in defense contracts, the obligations and responsibilities of the Office of Civilian Defense to other industrial plants and community utilities, shortage of critical materials for use in camouflage, and other problems. There is, however, a realization of the present necessity of preparation. Many institutions throughout the country have urged the inauguration of training courses. In view of these requests, and in order that camouflage instructions may embody approved methods, an educational program has been adopted. An intensive two weeks’ course will be conducted by the Engineer Board at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.21

In total, Belvoir’s civilian courses, each lasting two weeks, ran through June and July of 1942 and graduated seventy-three camouflage instructors, with a handful of additional civilians attending later military classes.22 The first course included thirteen participants, but the OCD wanted to provide instruction to as many civilians as possible; “the faster this information is disseminated from a responsible center, the less chance there will be of hit and miss camouflage experimentation.”23 OCD officials thus argued with the War Department for an enlarged second course. Initially capped at twenty, it was expanded to a maximum of thirty participants; thirty-four actually attended. Demand was strong enough to support both a third and fourth course. Belvoir graduates subsequently established OCD-sponsored courses at a long list of institutions, often through fine arts or architecture departments. The litany of schools is impressive and included Columbia,

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Cornell, Harvard, New York, Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, and Stanford; the Universities of California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania; Dallas College, Ohio State University, and Oregon State College; Carnegie Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alabama Polytechnic Institute and New York State Institute of Agriculture. Some institutions were specifically devoted to arts education, including Chicago’s School of Design (later the Institute of Design), Cleveland School of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Pratt Institute, and the Rhode Island School of Design.24 A map from the OCD’s in-house report shows the remarkable spread of the program; the OCD invited instructors from schools in each of nine geographic regions across the country (fig. 3-2). Students who completed the OCD-sponsored courses subsequently taught by Belvoir graduates would receive special certificates (fig. 3-3). These students would likely be drafted into military service, perhaps but not necessarily for camouflage duty. But the Office also hoped to create a reserve of certified camoufleurs available for domestic work should the US come under aerial attack—or, as the initial solicitations for instructor participation at Belvoir euphemistically explained, “should a change in the military situation require an extensive camouflage program.”25

Learning Camouflage: The Civilian Course at Belvoir What did the civilian participants actually do after arriving at Belvoir? For one, they took up the workaday routines of military life: Rickard describes the civilian courses as “intensive,” and notes that participants “lived in barracks, [slept] on cots, arose at 6 a.m. each morning, and ate at the Army mess, or in a cafeteria on the grounds.”26 But the experience was hardly mundane. “The interest and ‘esprit de corps’ was amazing,” Rickard explained. Regarding the participants, he noted, “many had outstanding personalities.”27 And “all declared the experience stimulating.”28 After registration, orientation, and an opening address, Major Breckenridge gave an “Introductory Lecture on Camouflage,” presented restricted training films, and demonstrated the “sniper suit,” an elaborate costume for the disguised sharpshooter. Academic sessions covered distinctly militaristic topics—“Tactics of Aerial Attack,” “Air Force Requirements,” or “Seacoast Fortifications”—but also more aesthetic pursuits like “Aerial Photography,” “Paints and Adhesives,” and the “Principles of Design.”29 Ample time was reserved for study problems,

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field trips, and quizzes, in addition to the regularly scheduled classroom lessons. The daily routine was enriched with special dinner meetings, round table discussions on “visual phenomena,” and opportunities to study rare materials—in this case, German aerial photography textbooks acquired by the US military.30 Homer Saint-Gaudens even made a guest appearance. Military personnel served as instructors, presumably offering the same training they provided for newly enlisted men; but some of these teachers were also notable for their activities in civilian life. John Rogers Cox, for example, was an American Regionalist painter who later became famous for his canvases of wheat fields. Cox served as chief consulting artist to the Camouflage Section at Belvoir. He taught “Disruptive Painting.” His wartime duties included the design of Belvoir’s sniper suits.31 Despite its wide solicitation for participants, the OCD made clear their inclination for “preferably a professor or a director of an architectural, landscape, or structural engineering department.” But they ended up training a much wider range of what we might today call “creatives.” The first group of thirteen participants was an eclectic mix, and included Richard M. Bennett, William H. Brown, and George Koyle, architects who taught at Yale, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively; James C. Boudreau, Dean of the Art School at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute; Winthrop O. Judkins, an art historian and early authority on cubism then teaching at Harvard’s Fogg Museum; William A. Rose, a civil engineer from New York University (NYU) who co-authored Aerial Bombardment Protection (1942), a book on the design of air raid shelters; landscape architects Morris E. Trotter of Ohio State University, Stanley H. White of the University of Illinois, H.L. Vaughn of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harlow O. Wittemore of the University of Michigan; and Kenneth L. Washburn, a painter then teaching at Cornell. Civilians at Belvoir’s additional three courses spanned an even broader range of professional identities (fig. 4). Among them were architects Harold Bush-Brown of Georgia Tech, Jean Labatut of Princeton, and Cecil C. Briggs of Pratt; landscape architect Alfred Edwards of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute; Alfred Mewett, a sculptor and registrar at the Cleveland School of Art; George B. Kimberly, a Professor of Drama at Carnegie Institute of Technology (his expertise in stage lighting was valuable for camouflage); artists Gyorgy Kepes, Milton S. Fox, and Gordon Franklin Peers; poet and historic preservationist Edward Steese; and horticulturalist Carl F. Wedell. Others included Frederic H. Rahr, an “industrial color consultant” from Scarsdale, NY, who advised corporate

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clients on the public’s color preferences through the Rahr Color Clinic; illustrator George W. Kadel, who wrote Airbrush Art, a primer on airbrush techniques; architectural historian Carroll L.V. Meeks, who later authored studies on the railroad station as architectural form and on Italian architecture; and painter Edward M. Farmer, who commandeered Stanford University’s Art Department during the Great Depression. This group is hardly cohesive or even coherent, to be sure: what common interest would typically link both civil engineers and art historians, color consultants and horticulturalists, poets and airbrush artists? The eclecticism points to the uniquely collaborative ethos of the Belvoir courses, the way in which the topic of camouflage and the urgency of war united seemingly opposite, maybe even opposed, interests. Camouflage fused boundaries and blurred professional identities. Moreover, among those representatives of the arts invited to Belvoir, artistic agendas spanned from avant-garde to retrograde and included the radical experiments of Kepes’s New Bauhaus modernism and the abstractions of Wallace Mitchell, a painter from the Cranbrook Academy, as well as the staid landscape watercolors of Glenn Moore Shaw and the still life paintings of Gordon F. Peers (all of these artists worked together in the Second Civilian Camouflage Course).32 The group’s later achievements included creative contributions but also editorial, administrative, and commercial successes. Fox, for example, became an important arts editor at Harry N. Abrams and authored a volume on Auguste Rodin for the publisher’s Great Ages of Art series. James M. Boyle, a painter, helped establish the University of Wyoming Art Museum as head of the University’s Department of Fine Arts. Viktor Schreckengost designed bicycles, children’s toys, and iconic midcentury dinnerware. This diversity has profound historiographic implications: our standard models for making sense of art in the twentieth century cannot fully account for the heterogeneity at Belvoir. Traditional boundaries—between the Americanist and the modernist models of art history, for example— tend to isolate scholarly concerns, separating specific movements as well as medium-specific discourses like photography, painting, or print-making from one another, while further dividing interests between high art versus popular culture. Chronologically speaking, the Second World War is also conventionally positioned as a convenient bookend, a concluding chapter or opening introduction, rather than a unique art-historical moment in and of itself. But at Belvoir in 1942, these many divergent narrative and chronological lines are thoroughly intertwined. Above all, the list of varied participants suggests how the machinery of modern warfare, and its bureaucracy by extension, could forge highly

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unusual adjacencies. No doubt these figures are remembered for their later activities, not their brief interlude with the military—but is camouflage not also part and parcel of their artistic output? Decades before the question of the “two cultures” was asked by C. P. Snow or answered by art-andtechnology collaborations in mainstream contexts—the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the 1960s, for example—Belvoir united disciplines in common purpose. The program anticipates the cooperative claims so ubiquitous in our artistic and academic activities today.

Teaching Camouflage: OCD-approved Courses after Belvoir Upon returning to their home institutions, the Belvoir graduates recorded their enthusiasm and excitement in questionnaires submitted to Rickard. “This is to express my appreciation of the privilege granted me of taking the Camouflage Course at Fort Belvoir,” wrote Steese, the poet and preservationist. Some were grateful about working with a range of specialists. Bush-Brown, the architect from Georgia Institute of Technology, thanked Rickard for “the opportunity to have learned something more about Camouflage and to have come in contact with so many fine people.” Others were most pleased about the access to restricted and confidential training materials. “It was a fine and exciting experience, and a privilege. I was especially impressed by the Army’s cordiality and cooperation,” explained Mitchell, from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. “I shall be carrying on study of data given us for some time to come,” reported the University of Pennsylvania’s Koyle. “I wish the course could be continued in advanced form,” wrote Farmer of Stanford.33 The OCD’s newly trained camouflage instructors subsequently established courses at their home institutions, modeled in part on a standard syllabus of sixteen lectures that the OCD prepared as a guide. The OCD’s main requirement for these classes was that all participants were “professionals,” specifically “engineers, architects, landscape architects, and people of similar training and qualifications.” Artists, however, were also adequate—even if they were not officially endorsed. “An artist, for example, is often not practical, yet an artist can be practical as has been proved in certain instances, and should not be kept out merely because he is an artist.”34 While it is not clear from the historical record what the OCD was worried about—whether they feared the misapplication of camouflage or the way that camouflage might became an artistic pursuit for its own sake—they tightly controlled the language used to present

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these courses. The OCD explained to university presidents their hope that “direct mention of the Engineer Board at Fort Belvoir would not be included in publicity,” and that “the use of the word ‘expert’ be avoided.”35 “This Office does not favor general courses or ‘glamour courses’ for the public,” the OCD explained.36 In some ways, these fears may have been warranted. For example, a memo concerning “Unauthorized Camoufleurs, Camouflage Exhibitions and Camouflage Schools” and forwarded to the national office of the OCD explained the situation of artist Emerson Lewis, a realist painter (Lewis was a member of the Committee for Sanity in Art, a movement opposed to abstraction). Lewis, who was never invited to Belvoir, had conducted an un-official camouflage class at the Bay Area’s Jean Turner Art School, for which he received “much favorable newspaper publicity and unofficial military disapproval.”37 The news of this “unauthorized camoufleur” circulated throughout the OCD as a warning for how legitimate military knowledge might be corrupted in civilian contexts. In a similar episode, twenty-two participants of an OCD-approved class of forty-two did not receive the official OCD certificate because “not all of them had the professional background” necessary, according to the head of the OCD’s Third Civilian Defense Region.38 After one student complained of “unjustifiable discrimination,” the certificates were released.39 Although the individual courses established by Belvoir graduates at their home institutions are beyond the scope of this essay, one example provides an interesting case study. Not content merely to oversee the courses of its Belvoir graduates, the OCD also organized its own special class that began in late 1942. Held at George Washington University (a school known colloquially as “GW”) and sponsored jointly by it, the OCD, and the Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the course was typical of the OCD-approved courses across the country. It covered the standard sixteen sessions and enrolled some fifty students.40 It used Major Breckenridge’s Modern Camouflage and Pratt’s Industrial Camouflage Manual as textbooks, supplemented with mimeographed materials from Fort Belvoir.41 However, the course also brought together instructors from a range of institutions, including key officers from Belvoir and Belvoir graduates teaching at Pratt, NYU, and elsewhere. The format replicated the art history slide lecture, with discussions built around formal analysis of image like aerial photographs and abstract patterns. As a model of camouflage teaching, one that united many different instructors, the OCD considered the GW course “an unusual opportunity” and even recorded its lectures with a stenographer; the result is nearly a thousand pages of typed transcripts. These documents record both the

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banal details of the classroom—students’ questions about homework and textbooks, teachers’ assessments of exams and quizzes—and the larger motivations and tensions behind camouflage pedagogy. The ultimate purpose of generating such transcripts was probably the publication of a textbook, as the OCD felt the recordings “should have great value.”42 But as interest in camouflage waned by the end of the war, the transcripts were boxed and shelved, only to gather dust. Today, this cache of transcripts serves as the most comprehensive record in existence of camouflage pedagogy as approved by the OCD. Most relevant for the purpose of this essay are the many incongruous discussions of the arts. Major Leroy Daniel McMorris of the US Army, for example, opened his lecture at GW on the “Properties of Surfaces” with a summary of his qualifications for industrial camouflage. “I have made a particular study of various kinds of surfaces,” he assures students, “both in [the] research of antique and classical art as well as in modern art.” He explicitly encouraged the formal study of works of art as a means of understanding how textured gradients cast shadows under different lighting: The effect of light on surfaces … is most important. … I do not know whether or not any of you have studied any of the modern art, but in some types of modern art … they devote a great deal of attention to tactile and sensory impressions on surfaces. It is quite a good thing, if you have studied any of that, to give you some comprehension of what we have to deal with in camouflage.43

McMorris further applied these “tactile and sensory impressions” directly to the aerial view. “When you get above the ground in an airplane and fly, you will notice that surfaces have very much the same feeling.” He demonstrated this perspective with textured materials like cardboard and corduroy; from the sky, the world below appears “as glassy surfaces, as paper surfaces, as velvet surfaces, and surfaces of various tactile or sensory things that give you certain sensory impressions, from smooth to very rough.”44 It should hardly be surprising that McMorris’s expertise was rooted in formalist observation; he spoke from authority as a noted muralist, portraitist, and illustrator in peacetime that went by the name Daniel MacMorris. This example, merely one of many hidden in the GW transcripts, illustrates how varied references were in the camouflage classroom. Rickard explicitly addressed the disjuncture and divisions between art and science in his own lecture for the GW course. “You have had opinions

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from the military; you have had opinions from the scholastic people; and you have had opinions from the practical people in the field,” he began. Even down at Fort Belvoire [sic] where they should be in agreement, there was a complaint that there was a disagreement amongst some of the lecturers. I don’t think that is something to worry about. … [I]n any art or science you get quite a disagreement. You get varying opinions … and it would be a very monotonous life indeed, if people in any art or science all agreed.45

Rickard then proceeded to share definitions of the words “camouflage,” “art,” and “science” from the Oxford English Dictionary, attempting to place camouflage under both terms through lexicographic demonstration. A series of confidential meetings convened by the OCD in March 1943 reveals how these art-and-science tensions were explicitly addressed at the highest levels of the Office. These seminars brought together representatives from across the country for “mutual interchange” on civilian defense topics.46 The group’s discussion of camouflage centered on the possibility of a new “Central School of Camouflage” in Washington, DC. While the idea was rejected as unnecessary, it opened onto a wide-ranging discussion of the true purpose of camouflage. Francis Keally, the head or “Camouflage Specialist” for the second region of the OCD as well as a painter of architectural renderings, described artists as less useful for camouflage. Keally reported that “about 60 percent” of students in his camouflage courses were “artists and landscape painters and portrait painters.” These students mistakenly thought “camouflage was down their alley.” In disdain, Keally notes: “Several of my friends called me up and told me about some well-known artist who was interested and who wanted to help out.”47 The suggestion was that artists were eager but nonetheless unqualified. In reference to camouflage instruction at arts institutions like Pratt, the Worcester Museum of Art, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, Keally was even more direct: [T]he general opinion throughout the country is that they [the US Army] are looking for artists … Well, … they are not looking for artists. There is no art work [sic] in this. After all, I am an artist myself, so you know I am not speaking antagonistically, but merely from the points of view that have been expressed to me.48

Keally’s specifically objected to the artist’s “impractical” nature. He explains: “Even though they do have some artists in those units the tendency now is to have very practical fellows who can use their hands.”49

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Keith Martin, Camouflage Specialist for the seventh OCD region, challenged Keally: [W]hen the average layman hears the word ‘artist’ he immediately thinks of only one thing—a fellow who paints a picture; and the word ‘artist’ doesn’t mean exactly that. An artist is a man with a certain aptitude to express himself in a variety of ways, some more practical than others.50

Despite this defense of the artist, the general consensus in the room was bleaker. Rickard recalled that during the First World War, “three-quarters” of the artists involved in camouflage “were excess baggage.”51 In the end, though, these debates hardly mattered. Already by the fall of 1942, just months after initiating its civilian courses, the OCD sent a form letter to camouflage instructors graduated from Belvoir explaining that “these OCD-sponsored courses will be discontinued.”52 Instructors were told to teach no more than two courses; “many more pupils have now been graduated than can be absorbed by employment,” they explained, “while it is doubted whether pupils with proper qualification will continue to be found available for instruction.” For their part, instructors also complained about the “lack of opportunity to put knowledge to public service.”53 The abrupt conclusion of the program suggests that industrial camouflage during the Second World War was, in a way, obsolete from the start. Strategic aerial bombardment campaigns—the London Blitz or, later, the Allied bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo—did not actually require identifying specific targets; aircrafts dropped bombs indiscriminately over vast swaths of land. The bombardier did not need to see anything at all. Furthermore, the US never came under direct threat after Pearl Harbor. A 1943 letter from the OCD regarding the camouflage situation explained how “activity is now curtailed through lack of definite directives from the War Department, and through restrictions imposed by the War Production Board, as well as through the temporary lack of sufficient need for such measures. … There will be a cessation of these courses at Fort Belvoir.”54 In hindsight, it begs the question of whether the courses at Belvoir were really about civilian defense to begin with. Were they intended to produce industrial camouflage specialists, or was there a different, perhaps more concealed, motive? Just days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt requested summary reports from the heads of defense agencies regarding their preparations for the war effort. In his remarks for the President, Fiorello LaGuardia—Mayor of New York City but also then Director of the OCD—is blunt in framing the OCD’s ambitions. Drawing from the

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language of Executive Order 8757, LaGuardia summarizes the goals of the Office as, first, the coordination of local and federal civilian defense agencies, and second, protection of civilian life and property. But he also puts forth a third objective: “Promote activities designed to sustain the national morale and to create opportunities for constructive civilian participation in the defense program.”55 He further elaborated the means of achieving these goals through “mass education … to convince citizens that the carefully planned program of the Office of Civilian Defense is the one that they should follow.”56 In other words, the OCD was explicitly established—even if such goals were not publically articulated—not only to coordinate between government agencies and protect civilian life, but also to “sustain morale” and encourage “constructive civilian participation” through education initiatives embracing the widest audience. The aesthetic activities of artists, architects, and designers were the crucial means to reach this public. Ulysses S. Grant, III—the Brigadier General who introduced Major Breckenridge’s Modern Camouflage—was aware of this hidden goal. A letter from the OCD, sent just weeks after the conclusion of Belvoir’s civilian courses, bluntly informed him of these objectives, and stated “this Section [the Engineer Section of the OCD] explains to potential students its purpose in preparedness, but indicates that they must not be too hopeful of expectation in camouflage performance. … Actually, we are asking men to be patriotic and become prepared to be of service, but can give them no assurance of any benefit to be gained by finding work.”57 The OCD’s end goal was to encourage patriotism through preparedness, regardless of actual employment at home or deployment abroad.

Exhibiting Camouflage: Art at War In deciphering camouflage, our narrative has moved through the bureaucracies of Washington, DC, and the training grounds at Fort Belvoir, but it concludes in more familiar terrain. In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) organized a largely forgotten traveling exhibition titled Camouflage for Civilian Defense. Based on an exhibition organized by Rickard in his former capacity as chairman of the Camouflage Council of New York and originally held at the Advertising Club of New York, MoMA’s show included twenty-five exhibition panels and numerous models illustrating fundamental lessons of camouflage. In organizing the exhibition, MoMA became directly implicated in the activities of the US military. The first problem the Museum faced in preparing the show was how to secure classified photographs demonstrating

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the principles of camouflage, especially aerial vision. In a letter to the War Department, MoMA’s Monroe Wheeler, who oversaw circulating shows through his position as head of the Department of Exhibitions and Publications, framed the exhibition in terms that might appeal to the military’s agenda. The exhibition, Wheeler writes, “will explain the function of camouflage, emphasizing why it must be planned and directed only by professionally experienced men, with the approval of the Office of Civilian Defense.”58 Similarly, Wheeler explained in a letter to Major Breckenridge at Belvoir that the show would “clarify for the layman the meaning of camouflage”; it would “deal scientifically” with the subject, but would also appeal widely “to engineers, architects and artists.”59 The Museum would thus explicitly take on the role of promoting the OCD and its message. Wheeler’s overtures worked, and he subsequently visited Belvoir to source aerial photographs on his own.60 The Museum’s staff prepared a list of “Special Questions for Fort Belvoir” in advance of Wheeler’s visit. The list outlines some of the discussion Wheeler must have had with Belvoir officials. The first item, under the heading “Artists in Camouflage,” referred to a problem that was hardly settled but which MoMA would specifically want answered: “Specifically how useful are [the artists] and is the Camouflage Section using them?” The document also suggests that MoMA initially proposed circulating its camouflage exhibition not at regional art museums but rather military installations; the show would be a “dramatic means of selling” camouflage while promoting “camouflage awareness.” Unlike standard military training, such an exhibition would convey its lessons with “direct slogans” and “by visual means.”61 In a letter to Major Breckenridge, Wheeler later disclosed the idea of bringing the show directly to Belvoir and the OCD: “We are now discussing with Colonel Mapes [of the OCD] his possible use of our exhibition in his civilian camouflage program”62 Nothing came of this ambition—the show circulated only to university museums and smaller arts institutions, not to Belvoir or the OCD—but MoMA nonetheless assumed duties that might typically be assigned to the US government. In response to its wartime exhibitions, the museum received countless letters from aspiring camoufleurs seeking employment in the field.63 Elodie Courter, head of MoMA’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions, wrote to Rickard for advice about how to handle this situation: As you can imagine, we are having an ever increasing number of artists coming in to ask what part they can take in the camouflage effort… The answers I am able to give them are, I’m afraid, unsatisfactory. … I tell

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But the confusion was not only MoMA’s new role as improvised recruiting office; indeed, the museum actually received requests directly from the military for images to be used in the military’s camouflage training. The Naval Air Combat Intelligence Officers’ School at a US Naval Air Station in Rhode Island asked for copies of the show’s aerial photographs for its lessons; as the Museum’s prints were then being exhibited in Camouflage for Civilian Defense, Wheleer instead referred the School to Major Breckenridge’s Modern Camouflage and to the Pratt camouflage manual.65 Even Canada’s Department of National Defense contacted MoMA, curious about the possibility of obtaining a MoMA display for training purposes at Borden, a Canadian Forces base.66 What is so remarkable here is how institutions that one imagines would normally have nothing to do with one another became so completely aligned with a common purpose. Decades before MoMA carried out the US government’s work through the propagandistic exhibition of Abstract Expressionist painting as a “weapon of the Cold War,” the museum was already engaged in government activities of dubious aesthetic value. Correspondence between Homer Saint-Gaudens and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Director of MoMA, sums up the unlikely and unusual associations prompted by war. In a string of letters, Barr urges Saint-Gaudens to meet the artist Fernand Léger during Saint-Gaudens’s deployment in France, where Saint-Gaudens was overseeing the camouflage of Allied troops. Saint-Gaudens offers Barr references to writings on camouflage from the journal Military Engineer and even provides mimeographed copies of restricted documents. Commenting on these ironic juxtapositions—and the fact that the creative individual might make the best camoufleur—Saint-Gaudens remarks: “Life is full of confusion.”67 The off-hand comment distills the strangeness of the period. In the pursuit of concealment, very opposite and even opposing institutions and individuals became strangely confused. The artist dissimulated as military scientist, the military scientist dissimulated as artist; both became one and the same, blurred by camouflage.

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Notes 1

Robert P. Breckenridge, Modern Camouflage: The New Science of Protective Concealment (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942), 17. Breckenridge does not explicitly identify the depicted city, but based on its geography it is clearly Baltimore. 2 Recent scholarship on camouflage does not fully investigate the Belvoir program, although it is mentioned. For a survey of architectural involvement in camouflage during the Second World War, see especially Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2011). For an interpretation of camouflage as a broader media phenomenon, see Hanna Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2012). The pioneering work of Roy R. Behrens has explored many of these relationships; see his recent books Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (Dysart, IA: Bobolink Books, 2009) and False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage (Dysart, IA: Bobolink Books, 2002). 3 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 148-150. 4 Breckenridge, Modern Camouflage, vi. Here, Grant’s foreword contradicts the claim to unfold in Breckenridge’s book that camouflage is only a science, as indicated also by the book’s subtitle, “the New Science of Protective Concealment.” Ironically, it was Breckenridge who would soon provide camouflage instruction to civilian artists at Belvoir. 5 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 134. 6 Indeed, it seems historically revealing that Heidegger presented these thoughts on the subject of conquest on the eve of the Second World War. 7 The text of Executive Order 8757 is reprinted in “Pertinent Excerpts from Documents Relating to Camouflage Policy in OCD,” 1. This document is referred to as “Excerpts B” in the OCD’s reports and includes relevant passages from War Department directives. National Records and Archives Administration, Washington, DC, (hereafter NARA) record group (hereafter RG) 171, entry 57, box 29, folder “Camouflage confidential.” 8 “History of the Engineer Section,” 1. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “History of Engineer Section and of Camouflage Unit.” 9 Greville Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 1. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1. 10 “Outline for Civilian Camouflage Instruction for Professional Men,” in NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1. The outline bears an inscription in Rickard’s handwriting: “Suggested outline by Greville Rickard, made before coming into OCD which was March 13, 1942.” 11 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 1. 12 Ibid. .

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13 “A History of the Engineer School,” 145. NARA, RG 77, entry UD 2006D, box 1047, folder “Engr. Sch. History.” 14 There were seventy courses by 1944. See “Summary of Students in Officer Courses.” NARA, RG 77, entry UD 2006D, box 1046, folder “Annual Report 1943-44.” 15 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 1. 16 Letter from Rickard to Glenn C. Wilson, May 8, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “Informational letter to University Directors.” 17 Lists titled “Tentative First-Choice School,” “Tentative Second-Choice Schools,” and “Third Choice School.” NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “University Lists, etc.” 18 Herbert F. Barnett to Greville Rickard, March 24, 1943. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Miscellaneous camouflage School information.” 19 László Moholy-Nagy to Milton C. Mapes, April 21, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 10, box 119, folder “Gen. Correspondence 1940-1942, 515-516.” 20 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 1. 21 There are multiple copies of this form letter addressed to various university leaders, some with slight variations. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Correspondence Connected with 4 courses at Ft. Belvoir” 22 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 3. 23 Memorandum from M.C. Mapes to Colonel E. W. Ridings re: Fort Belvoir Camouflage Course, June 15, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Letters-War Dept. Camouflage School of Ft. Belvoir.” See also related letters and the routing slip to Col. Mapes in the same folder approving an increase to thirty. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 3. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 2. 28 “History of Engineer Section,” 16. 29 As listed in a “Schedule of Instruction” for the first, second, and third civilian camouflage courses. NARA, RG 171, Entry 116, Box 1, folder “4. Fort Belvoir Courses in Camouflage – prior to the OCD sponsored University courses.” 30 “Report of Group Leader, 4th Civilian Camouflage Course,” from Milton L. Grigg to Major Donald P. Barnes, July 31, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “4. Fort Belvoir Courses in Camouflage prior to the OCD sponsored University courses.” 31 See Edward Alden Jewell, “Art in a Practical Service to War,” New York Times, December, 12, 1941. Jewell apparently spoke with Cox at Belvoir about his position. 32 My dissertation in progress, “Artist under Technocracy: Gyorgy Kepes and the Cold War Avant-Garde,” further explores Gyorgy Kepes’s particular involvement in camouflage during the Second World War. See also Robin Schuldenfrei, “Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago,” in $WRPLF'ZHOOLQJ$Q[LHW\'RPHVWLFLW\DQG3RVWZDU$UFKLWHFWXUH, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2012), 87-126; and Maggie Taft, “Better

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Than Before: László Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus in Chicago,” in &KLFDJR0DNHV0RGHUQ+RZ&UHDWLYH0LQGV&KDQJHG6RFLHW\, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 31-43. 33 These comments are compiled in a lengthy document titled “Questionnaires to Universities Directors on Ft. Belvoir courses.” NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1. 34 Memorandum to Representatives of the Universities conducting OCD-sponsored courses in Camouflage from Colonel M.C. Mapes re: “Eligibility for OCD sponsored certificates,” October 2, 1942, included in Report, NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1. Emphasis in original. 35 Memo from E. B. Foster to all university representatives, July 27, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “Informational letter to University Directors.” 36 Form letter to university representatives from Colonel Mapes, August 28, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “Informational letter to University Directors.” 37 Memorandum from Philip Pinner to W. L. Pereira, June 29, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box B, folder “Camouflage confidential correspondence.” 38 “OCD Camouflage Awards Scored,” Baltimore Sun, October 20, 1942. 39 Frank O. Heyder to James M. Landis, October 22, 1942. NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Miscellaneous camouflage School information.” 40 See announcements for the course in the Washington Star, November 15, 1942; in the Baltimore Sun, November 15, 1942; and in the Washington Post, November 16, 1942. 41 Greville Rickard to Sidney B. Hall, December 18,1942; and Greville Rickard to Sidney B. Hall, November 20, 1942, in NARA, RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “G.W. Univ. course.” 42 Rickard, “Report on Camouflage Educational Program,” 3. 43 “Properties of Surfaces by Major Leroy Daniel McMorris and Mr. Stanley McCandless; Verbatim Transcript of Proceedings,” 1, 2. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 9A. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 “General Camouflage by Mr. Greville Rickard and Protective Construction by Mr. Richard Fine,” verbatim transcript of proceedings. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 10. 46 As explained by Colonel Mapes in “Engineers’ Section Seminar – OCD; verbatim transcript; March 8,1943; 9:15 AM to 12:15 PM; 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM,” 1. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 11. 47 “Engineer Section Seminar – OCD; verbatim transcript; March 9, 1943; 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM; 8:00 PM to 10:45 PM,” (hereafter “Engineer Section Seminar” 103. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 11. 48 “Engineer Section Seminar” 115. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 11. 49 Ibid., 115. 50 “Engineer Section Seminar” 116-117. NARA, RG 171, entry 117, box 11. 51 Ibid., 117.

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Form letter sent from Colonel M.C. Mapes to instructors of OCD-approved camouflage courses, dated October 30, 1942. RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “Informational letter to University Directors.” 53 “Answers on Camouflage,” typed list of responses from regional camouflage specialists in advance of an Engineer Section seminar, dated January 2, 1943. RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Engineer Section Seminar Mar 8 to 23 1943.” 54 Captain E. Foster, C.E., Acting Chief, Engineering Section, Protection Branch, OCD to Joseph M. Loughlin, Director, First Civilian Defense Region, dated August 1, 1943. RG 171, entry 116, box 2, folder “Informational letter to University Directors.” 55 “The Office of Civilian Defense,” typescript signed F. H. LaGuardia, page 1. An accompanying letter indicates that the original report was delivered to President Roosevelt on 19 December 1941; Roosevelt requested the report in preparation of his first State of Union address after the US entered the war. RG 171, entry 12, box 3, folder “Confidential 049.” 56 Ibid., 11-12. 57 Memorandum from Colonel Mapes to General U. S. Grant regarding “Financial support of civilians taking courses in camouflage at Fort Belvoir, Virginia,” August 6, 1942. RG 171, entry 116, box 1, folder “Miscellaneous Camouflage School information.” 58 Monroe Wheeler to the Chief of Engineers, War Department, February 27, 1942. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, [190.2]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (hereafter MoMA Archives). 59 Monroe Wheeler to Major R. P. Breckenridge, February 19, 1942. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives. 60 As mentioned by Major R. P. Breckenridge in a letter to Monroe Wheeler, February 23, 1942. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives. 61 Emphasis in original. Document titled “Special Questions for Fort Belvoir,” undated. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives. 62 Monroe Wheeler to Major R. P. Breckinridge, March 11,1942. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives. 63 See, for example, Merwin Robinson to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., July 8, 1942; and response from James T. Soby to Merwin Robinson, July 15, 1942. Early Museum History Papers, [I.3.j]. MoMA Archives. Robinson hoped to join a camouflage unit during the war. 64 Elodie Courter to Kenneth Richard [Greville Rickard], 21 January 1941. Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, [II.1.43.6]. MoMA Archives. 65 E. Baldwin Smith to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., September 29, 1942. Response from Monroe Wheeler to E. Baldwin Smith, October 9, 1942. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives 66 K. M. Holloway to Carlos Dyer, December 30, 1941. Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, [II.1.43.6]. MoMA Archives. 67 Homer Saint-Gaudens to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., January 29, 1941. MoMA Exhs., [190.2]. MoMA Archives.

CHAPTER FOUR SHOCK-PHOTO: THE WAR IMAGES OF ROSLER, SPERO, AND CELMINS1 FRANCES JACOBUS-PARKER

[T]he traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths, all captured “from life as lived”) is the photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock-photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have hold on the process instituting signification. —Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 19612

In 1970, the New York-based Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) produced its now-famous anti-Vietnam War poster, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies. The poster paired two shocking representations of the victims of the 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers: a color photograph of a pile of bodies, mostly of women and children, and the question and answer of the poster’s title, which confirmed that infants were among the dead. Both text and image had recently appeared in national print and televised news; the AWC overlaid appropriated image and blood-red text, and then reproduced the resulting design as a free, twenty-five by thirty-eight-inch offset lithograph in an edition of 50,000. In its direct representation of material lifted from mass-media sources, without added slogans or other expressive content, the poster’s design paradoxically turned Barthes’s assertion—that the “shock-photo” is that which escapes or exceeds the possibilities of signification—into a form of antiwar rhetoric. In the face of such a traumatic image, the poster seems to suggest, “there is nothing to say.” The AWC’s poster was brandished in antiwar demonstrations, and has since become a touchstone in discussions of the intersection of art and politics in the era of the Vietnam War.3 I begin with its invocation because of the ways in which, in both its design and its iconic status, it dramatizes

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a problem faced by many American artists in the 1960s and early 1970s: whether to address the war through their work, and via what strategies. For artists and the public alike, knowledge of the Vietnam War was inextricably linked to the onslaught of mass-media images and footage of destruction. The status of visual representations of war was, therefore, particularly overdetermined. By 1967, the artist Ad Reinhardt had concluded, “there are no effective paintings or objects that one can make against the war. There’s been a complete exhaustion of images.”4 Though his statement suggests the futility of antiwar art in any media, it is his emphasis on “images” that interests me in the present context. Indeed, many artists seemed to concur with this verdict, turning instead to assemblage, language-based, and conceptual art as vehicles for critique. Such artistic practices attest to the apparently “exhausted” status of the image. And yet, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, some artists did continue to produce images as a means of engaging critically with war and its representation. This essay analyses three such groups of “war images” made by three American artists during the era of the Vietnam War: Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series (1967-72), Nancy Spero’s War Series (1966-70) and Vija Celmins’s war-themed paintings and drawings (1964-68). While the works of these artists vary considerably, each radically repositions mass-media representations of war, and each does so via the production of images. My essay examines these three nearcontemporaneous series as case studies, each demonstrating a different approach to the problem of signification presented by what Barthes calls “shock-photos.” Importantly, whereas the AWC produced its poster explicitly for the purpose and spaces of antiwar activism, the images made by Rosler, Spero, and Celmins present a more complex, ambiguous, and perhaps ambivalent negotiation of the relation between appropriation, criticality, and political action. My analysis addresses the various strategies, techniques, and media employed by these three artists in their use of the mass-media imagery of war. Access to photographs of distant disaster was by no means new to the 1960s. Susan Sontag has characterized this particular type of spectatorship as “a quintessential modern experience.”5 Equally defining of modernity, one could argue, are the host of troubling ethical questions raised by this condition: what can such pictures do, and what, if anything, is one to do with this experience of witnessing disaster from afar? As Sontag notes, writers from Charles Baudelaire to Virginia Woolf have grappled with these questions. More recently, Judith Butler has added her voice to the historically layered discourse, addressing the issue in a post-9/11 world.

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While both the technologies of violence and of its representation have changed radically over time, the ethical quandaries presented by this condition of distant spectatorship remain. My essay poses the works of Rosler, Spero, and Celmins as participants in this ongoing discourse, one that seems more urgent now than ever. One could chart a long history of artists who have depicted scenes of calamity witnessed only from afar, via textual or visual media. Yet, for artists working in the US in the 1960s, the question of how to respond to this condition of spectatorship took on new urgency because of the convergence of several historical and technological factors: first, the increase throughout the decade in the availability, prevalence, and graphicness of mass-media imagery, both still and moving, depicting war and its aftermath; second, the turn among practitioners of advanced art to figuration, often by way of appropriating mass-media images; and third, the rise of artists’ involvement in political and social justice causes, and especially protest against the Vietnam War.6 It is this convergence of the influx of mass-media images of war, a turn to figuration, and an artistic culture of political engagement that makes the “problem” of war images so relevant to the art of the 1960s. Rosler, Spero, and Celmins are also linked by their status as women artists—a fact that warrants parsing, as its significance remains an open and complex question in my essay. The gender of the artists matters to my analysis to the extent that to be a woman artist in the 1960s often entailed a heightened consciousness regarding the relation between subjectivity, subject position, and regimes of power and representation. The antiwar politics of the period were bound up with the bourgeoning women’s and civil rights movements, and many women’s groups emerged out of or in relation to other political movements of the period. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has noted, feminism offered “a way to theorize connections between militarism and masculinity, as well as to think through the gendering of subjectivity in times of national crisis.”7 Many of the works made by these artists can be read as feminist in precisely this regard—though to varying degrees. In general, the works by Rosler and Spero engage explicitly with the representation of war in relation to gendered bodies and spaces, while the works by Celmins do not. Likewise, Rosler and Spero were more actively involved in feminism at the time, and discuss their work in terms of gender and sexuality. That said, the works of all three artists are linked by their critique of regimes of representation, spectacle, and structures of power.8 A number of recent studies and exhibitions have examined artistic production in the US during the Vietnam War era. 9 In addition, recent

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scholarly and curatorial initiatives have sought to complicate our understanding of the politics of Pop Art, and to expand accounts of the period to include previously overlooked artists, many of them women.10 Such reassessments of the art of the 1960s may in part be prompted by a sense of resonance with recent and ongoing political circumstances, and with recent and ongoing wars. The lines of connections between our present politics and those of the era of the Vietnam War have been explicitly drawn by a range of contemporary artists (Spero and Rosler included) who have, in recent years, resurrected aspects of and, sometimes, entire works of 1960s antiwar art as a means of protesting the US role in the wars of the 2000s. 11 Beyond the nostalgia for a time of committed activism and effective protest—a nostalgia perhaps misplaced—what can a return to these 1960s war works offer us now?

Rosler’s Montages Between 1967 and 1972, while based in New York and San Diego, California, Martha Rosler made twenty photomontages that comprise the series called House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.12 She selected her source images from Life magazine’s photojournalistic coverage of the Vietnam War and from the pages of architecture and design magazines such as House Beautiful and Ladies Home Journal. The series consists of two sub-groups: five works, subtitled Bringing the War Home (In Vietnam), show black and white images of soldiers in conflict, some in grids or against blank grounds, while another fifteen, subtitled Bringing the War Home (House Beautiful), import images of landscapes and bodies from the Vietnam War into brightly colored spreads of American middleand upper-class homes.13 Rosler’s feminist and antiwar activism led her to abandon painting, the medium in which she had been working, in exchange for the photomontage of what she calls her “agitational works.”14 Photomontage enabled Rosler to construct new scenes using existing mass-media imagery, and to contrast the two image-realms—war and domestic— represented by her source material. In combining these two worlds, Rosler’s works dramatize the difference between the protected, luxurious environments of the American home and the ravaged spaces and bodies of the faraway war. This physical juxtaposition of mass-media imagery of home and war into a single montage invites, in turn, an equivalent psychic juxtaposition for its viewers. As Rosler explains, “I was trying to show that the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ of our world picture, defined by our naturalized accounts as separate or even opposite, were one.”15 Rosler’s

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montages disrupt the illusionism of the media representation of both domesticity and war, demonstrating that both are constructions—and constructions whose politics are entangled. Rosler was attuned to the historical legacy of photomontage as a technique for political speech, especially in relation to war. She has cited Dadaist photomontage as a precedent, noting that John Heartfield’s photomontages convey “the implicit message that photography alone cannot ‘tell the truth’ and also the reminder that fact itself is a social construction.” 16 Her reference to Heartfield in particular is historically topical, for Heartfield and his colleague George Grosz attribute their “invention” of photomontage to censor-evading picture postcards made and sent home by soldiers during World War I. In a lecture delivered to the Moscow Polytechnic Institute in 1931, Heartfield related that such montage aimed to “point out the yawning chasm between life on the front and the life of the bourgeois freeloaders.” 17 Photomontage enabled the soldiers to contrast images of their everyday experience of wartime horror with images of “’the life of the capitalist parasites,’” thus indicting the latter. Rosler’s photomontages evoke these Dadaist roots, yet they also mobilize montage in a way that distinguishes them from much of their art historical predecessors. While the cut up and borrowed nature of the medium is evident, most of the works in Rosler’s series maintain the spatial illusionism of the traditional picture-as-window. Rather than the violent disruption resulting from the juxtaposition of disparate imagery that characterized much Dadaist montage, many of Rosler’s images merge into a single perspectival field that appears, as she describes, “rational and possible…a coherent space—‘a place.’” 18 In some works from the In Vietnam sub-series, the collaged images adhere to the laws of perspective and scale, producing the illusion of space and depth in spite of the white ground; in others the images are arranged in grids, as if on a sign. In contrast, the images from the House Beautiful tend to maintain scale and perspective across diverse sources, so as to produce spatially legible “scenes” which fall roughly into one of two categories: either landscapes of war are visible outside, through the windows of the home, or the bodies of war—its victims and soldiers—appear inside the home. Whether the house enters the war, or the war enters the house, in both cases our vantage is from inside the home, and all visually enact the breakdown of the physical separation between the (American) home front and the distant war. Works such as Vacation Getaway, Cleaning the Drapes, and Patio View invite us into a world in which we watch the war from the vantage of

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domestic space, often through the transparent, breakable barrier of plateglass windows. In each of these scenes, the collaged outside environment matches the home in both scale and setting. The “secluded vacation spot” described in the caption of Vacation Getaway offers a view of hillsides and mountains while the more suburban Patio View looks out onto a street lined with houses (fig. 4-1). In each, the landscape from the house is plausible in its genre and topography, but for the fact that it is also clearly the site of war-related destruction. These views of the battlefield transform the modernist picture window from architectural attribute into liability, so that rather than watch the conflict through safety of the television screen, one is rendered vulnerable and exposed. Other works locate the disruptive effect of montage inside of the home, in the form of war-marked individuals entering its spaces. Here, too, the scenes approximate spatial and illusionistic coherence. In Tron, a girl missing one leg stands in the foreground, as if braced against the entryway to the room beyond. In Balloon, a distraught figure clutches a child, dead or wounded, and seems to be moving up the stairs towards us. Here, the cluster of balloons in the background suggests the aftermath of a child’s birthday party, “bringing home” the contrast between these two childhoods. In both works, the figures appear to be Southeast Asian, and it is this combination of ethnicity and wounds that marks them as interlopers from the war. In other works, as in Red Stripe Kitchen, uniformed soldiers invade the home, transforming the cupboards and hallway into the site of war reconnaissance. Here the male uniformed body takes the place of the wounded, non-white one.19 These figures and landscapes, saliently marked by war in the form of wounds, uniforms, ethnicity, explosions, and destruction, are clearly not “of” these homes. There is no mistaking this injured child as a casualty of the birthday party, or this kitchen as a realistic space in which to wage war. And yet in spite of such clear contrasts, these montages appear legible and coherent in terms of perspective and space. As a result, although we know they are collaged, we “read” them as scenes, and are invited to imagine that the depicted encounters between home and war are really unfolding. The force of Rosler’s montage depends in part on this invitation: that we conceive of a world in which the bloodied body, the army boot, and the war-scarred earth really is in contact with the modernist décor and pristine wall-to-wall carpet; a world in which the suburban birthday party is disrupted by the stricken parent carrying a warwounded child, in which one continues to clean the drapes in spite of the carnage beyond. As the war on the screen becomes the war out the window, our vantage at a safe distance is collapsed, and with it, our

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psychic distance from the conflict. The “living room war” becomes a spatial, embodied reality. Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home photomontages, and particularly the House Beautiful sub-series, have garnered much critical attention in recent years, and are often illustrated in catalogues and survey texts. Yet an important shift in both the context of their reception and their material existence is often overlooked. They were initially disseminated as flyers or in underground magazines, where they appeared in low-quality, black and white reproduction. They were not shown in an “art context” or in color until 1991, when they were editioned for an exhibition at Simon Watson Gallery. 20 While these recent editions are more faithful to the colors of Rosler’s source images, they depart substantially from the format in which the photomontages initially appeared—and from the agitprop context for which Rosler intended them. The implications of this transformation are significant, in that they speak to an ethical code according to which Rosler appropriated the images of war. The artist later explained that, at the time, the idea of showing such antiwar work in an art context “verged on the obscene, for its site seemed more properly ‘the street’ or the underground press, where such material could help marshal the troops.”21 That is, much like the And Babies poster, these photomontages were meant to elicit activism against an ongoing war, and for Rosler this rendered them incompatible with spaces for art. In a text written for a 1993 exhibition, Rosler expands on this position, explaining that while “it is important for artists to make works about war, it is too problematic to put them in art exhibition spaces while the war is going on.”22 For Rosler, then, the ethics of the use of the images of war depends upon their temporal relation to the conflict they represent, and on their capacity to galvanize activism, or “marshal the troops” against the war. Thus, to show a photomontage of images of the Vietnam War in an art gallery in 1971 was “obscene,” but to do so in 1991 was not. Rosler’s explanation of the shifting identity of her House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series fits within a broader concern, articulated in her writings and other works, about the risks of reiterating oppression via the use of documentary imagery. Rosler is especially wary of the capacity for images to elicit emotional responses that assuage the viewer’s responsibility for the events depicted, whereby the photojournalist takes on “the burden of pain, compassion, and bravery that inspires but simultaneously absolves the rest of us.” 23 This concern informs both Rosler’s choice of photomontage as a medium, and her understanding of the migration of House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home from street to gallery. In this series, as in many of her works, she employs Brecht’s

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strategy of the “Lehrstück” which, in Rosler’s words, “teaches while declining to arouse cathartic pity or fear, or worse – an ‘aesthetic experience.’” 24 Instead of responding to the image with emotional expression, the viewer must participate in constructing its meaning. House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home employs photomontage so as to render this construction of meaning literal and analogous to the construction of illusionistic space. We understand that the encounters between war bodies and landscapes and suburban American homes are constructed using montage, yet we simultaneously read them as “’a place’” in which such encounters might really occur.

Spero’s Scribbles Where Rosler montaged existing imagery, the artist Nancy Spero invented her own aesthetic and visual lexicon to represent the Vietnam War. Between 1966 and 1970 in New York, Spero produced a body of work, now known as the War Series, consisting of over 150 war scenes featuring images of bombs and helicopters. The series was inspired by photographic and television coverage of the Vietnam War, but instead of appropriating photographs directly, Spero worked primarily with gouache and ink on paper. Spero made these works via violent scribbling and rubbing, sometimes tearing the thin paper support and mingling her own saliva into her medium. The images that result from this expressive, bodily process are themselves expressive and corporeal: helicopters and bombs rendered as monstrous creatures brandishing bodily fluids as artillery. As with Rosler, a radical shift in both aesthetic and technique accompanied Spero’s artistic engagement with the Vietnam War. Between 1959 and 1964, while living in Paris with her children and husband, the painter Leon Golub, Spero completed the Paris Black Paintings, a series of nocturnally-created oil paintings in which androgynous, sketched couples float in shadowy layers of dark paint. These paintings garnered little attention, a fact that fed Spero’s bourgeoning feminism.25 When the couple returned to New York in 1964 to a nation embroiled in violent conflict abroad, Spero felt compelled to protest the war, but unable to do so via painting, a medium that according to her was burdened by the “restrictive precepts in art practice.” 26 In 1966, she substituted paper for canvas and began the War Series. Spero has articulated this rejection of painting as a response to a set of concerns linked by their relation to patriarchal power structures: the marginalization of women artists, the dominance of modernist painting, and the prevalence of war. Spero’s antiwar work required not only a shift in subject matter, but also a

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rejection of the medium, scale, and composition by which a work was deemed “important” by the art market. 27 Her aesthetic shift was a move “against the art world, the male establishment and [it] continues over time—[against] male dominance, male wars, males as perpetrators.”28 If, as she viewed it, patriarchy dictated war and art-world values alike, then her rejection of one could serve as protest against the other. (Spero’s eschewal of these standards proved perhaps too effective; she describes her work from the 1960s and early 1970s as “unknown, ignored, and on occasion the War Series was ridiculed.”29) Spero began the War Series by drawing ferocious, anthropomorphized, and graphically sexed bombs in mid-explosion. In Androgynous Bomb and Victims (1966), for example, a brown smear, somewhere between a mushroom cloud and mastodon, sprays blood from two breasts and a penis over a bloody wasteland of bodies (fig. 4-2). These bombs are often depicted as giant, explosive gestures with human heads and genitalia, while their victims appear as scattered, tiny, and indistinguishable marks. Spero’s bombs are monstrous, mythical creatures that terrorize the people below. After nine months drawing bombs, Spero shifted to the motif of the helicopter, which dominated subsequent works in the series. The helicopter was, as she explains, “the symbol of this war—the omnipresent image of the chopper hovering, transporting soldiers, napalming villages, gunning fleeing peasants or picking up wounded and dead US soldiers.”30 Like the bombs, Spero’s helicopters are anthropomorphic, blurring categories of human, beast, and machine. In an early drawing, The Bug, Helicopter, Victims (1966), the helicopter becomes a giant insect—literally “bug-eyed,”—a green streak that tugs at the thin paper, seemingly on a collision course with the earth. Dotted across the image, red splotches bleed over their black outlines, so that the creature’s “victims” appear insect-like as well. The helicopter of Gunship (1966) spews blood and bodies from its gaping mouth while bones cascade from its tail. In S.U.P.E.R.P.A.C.I.F.I.C.A.T.I.O.N. (1967), whose title parodies the language and acronyms of military operations, bodies dangle from the breasts of a serpentine mother ship. Other drawings make explicit reference to particular characters. The cross-wielding cowboy of Clown and Helicopter (1967) darkly parodies both the bellicose Cardinal Spellman, who appears by name in another work, Cardinal Spellman, Helicopter, Eagle Cross, Angel (1967), and Major Kong, the war-hungry Texan (played by the cowboy Slim Pickins) who makes his famous bombriding descent at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

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Spero’s War Series employs bomb and helicopter metonymically, as forms that stand for the entirety of the war’s dynamics of destruction, power and spectacle. As Mignon Nixon has explained, the drawings serve to “incarnate the phantasmatic dimensions of war, to invoke the infantile, sadistic, often sexualized mania that pervades war violence.” 31 Spero’s bombs and helicopters embody this chaotic imbrication of war violence and sexuality, disrupting the omnipotent fantasy of war as precise and controlled. In place of mechanical, inanimate war machines, we encounter furious, sexed chimeras that spew bodily fluids. The War Series performs this same operation on the means by which war is represented: it transposes the technologically produced, authoritative surface of the massmedia image into expressive and corporeal materials and gestures. In Spero’s use of bodily fluids and gouache and her aggressive scribbles on fragile paper supports, the process of representation becomes a material analog for the destruction of war, and in particular its destruction of bodies. In both their anthropomorphism and their aesthetics these bombs and helicopters present the war machine not from the accurate detail of the distant camera lens, but from the terrified, subjective position of those at its mercy. Spero recounts that she “imagined that Vietnamese peasants saw [the helicopter] as a giant monster,” and so depicts them through the projective lens of their victims’ phantasmagoric terror.32 The politics of this projection are problematic, and yet the fantastical nature of Spero’s representations makes the role of imagination explicit; they do not aspire to realism, and if anything underscore our lack of access to the lived experience of war. We might characterize Spero’s tactic as one of extreme projection, attempting to evoke for distant viewers the psychological and emotional dynamics of warfare in a way that photomechanical, massmedia coverage could not. As Spero recalls, “the images coming over the media were, day after day, unrelenting, and one wondered whether the viewers, all of us, were getting hardened. To see the carnage, the devastation of our soldiers, interspersed with ads, soaps and everything else.” The hand-made, sexually explicit, and ferociously embodied encounters depicted in the War Series present a corrective innervation for viewers at risk of becoming inured to the “unrelenting” media images. Spero often characterized the drawings as “manifestoes” or “exorcisms,” suggesting that the very process of drawing could effect change.33 In the face of the mass-media image, drawing the war was a means not only to describe latent structures of oppression but also, in laying them bare, to drive them out.

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Celmins’s Redescriptions In their use of the mass-media imagery of war, Vija Celmins’s series of war works made from 1964-68 fall somewhere between Rosler’s direct appropriation and Spero’s hand-wrought fantasies. Rendered in grayscale oil on canvas and in graphite on acrylic ground on paper, these small drawings and paintings capture moments of violent rupture on a monumental scale: a billowing mushroom cloud, warplanes splintering in mid-air, a ship exploding at sea. Each is a meticulous transcription—or “redescription” as Celmins calls it—of a found mass-media photograph. But in contrast with Rosler and Spero, Celmins did not look to contemporary imagery of the Vietnam War. Instead, she based her works on photos of World War II, which she found in scrap-albums and used books in flea markets and bookstores in Los Angeles, where she was then based. From this unofficial series only one work, Time (1965), a painting depicting the cover of the August 1965 issue of Time magazine featuring imagery of the Watts uprising in Los Angeles, explicitly references a contemporary event. Celmins’s selection of such anachronistic source imagery was in part motivated by her personal history. She spent her early childhood amid World War II and its aftermath, first in Latvia and then as a refugee in Germany before her family’s relocation to the US in 1948.34 Yet beyond this personal connection, the origins of her source photos also demonstrate the extent to which the coverage of World War II permeated the nation’s informal image archives and collections in the 1960s. These are not personal snapshots but mass-produced images that circulated widely, often first through newspapers, and then through scrap-albums and commemorative books about the war. Celmins is one of many artists who, during the 1960s, appropriated or otherwise drew on such mass-media representations of past conflicts, from Roy Lichtenstein’s War Comics (1962-64) to the Airplanes of Gerhard Richter (with whom Celmins is often compared.)35 This resurrection of the imagery of past wars points to the ways in which the persistence of the representation of violence shapes our perceptions of both ongoing conflicts and historical ones. Celmins’s T.V., a 1964 oil painting, was the first work based on a World War II news photo, and it constitutes a transitional image in her oeuvre in several respects. When she began her MFA program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1962, she abandoned the gestural abstract expressionism of her training and embarked on a project of aesthetic reduction. Restricting her subject matter to the contents of her studio, she painted still-lifes of the everyday objects and appliances that

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surrounded her: a lamp, a hotplate, or a can of soda, for instance. T.V., in a sense, extends this project, except that this particular appliance generates an image. The grayscale television sits in the middle of a disorienting, empty gray ground; on its screen, which is positioned parallel to the plane of the canvas, an airplane explodes in plumes of white smoke. For Celmins, T.V. provided a vehicle through which to expand a repertoire of subjects beyond the contents of the studio. But rather than import another banal three-dimensional object, T.V. brings into the studio an object-asimage, and one with highly charged historical resonance. The conflict in Vietnam was, as Celmins notes, “just starting to rage,” and with it came a flood of newsprint and, for the first time, televised images of war.36 Yet into the infancy of America’s first “living room war,” Celmins smuggles a vintage image of a historical conflict. The capacity for distant sight promised by the name of the appliance here becomes vision over historical distance as well. T.V. enacts a slippage of history in which the war unfolding in the present is haunted by a war that wasn’t televised. TV also collapses, or at least confuses, the distinction between two technologies of representation, and thus of the temporality of the appropriated image; what we assume to be a moving scene, frozen by the artist’s medium, is in fact already still, a still, captured by the camera’s shutter. At a time when many artists were beginning to experiment with the technological possibilities of new media forms, Celmins negates the technology of television twice over by painting it into a still life and smuggling a film still onto its screen. Many of Celmins’s subsequent paintings also feature warplanes caught just at the moment of rupture—burning, cracking, and crashing. In Flying Fortress (1966), a gray B-17 bomber hovers mid-flight in the middle of the canvas, but close inspection reveals a jagged slice of sky visible through a break its fuselage. Here as in the other World War II paintings that followed T.V., Celmins includes only the media image, without any frame that might indicate its source. Yet the grisaille palette remains as vestige of the technological intermediary between painting and scene of violence. In a 1968 group of graphite drawings on acrylic ground, the frame of the media source reappears, here as newspaper clipping rendered to scale in trompe l’oeil. In the clipping depicted in Bikini, a white mushroom cloud billows skywards from the horizon line, filling the upper half of the drawing of the photo, while in the foreground, tiny palm trees flail (fig. 43). The clipping’s bottom edge is drawn into a jagged tear, with a scrap of caption that reads “ATOMIC BLAST FLINGS ‘MUSHROOM,” and below, “Bikini Lagoon, July 25, 1946.” More explicitly than the preceding paintings, these drawings play with our perception of flatness versus

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depth, and thus also of image versus object. The clippings are drawn as though crumpled, creased, torn and stapled, emphasizing the status of their sources not only as images, but as physical matter that was disseminated, collected and held. Celmins has explained that the photograph functions in her work as “another layer that creates distance. And distance creates an opportunity to view the work more slowly and to explore your relationship to it.”37 The specter of a photographic presence, in the form of the grisaille palette or the clipping’s edge, prevents us from completely entering the illusionism of the image. At a time when magazines and television delivered the imagery of the war in ever more immediate detail, in motion and in color, Celmins’s works thematize the process of emission, transmission, and reception that constitutes the mass media image, inviting contemplation of the geographical and temporal distance between the site of the event and site of viewing. In these drawings and paintings, Celmins replicates the appearance of an image that is produced mechanically twice over, first via the camera, then via the printing press of a newspaper. The resulting paintings and drawings are unsettling hybrids, testing our understanding of how different media produce meaning and relate to history. In these works, it can seem as though oil and graphite are impersonating photography’s indexicality, or what Barthes refers to as its “message without a code.”38 In transposing her source images with such meticulous fidelity, Celmins’s war works suggest a negotiation of the imagery of war through the technical precision of the hand-made mark. As a group, Celmins’s World War II works are notable for the kinds of war scenes they do not show. Not one depicts the human subject caught up in war. Instead, both Celmins’s source medium, photography, and the events reproduced belong to the temporality and the scale of the machine. They relay vast, instantaneous events, captured and transmitted over great distances. Her subjects are necessarily photogenic: events unfolding at such speed, at such scale, and under such conditions that they can only be “seen” by the camera. They bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s prescient observation, made in 1936 amid the rise of fascism, that war is “especially suited to the camera.”39 Many of these sights are impossible for the body to observe unaided; the speed of flight, the flash of the atomic explosion produce a kind of blindness to the naked eye. The temporality and scale of the events depicted is in tension with the slow, detailed contemplation required to both make and perceive these works. Celmins’s hand-made images make manifest this gulf between human perception and that of the machine. Onto images produced in an instant by the camera, often

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capturing an instantaneous event and transmitted over vast distances, Celmins’s works impose human temporality and human sensory perception. In a 1993 exhibition catalogue, Martha Rosler wrote of the ongoing conflict in former Yugoslavia that, “I could neither make nor refuse to make a work about that war.”40 The images I have described by Rosler and Vija Celmins suggest two approaches to this double bind, both of which rely on temporal distance: in the midst of the escalating conflict in Vietnam, Celmins recovers the imagery of a vintage war, while Rosler uses contemporary war imagery, but restricts the circulation of her photomontages to “non-art” contexts until the war is over. In contrast, Nancy Spero shows no reservations about making a work explicitly about an ongoing war, and uses gestural drawing precisely for its ability to produce the perception of emotional connection. Yet of the three, Spero’s drawings deviate most substantially from the mass-media coverage that inspired them. Here, their explicitly fantastical, expressionistic nature distinguishes them from the photographic news coverage of war. The works by Rosler, Spero, and Celmins are as much about how war is represented, and how those images circulate, as they are about the war itself. They reveal the structures of power that are latent in media representations of war, pointing to how such images shape our understandings of violence and history. Judith Butler has argued that, “…if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be.”41 The works of Rosler, Spero, and Celmins demonstrate three distinct approaches to this possibility of critique, each in its own way defamiliarizing the imagery of war, and drawing attention to how we construct meaning from such pictures. In their varied appropriations of and responses to the mass-media coverage of war, these three artists align in one, perhaps surprising, respect: their evocation of intimate spatial and sensory experience. In Rosler’s montages, the war and war-wounded enter familiar, domestic settings; Spero’s drawings transform the war into body parts and bodily functions; and Celmins’s drawings and paintings render moments of explosive violence as meticulous, hand-crafted images requiring close contemplation. These works puncture the perceptual boundaries of the mass-media representation of war. They transform the “shock-photo” into a kind of shock-touch, “bringing the war home” by rendering us perceptually vulnerable to its violence.

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Notes 1

This essay is indebted to insights gained from an MA seminar with Mignon Nixon at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006-07, the Princeton University Media and Modernity Colloquium in April 2013, the Museum of Modern Art’s 2013-14 Museum Research Consortium Fellows, and the members of the Johns Hopkins University Spring 2015 Gender History Workshop. 2 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message” (1961), in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 30-31. From the French original, ‘Le message photographique,’ Communications 1, 1961: “…la photographie traumatique (incendies, naufrages, catastrophes, morts violentes, saisis ‘sur le vif’) est celle dont il n'y a rien à dire: la photo-choc est par structure insignifiante: aucune valeur, aucun savoir, à la limite aucune categorization verbale ne peuvent avoir prise sur le procès institutionnel de la signification.” 3 The poster was designed in late 1969 by the AWC’s Artists Poster Committee, consisting of Frazier Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, and Irving Petlin, using a photograph taken by army photographer Ron L. Haeberle and text from an interview between reporter Mike Wallace and Officer Paul Meadlo, a transcript of which appeared in The New York Times. For a detailed discussion of the Art Workers’ Coalition and this poster, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) and Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 4 Ad Reinhardt, “Ad Reinhardt: Art as Art,” interview by Jeanne Siegel, WBAI, New York, June 13, 1967; printed in Jeanne Siegel, Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York: De Capo, 1985), quoted in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 8. 5 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 18. 6 The media coverage of the Vietnam War was notable for both its increase in verisimilitude and in the public’s access to war coverage. The war was the first to be broadcast on television, accounting for a wide viewership: by 1967, over ninetyfive percent of households in the US owned TVs. Larry Burrows’s famous color photographs of Vietnam began to appear in the pages of national magazines in 1962, and 1965 marked the year when more than half of all TV networks began to broadcast in color. 7 Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 3. 8 These groups of works are further linked by the belatedness of their reception, in that each did not receive substantial exhibition or critical attention until recently. Rosler’s works were first exhibited and editioned in 1991, when ten were included in an exhibition at the Simon Watson Gallery (see fn 18). Spero’s War Series was not shown in its entirety in the US until 2003 at Galerie Lelong in New York. The first substantial presentation of Celmins’s war works since their initial showing in 1965 occurred in 2011, at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The belated reception of these series can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the

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gender of the artists in question and a broader art-historical ambivalence to art’s relation to political action and speech. 9 Cécile Whiting addresses how a number of Los Angeles-based artists (including Celmins) incorporated references to World War Two into their work in the 1960s in “California War Babies: Picturing World War Two in the 1960s,” Art Journal 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 40-61. See also Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Seattle, WA: Real Comet Press, 1990) and Catherine de Zegher, ed., Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American Vietnam War (New York: The Drawing Center, 2005), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name curated by de Zegher. 10 See for example, Sid Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2010). At the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association in 2012, Allison Unruh and Kalliopi Minioudaki chaired an exhaustive, three-session panel on “Pop and Politics.” 11 See, for example, the reconceptualization by Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija of the Artists’ Tower for Peace (1966) for the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2006. De Zegher’s exhibition at The Drawing Center included a wall drawing by Nancy Spero called Search and Destroy (2005) that incorporated images from her earlier War Series. Also included were Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004-08), which montaged images of the Iraq war into domestic interiors, alongside some of her earlier Vietnam works. 12 Rosler moved to San Diego in late 1968. 13 The syntax and word order of these titles varies; they are also referred to as House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, in Vietnam. The titles used here are stipulated by the artist (note from Martha Rosler to the author, June 9, 2015). 14 Note from Martha Rosler to the author, June 9, 2015. 15 Martha Rosler, “Place, Position, Power, Politics,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 355. 16 Rosler, “Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 279. 17 Heartfield’s lecture appears in Sergei Tretyakov, John Heartfield: A Monograph (Moscow: State Publishing House, 1936), quoted in translation by Devin Fore in David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds., Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 55. 18 Rosler, “Place, Position, Power, Politics,” 355. 19 These montages also stage encounters between types of gendered labor. When male soldiers parade through the kitchen, or when a woman cleans the drapes in view of a battlefield, the masculinity of war work pointedly contrasts with

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women’s work. In turn, both are, as Rosler points out, simultaneously denaturalized and implicated in one another. 20 See Laura Cottingham, “The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler,” Bringing the War Home: Photomontages from the Vietnam War Era (New York: Simon Watson Gallery, 1991). The photomontages originally appeared in magazines such as Goodbye to All That: Newspaper for San Diego Women 3 (October 13, 1970) and 10 (March 9-23, 1971). 21 Rosler, “Place, Position, Power, Politics,” 355. 22 Rosler, “War in My Work,” in Francis Frascina, ed., Modern Art Culture: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), 389-90. 23 Rosler, “Wars and Metaphors,” Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 254. 24 Rosler, “War in My Work,” 390. 25 As Catherine de Zegher writes, these paintings had “no audience, no reception… she was to experience that to speak was no guarantee to be heard.” Catherine de Zegher, Nancy Spero (Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 1998), 5. 26 Nancy Spero, quoted in “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero” in Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1994), 34. 27 As Spero explained, working on paper was “intentionally subversive, a personal rebellion, recognizing that I would no longer do ‘important’ work, in terms of collectors’ preferences.” Spero, “A Conversation,” 28. 28 Spero, in “A Conversation,” 28. 29 Ibid., 22. 30 Spero quoted in Harlow Tighe and Elena Carotti, eds., Nancy Spero: The War Series, 1966-1970 (Milan: Charta, 2003), n.p. 31 Mignon Nixon, “Book of Tongues” in Nancy Spero, et al, Nancy Spero: Dissidances (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 33. 32 Spero quoted in Tighe and Carotti, Nancy Spero, n.p. 33 Tighe and Carotti, Nancy Spero, n.p. 34 Between 120,000 and 300,000 Latvians were displaced in the summer of 1944, as the Nazi German army retreated west and the Soviet army advanced from the east. Celmins and her family fled Riga for eastern Germany in 1944, subsequently settling in the west in a Latvian refugee community in Esslingen, near Stuttgart. In 1948, with the assistance of the World Church Service, her family came by ship to the US and settled in Indianapolis, Indiana. See “Chronology” in Chuck Close, Vija Celmins (Los Angeles: Art Resource Transfer, 1992), 61-62. For more on Latvian refugees during World War Two, see Valdis O. Lumans, Latvia in World War II (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 341-349. 35 Whiting, “California War Babies,” 41. 36 Celmins in conversation with the author, April 2007. 37 Celmins quoted in Close, Vija Celmins, 13. 38 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17.

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39 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version” (1936), in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2008), 54n26. 40 Rosler, “War in My Work,” 389-90. 41 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 100.

CHAPTER FIVE FROM “FREE SPEECH” TO “FREE HUEY”: VISUAL EPHEMERA AND THE COLLABORATION OF BLACK POWER WITH WHITE RESISTANCE JO-ANN MORGAN

The Signs They Are A-Changin’ When University of California, Berkeley student Mario Savio, inspired by civil rights workers he had met in Mississippi that “Freedom Summer of ‘64,” led his fellow collegians in protesting the administration edict against campus political organizing, their one large banner read simply “Free Speech.” The mostly white, conservatively dressed procession passing through Berkeley’s Sather Gate had left behind Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) pamphlets on table displays to take a more public stand. They would soon be, in what became an idiom of the times, “takin’ it to the streets” (fig. 5-1).1 By 1968, public demonstrations in the East Bay communities of Berkeley and Oakland had burgeoned. Protests entreating “get out of Vietnam” and “no more war,” ongoing since 1965, were still spearheaded by students—of draft age and increasingly impervious to the dictates of authority—but there was growing political awareness and activism off campus as well. The role of print ephemera expanded. Events were engineered for visual impact, attracting photographers from mainstream as well as alternative news outlets who further spread the message. In addition to the students, antiwar marches and various rallies brought in local residents, many of them African American. From neighboring Oakland came the imperative to save a young black man from a feared execution to be carried out on what many felt were

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contrived charges. In the early hours of October 28, 1967, during a socalled by police routine traffic stop, two Oakland policemen were shot, one fatally. The young man, Huey P. Newton, founding member of the Black Panther Party, and veteran of over fifty previous “routine” traffic stops, was wounded in the abdomen and charged with murder. No gun was found on him, although a book on United States law, his name signed within, lay nearby.2 With the mounting protests, signage styles also underwent change. As the Newton trial commenced on July 15, 1968, between two and three thousand people converged on the Alameda County Courthouse chanting “Free Huey.” Young men uniformed in black berets and leather jackets waved blue Black Panther banners, and everyone held huge picture posters of the celebrity prisoner held inside. In addition to Black Panther Party members and others from the African American community, also present were the Berkeley New Left—their ranks made up from inheritors of the Free Speech fervor of 1964 and the more recent Vietnam Day Committee marches.3 A distrust of authority fomenting within civil rights and antiwar groups, plus African Americans’ perceptions of the police as armed occupiers rather than keepers of the peace, gave all factions a shared disdain for local law enforcement. But what brought them to this place at this time, united in support of Huey P. Newton, was an orchestrated program using well-placed photographs and other visual ephemera to plead his innocence (figs. 5-2 and 5-3). The lynchpin most responsible for securing the disparate, and at times uneasy, coalition was Black Panther Party Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. In a comprehensive study of Berkeley activism of the 1960s, William Rohrbach identified him as the “main link between the two communities” of black militants and white radicals.4 Cleaver was known as a writer, a regular contributor to the leftist magazine Ramparts and bestselling author of the autobiographical Soul On Ice (1968), but he was also a dynamic speaker who could galvanize crowds, white and black alike. Even more important, he had an innate sense of how photographs, signs, and public assemblies could impact various audiences, while also attracting maximum press coverage. He masterfully employed these visual materials in an indefatigable campaign to “Free Huey.” Celebrated then and since for his written and spoken contributions to political struggles, rarely—if ever—has Cleaver’s visual acumen been given credit for shaping the landscape of Black Power and white resistance in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley during 1967 and 1968 (fig. 5-4).5

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Eldridge X Eldridge Cleaver’s involvement in Bay Area activism started with a photograph, and it would be another photograph through which he waged the Free Huey campaign. Cleaver, or Eldridge X, as he then sometimes called himself, had been in California prisons for eight years when, in October 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton conceived a Ten-Point Platform, effectively founding the Black Panther Party. Two months later, Cleaver was out on parole, and by the next April he was in Panther leadership. While incarcerated at Soledad State Prison he developed an African American history and culture class through which he shared the teachings of Malcolm X with other inmates. This made the guards antagonistic to Cleaver’s writing of anything but legal briefs. 6 Seeking advice to appeal for writing privileges, he sent letters, one a day, to California lawyers whose names he found in newspaper accounts of civil liberties causes. By spring 1965, his list almost exhausted, Cleaver happened to see a photograph in the Sun-Reporter, a Bay Area newspaper with a black readership. One evening I went to my cell and there was a picture of Beverly in the paper in connection with some case she was involved in. She was a very beautiful woman with a very striking face. All the men had been no help. So I decided to write her. I wrote her a different kind of letter, a letter that I thought a woman would understand.7

This woman, Beverly Axelrod, had been a defense attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during trials held after protests of the discriminatory hiring practices of both San Francisco’s “Auto Row” (a street known for its large number of automobile dealers) and the Sheraton Palace Hotel. Cleaver noted her “standing in a group of black men on the steps of a courthouse—laughing and clearly enjoying herself.”8 Years later he recalled to scholar Melanie Kask, formerly Axelrod’s daughter-in-law, that he “surmised, from her expression and her body language in the photograph, that she was at ease with, and liked, black men.” 9 Cleaver’s ability to read the photograph served him well as he strategized how best to gain this important help. Axelrod found Cleaver’s letter compelling and visited him in prison within a few days. For the next year and a half she worked to get him released as they shared letters and weekly visits, growing closer and eventually becoming romantically involved. Axelrod strategized that publishing the letters and essays Cleaver was composing for her might improve his standing with the parole board.10 Well-connected within left-

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wing legal and literary circles in San Francisco, she showed their correspondence to Ramparts magazine publisher Edward Keating. He, too, was smitten with the prisoner’s abilities and published Cleaver’s essay on James Baldwin in June 1966, and his “Letters from Prison” the following month. A job writing for the magazine was available to Cleaver once he got out.11 Axelrod helped prepare Cleaver’s writing into a manuscript for what eventually became Soul On Ice. Even before his release she had negotiated an agreement for the book’s publication with McGraw-Hill.12 Assisted by her representation, Cleaver was granted parole in November and released December 9, 1966.13 Before these events transpired, Axelrod already had an impressive civil rights resume. In 1963, she was a volunteer lawyer for CORE during voter registration drives in Louisiana. As an NAACP defense attorney she had represented hundreds of activists, many of them white students, during demonstrations against the alleged racial discrimination on Auto Row and at the Sheraton. It was, in fact, these demonstrations that had prompted the business-minded Board of Regents (the governing body of the University of California higher education system) to outlaw campus organizing at UC Berkeley, which instigated the Free Speech Movement (FSM). 14 In addition, she was legal counsel for the Vietnam Day Committee, a coalition devoted to advocating against the Vietnam War.15 Through Axelrod, Cleaver met major figures in the Bay Area leftist community, and his job with Ramparts connected him with other writers.16 Axelrod introduced him to Jerry Rubin, a onetime UC student and initiator of Vietnam Day Committee marches. Rubin would soon become cofounder of the Youth International Party, or the “Yippies,” with Abbie Hoffman.17 Axelrod notably defended Rubin when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1966.18 At a Berkeley gathering of these and other free speech and antiwar activists, Cleaver marveled at the large posters of W. C. Fields and Che Guevara on his ceiling and wall.19 Having been incarcerated since 1958, seeing what were then termed “personality posters” so displayed was new to him. It is tempting to imagine the impression was profound enough that a year later, when he pondered how to bring attention to Newton, he remembered his initial response to these captivating pictures. Large portrait posters were a mainstay in American electoral politics, but the touting of individuals in protest demonstrations was unprecedented. An abundance of such personality posters were seen throughout Berkeley, and not just of politicians: huge black-and-white posters of Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, Mae West, and other film stars and literati were widely available. Despite this, no one on the Left thought

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to incorporate such large, photographic posters into their protest, marching with little else but an occasional word sign. Prominent groups like the Vietnam Day Committee measured success by assembling larger and larger crowds for the attendant media coverage.20 Signs were little more than a way to flash a pithy textual message as protestors passed by a press photographer. The photograph that became a personality poster of Newton—seated, gun and spear in hand—was created in late April or early May 1967, and used to officially launch The Black Panther newspaper. Bobby Seale, present at the photo shoot, recalled that it was largely Cleaver’s idea. “He artistically put that picture together.”21 The setting was Beverly Axelrod’s home in San Francisco (fig. 5-5).22 Snapshots Cleaver made in January and February 1967 shortly after his parole offer insight into his attentiveness to the details of his lawyer/lover’s domestic space. Their close relationship comes through in intimate settings where she cooks, lounges awkwardly, or relaxes, hair down, loosely wrapped in a robe, smoking a cigarette on the side of a rumpled bed. The wicker chair that would soon support Newton is featured with Axelrod behind it. On the wall, perhaps hung by Axelrod to please Eldridge X, resides a large poster of Malcolm X (fig. 5-6). Cleaver’s inventory of home décor lingered on a poster of Marcel Marceau, who had recently performed in San Francisco at the Geary Theater. The French mime artist skews awkwardly, sharing the frame with an empty soda pop bottle atop the refrigerator, indicating Cleaver strained to fit the large print into a snapshot. African masks and sculptural figures, too, caught his attention. Likely Cleaver already had the props in mind when the time came to compose the photograph Seale would call a “centralized symbol of the leadership of black people in the community.”23 Cleaver’s first meeting with Black Panthers also made a vivid visual impression. The occasion was a February 1967 convening of African American activists to organize security for Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, who was coming to an event in the Hunter’s Point area of San Francisco. His back to Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and a small cadre of Panthers as they arrived, Cleaver witnessed the reaction to their entry. He noted “a deep female gleam leaping out of one of the women’s eyes…the total admiration of a black woman for a black man.” Journalist Gene Marine later quoted Cleaver, who turned to behold “the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets. Powder-blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes—and each with a gun!” 24 These were more than just armed black men in stylish leather coats wearing berets. Relishing the sight, Cleaver the visual thinker

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summoned adjectives to emphasize that they wore “powder-blue” shirts, and their shoes were “shiny.” Before Cleaver supervised the photo shoot at Axelrod’s home that would produce the iconic poster of Newton enthroned, the two Panther founders had already posed for a photograph that would become a widely reproduced poster. Seale and Newton were profiled in April 1967 for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. Accompanying the story, titled “Its All Legal: Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns, Talk Revolution,” was a photograph in which both men held guns. The combination of fierce-looking, armed men and attention-grabbing headline became the rule in reporting that invariably showcased their militancy: the “guns,” without any reasoned analysis of their political ideas, and the “revolution.” Although a Chronicle/Examiner photographer shot the photo, by then Cleaver had joined the Party and may have served as advisor for the posing, props, and clothing worn. Since they began six months earlier this was the first photograph to really express what the Black Panthers stood for.25 Seale and Newton, armed and regaled in the black berets and leather jackets that had caught Cleaver’s attention when he first met them, stand before a large sign announcing: “Black Panther Party for Self Defense.” The photograph was mass-produced as a poster and would frequently appear in the Black Panther newspaper. Clipped details of their faces were transposed onto announcements, flyers, and pin-back buttons. All were likely directed by Cleaver.26

Border Crossing: North Oakland and South Berkeley Prostitutes were still plying their trade that October 28, 1967 morning at 4:28 a.m. near the corner of Seventh and Willow in West Oakland when Huey P. Newton and two local policemen had their fateful encounter. Curiously, none of them would be called as trial witnesses. It was a world apart from the North Oakland/South Berkeley neighborhoods from which came Newton, Seale, and others among the early Panthers. A red-light district with late night bars and soul food joints where Newton had gone to celebrate getting off probation, it was fifty city blocks from Panther headquarters. The first Panther office opened in January 1967 next to Merritt College, near the Berkeley line.27 Seale and Newton were students at Merritt and lived nearby. Seale’s home was across the street from the college and only a short drive from UC-Berkeley. Seale and Newton were likely comfortable in the Berkeley milieu of bookstores and coffee houses. On March 17, 1967, a few months prior to founding the Black Panther Party, they and a couple friends were at a

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restaurant near the Berkeley campus. Seale, a talented public speaker known for his stand-up comedy in local clubs, was urged to recite poetry, and a chair among outdoor tables was secured for an impromptu recitation. Local police interrupted, there was pushing, and Seale was arrested for “blocking the sidewalk.” While Seale and friends may have been at home in the college town atmosphere, evidently the police had other ideas.28 Another Berkeley outing soon after the Party formed reveals how Seale and Newton relied on the UC campus community. To raise startup money to buy guns for “self defense,” they chose Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, a convening point for the Free Speech Movement and many subsequent marches. “All you free speechers up here who lost Mario Savio must read the Red Book and do it like the Red Guards did it,” Seale called to passersby. Purchased from a wholesaler for thirty cents, they sold copies of Quotations of Chairman Mao for one dollar each, earning a $170 profit.29 The guns they hold in the Examiner/Chronicle photograph were supplied by Berkeley student Richard Aoki. 30 Profits from book sales would fund many more. At Merritt, Seale and Newton were active with the Soul Students Advisory Council and in other politically minded groups. They had been acquainted since 1962 and were knowledgeable about student political activities ongoing in Berkeley since at least 1964. As they grew weary of the all-talk-and-no-action aspect of student organizations at Merritt, what most ignited their growing political consciousness were the discussions they shared with each other.31 By October 15, 1966 they had decided to take action. Using typewriter and mimeograph equipment in the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center where they were employed counseling youth, Seale and Newton drafted a document stating what an envisioned Black Panther Party would represent. Seale was an ardent devotee of Malcolm X and collected copies of Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks, as well as the Socialist Party’s The Militant. 32 Both Newton and Seale were impressed by the writings of Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth (1961) described colonization in a way that could be equated with the plight of American blacks. The book would be required reading for aspiring Panthers.33 Inspired by the Ten-Point Program that Malcolm X published in Muhammad Speaks, and informed by the thinking of Fanon, their “TenPoint Platform” began: “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” 34 The platform continued, “We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.” This was a priority. To accomplish the goals, they initiated “survival programs.” The first was a police patrol: after monitoring police

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activities by shortwave radio, a car with properly armed Panthers then followed the squad car as it cruised West and North Oakland.35 As might be expected, the police patrols garnered attention. One evening Newton, Seale, and Bobby Hutton, a teenager they had drafted through the Anti-Poverty Center, were making their rounds when they were stopped by police and interrogated on the street. Coincidentally, this occurred close to Merritt College just as night school was ending. Newton, an avid student of American law, boldly challenged the patrolmen’s right to physically examine their legally obtained guns. He cited the Fourteenth Amendment protection of property, and likely also the Second Amendment right to bear arms. At a recent Soul Student’s Advisory Council meeting, Newton had arrived carrying an M-1 rifle to inform the attendees about the Party’s stance on self-defense and gun rights. Now his confident face-off with actual police further impressed potential recruits with his commitment.36 Support for the police patrols grew among African Americans. Purportedly the Alameda County Sheriff’s office trolled Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to find rural whites for the Oakland police force. Journalist Don Schanche said of the practice in 1970: “I don’t know if those reports are true. However, it is significant evidence of the people’s deep fear that the stories persist.”37 Even if not enlisted from the Jim Crow South, their behavior—protecting property of the ruling class through violent policing of blacks—echoed a familiar pattern.

Sacramento Photo Opportunity The police patrols made the Panthers targets of surveillance, and within weeks there was a legislative backlash. Republican State Assemblyman Don Mumford, whose district included affluent Montclair, Piedmont, and the hillside areas of Berkeley, as well as the Oakland flatlands where many African Americans resided, drafted a bill proposing limits on citizens carrying weapons. On May 2, 1967, five carloads with over two-dozen Panthers convoyed to the State Capitol in Sacramento to protest passage of the bill. Photographs of the armed young men and women, gathered in entryways of the state house, were splashed across newspapers throughout the country. Suddenly, the fledgling Party was famous. Coverage of their visit to Sacramento in the local and national press was sensational. US News and World Report inflated their numbers in touting how “About 40 young Negro men swarmed through the State Capitol on May 2, 1967.”38 “Armed Gang Storms Assembly Chambers”

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and “Armed Group Subdued After Scare at Capitol” read the Sacramento Union. 39 “‘Panthers’ Invade Capitol” informed the San Francisco Examiner. 40 A cover story in the Oakland Tribune was titled “Armed Foray In Assembly Stirs Wrath,” continuing inside with “‘Panther’ Invasion Shocks Assembly.”41 All reporting was accompanied by striking photographic images. Jane Rhodes has termed the Panthers “icons of radical resistance,” ever cognizant of how they would be represented in the media.42 Newton, who did not make the Sacramento trip because he was on probation, had alerted local media about their plans.43 Still, Panthers and supporters were stunned by the size of the press corps. Unbeknownst to them, a photo shoot was being staged for Governor Ronald Reagan to “join a group of Pleasant Hill youngsters for a picnic on the west lawn of the Capitol.”44 As the serious procession of twenty-nine African Americans neared the Governor’s gathering, he was whisked off and photographers’ attention pivoted to the unexpected opportunity. In the confusion, Panthers were ushered into the assembly room, then quickly back onto the steps where cameras snapped away as Seale read Executive Mandate Number One, a position paper by Newton against passage of the gun bill. The Sacramento mission failed to stop the Mumford Bill, which became law in July 1967, four months before the fateful police shooting at Seventh and Willow. But the excursion was nevertheless a roaring success, introducing the Black Panther Party to the world. Cleaver, in a dual role as press representative for Ramparts, later termed the trip and subsequent media blitz a “colossal event.” They learned how to choreograph their presence for photographers who would gladly share the visual communiqué.45 Displeased with the written coverage of their Sacramento appearance in the mainstream press, the Panthers decided to offer up their own account. On May 15, 1967, the first official Black Panther—Black Community News Service went to press with a cover story titled “The Truth About Sacramento.” Featured were press photos of armed Panthers, one being the same Garry Gillis photograph that was used in the Sacramento Union. They may have faulted the reporting; the real “Truth About Sacramento” needed to be told, but the photographs suited them just fine. On page three of that May 15, 1967 Black Panther, the portrait of Newton in Beverly Axelrod’s chair made its debut, in a reproduction slightly smaller than the three-by-five inch original. Newton’s title, Minister of Defense, was printed above and the Ten-Point Platform filled the rest of the page. Both picture and platform would become regular features in the Black Panther.46

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The Berkeley Barb and the Black Panther There were well-established local newspapers dating back to the nineteenth century that had been serving an African American readership, as well as alternative publications including the Socialist Party’s The Militant, Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, and The Crusader, a newsletter published by Robert F. Williams then exiled in Cuba. Any and all may have been inspiration as the Panthers prepared their own newspaper. However, a recently launched left-oriented, underground newspaper in Berkeley must be credited as an influence to the visual layout and means of distribution adopted by the Black Panther—Black Community News Service. Since the summer of 1965, the Berkeley Barb had been an unofficial means of communication for the New Left (so-called to distinguish political activists of the 1960s from their predecessors of the labor rights and social justice battles of the 1950s and before). 47 The Barb was founded on August 13, 1965 by Berkeley alumnus Max Scherr with $10,000 he earned from selling his popular Berkeley blues club, The Steppenwolf. That May, Jerry Rubin, along with Berkeley mathematics professor Stephen Smale, had organized a teach-in on campus to inform students about the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) and plans for protesting the Vietnam War. In August, a small VDC contingent attempted to block troop trains going through Berkeley to the Oakland Army base. The next day, there were 500 protestors and thirty police assembled to stop them. By the third day, August 12, 1965, they numbered 1,000 and were attracting journalists and photographers. Soon after, Scherr began publishing the Berkeley Barb, mainly as a way to publicize VDC actions (fig. 5-7).48 Scherr himself sold 1,200 copies of the first issue along the Telegraph Avenue business hub, thereby establishing the Berkeley Barb. To keep costs down, Scherr relied on unpaid or poorly paid writers, photographers, and graphic artists, whose innovative creativity was less fettered by the dictates of a mainstream publication.49 As a result, Barb imagery was bold, and at times salacious—even X-rated. When the Black Panther began almost two years later, the pioneering work of the Barb served as a model. But, whereas the Barb was occasionally lighthearted, the militant faces of Seale and Newton, gleaned from the Chronicle/Examiner photograph, topped the Black Panther masthead. The same photographs sometimes appeared in both newspapers. For example, in a provocative full-page image appearing in both periodicals, Panther Communications Secretary Kathleen Cleaver (wife of Eldridge Cleaver as of December 1967), clad in a leather coat and

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sunglasses, points a gun towards the viewer. Above the picture was printed “The Ballot or the Bullet,” using the Malcolm X admonishment to motivate Barb and Panther readers in a voter registration campaign. What distinguished the Black Panther were the full-time skills of a gifted graphic artist. Not only did Emory Douglas have an original style that instantly impacted the viewer, he was an early member who understood the objectives of the Black Panther Party and was able to embody a biting political statement in visual form. Not surprisingly, it was Cleaver who brought Douglas into the party, not yet realizing his artistic potential. At the time the young artist was attending San Francisco City College where he had been designing scenery for playwright LeRoi Jones (who became Amiri Baraka that same year). Douglas chanced to be at Cleaver’s home as plans were underway for the Sacramento trip the next morning. “You’re going with us aren’t you?” Cleaver asked. Douglas agreed. Afterward, when Cleaver and others were attempting to lay out a newspaper with “The Truth About Sacramento,” Douglas made a couple suggestions. To everyone’s surprise, he then brought over his art supplies toolbox and suddenly a real newspaper was taking shape. He was given the title “Revolutionary Artist.”50 For the next twelve years Douglas supervised the layout and made drawings for the paper. He invented a cartoon-like pig-faced character to signify police and government corruption. His drawings confronted social issues, such as the sub-standard living conditions of African American tenants, and activated readers to become involved in party initiatives. Recently Leigh Raiford summed up Douglas’s style: [Douglas] created a new set of Panther icons through a combination of cartoons and photographs that fashioned as identifiable visual tone for the party while simultaneously containing visual and ideological contradictions. Douglas’s powerful thick-lined drawings of determined black children, stern-faced black men, armed black women, and, most iconically, avaricious pigs clothed in police uniform, stripped down even the most complex concepts to readily accessible images.51

The Barb system for direct distribution worked well for the Black Panther. At one time, the Black Panther was even published in Berkeley Barb facilities. After self-hawking the first papers, Scherr quickly settled into a more productive business plan. He hired scores of young people, many from among Berkeley’s legions of runaways, which endeared his venture to the growing counterculture, or “hippies.” For each paper sold, the seller received half the profit plus tips. 52 This same arrangement structured Black Panther sales, with rank and file members earning money

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for themselves and the profits going to fill Party coffers.53 On October 15, 1965, the Barb was instrumental in mobilizing thousands in Berkeley for a Vietnam Day Committee “International Day of Protest” walk to the Army Induction Center in Oakland, where they planned to disrupt draftee processing.54 Numbering close to 10,000, they gathered at Sproul Plaza for the five-mile trek. The event would later be called by participants “Bloody Tuesday;” 400 to 500 helmeted Oakland police met them at the Berkeley line. 55 Todd Gitlin wrote about the organizer’s surprise at how brutal the cops were: “[T]hese notorious radicals had remained innocent about what the authorities would do about a threat to the smooth running of the draft machine.”56 A month later on November 20, 1965, the one year anniversary of the FSM march through Sather Gate, a VDC group numbering close to 8,000 again left Sproul Plaza, this time making it all the way to Oakland’s De Fremery Park, which would become the main rallying area for the Free Huey campaign (fig. 5-8).57 “The turning point, in my opinion,” Tom Hayden would recall, “was October 1967, when resistance became the official watchword of the antiwar movement.” 58 October 1967 was a month of marches. Always climatically temperate, East Bay weather was still warm as the sun shone from lower in the sky giving the sidewalks and stucco houses a bleached glare. On October 17, 1967, mere days before Newton’s police altercation, 2,500 resisters experienced perhaps the most forceful retaliation yet when they arrived to protest at the Oakland Army Induction Center. Ramparts described how “without warning, 250 Oakland police—heavily reinforced by Sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrolmen—smashed heads with clubs and sprayed mace into faces, including the heads and faces of the press. The scene was bloody and terrifying.” Oakland Police Chief Charles Gain said the use of force was justified because “the mob was ‘an illegal assembly’.”59 With photographs and written accounts in the Berkeley Barb and elsewhere documenting police violence towards the resisters, even nonparticipants grew suspect of police motives and tactics, adding credence to claims that Newton’s arrest was a police set-up gone wrong. 60 Before stopping the Volkswagen he was driving, policeman John Frey had radioed for backup. A “known Black Panther vehicle” was in his sites. It is not known, but perhaps, in that darkest hour before dawn on October 28, 1967, police had mistakenly shot each other while targeting Newton, on whom no gun was found.61 Immediately after the shooting, the Party’s Minister of Information took charge. Cleaver wrote for the Black Panther, gave interviews and

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speeches, and managed all aspects of publicity. Writing in November 1967, just days after the arrest, he called Newton “a selfless revolutionary prophet” who had been falsely accused. 62 That photograph of Huey P. Newton enthroned as noble warrior which he had supervised six months earlier, and that Panther Chief-of-Staff David Hilliard would remember as “Eldridge’s favorite,” emerged as the signature image of the Newton defense initiative.63 Student publications kept East Bay readers up to date. Three days before the Newton trial began in July 1968, at UC Berkeley, the front page of The Daily Californian read like a rally announcement: “A march through Oakland and a picket outside the Alameda County Courthouse are being planned to express ‘broad-based community support’ for Black Panther Huey Newton, when his murder trial begins Monday morning.”64 Alongside the story was the photograph of Newton that would soon be ubiquitous. Eight- by ten-inch, one-page flyers, handed out on the streets or posted on kiosks, were another grapevine for details of coming events. The day after the shooting, a photograph of Newton lying chained to a hospital gurney appeared on the cover of the Oakland Tribune.65 The photograph was soon on handbills of a newly formed Peace and Freedom (P&F) Party and a group calling itself Whites for the Defense of Huey Newton, who, along with the Black Panther Party (BPP) were co-sponsoring the Newton defense fund. Perhaps it was thought that the indolent expression on the face of Newton’s police guard might sway public sentiment. Cleaver may have had the initial brainstorm to enlarge and reproduce that little three-by-five photograph into a huge poster, but by the time of the trial, Panther offices across the country—now plentiful—were fulsome with posters of Panther leaders and selected martyrs. In fact, posters were required for party affiliation. Walls and storefront windows were papered with large posters of Newton, Seale, Cleaver and others, alongside Malcolm X and Che Guevara. Opening day at the Alameda County Courthouse on July 15, 1968 featured anything but spontaneous demonstrations. Posters were handed out in bulk. Panther rank and file marched in precision amid chorus chants of “Free Huey” and the unfurling of powder blue flags (like the shirts) emblazoned with large representations of Black Panthers. From Berkeley, student and New Left participants abounded, having been alerted through multiple mention in campus and alternative newspapers. The San Francisco Chronicle was again on the “Panther beat,” with front-page coverage and a photograph of three African American men among the large crowd, their fists raised in a black power salute, with a caption that

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read, “A mighty roar of black anger and frustration.”66 Each of the three protestors held the same large poster of Huey P. Newton.

A Sound System for an Uneasy Alliance Posters were great for an assembled group. Flyers helped get the word out within the immediate community, but to mount a proper defense that could raise funds and shape public opinion, an even larger audience was essential. Shortly after Newton’s arrest, Cleaver spotted a truck with mounted bullhorn, speakers blasting, and a banner reading “Peace and Freedom,” canvassing his Fillmore-district neighborhood. Those on the truck announced a new political party and appealed for petition sign-ups so they could make a January 2, 1968 deadline. If only the Panthers had a sound equipped truck, they too could really publicize the Newton case, Cleaver reportedly mused.67 Cleaver had met Kathleen Neal in March 1967 at a Black Student Conference held by SNCC at Fisk University in Nashville while he was working on a Ramparts article profiling Stokely Carmichael. 68 Upon returning to California he told friends that he had met “a ‘black Beverly Axelrod.’” Many among his activist friends, white and black, were critical of his relationship with Axelrod, thinking it lessened his political effectiveness to not be dating a “sister.” The couple discussed this, and the Black House (a cultural center at 1711 Broderick Street) was established in part as a front residence from which he could sneak to Axelrod’s home at 150 Carmel Street. After he met Neal, he wanted to spend time with both women but Axelrod disapproved. 69 He married Kathleen Neal on December 22, 1967. 70 After observing Julian Bond in the role of Communications Secretary with SNCC, the future Mrs. Cleaver became a skilled publicist and public speaker as Communications Secretary for the Panthers.71 The friends Cleaver made through Axelrod proved indispensible in his efforts to aid Newton. Ramparts journalist Robert Scheer, for example, was a Berkeley activist who would be a candidate for the P&F Party. Since May 1967, Jack Weinberg, the FSM catalyst whom Cleaver had met right after his parole, was working on this third party as a way to voice discomfort with the ongoing Vietnam War and with racial intolerance domestically. 72 The task of registering 67,000 by a January 2, 1968 deadline loomed as insurmountable when Cleaver approached Peace and Freedom representatives. By December 22, 1967 the Berkeley Barb was reporting that an “unprecedented coalition” had been forged between the Panthers and Peace and Freedom.73 The Panthers got the sound system for

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Free Huey rallies, and in exchange, their rank and file members found African American signatories. The Peace and Freedom Party made the June ballot, and they even contributed $3,000 in startup money toward Newton’s attorney fees.74 The newly acquired speakers now blasted the voices of Seale, Kathleen Cleaver and others, in passionate appeals on Newton’s behalf in De Fremery Park, the same West Oakland site where the Vietnam Day Committee marches had converged. Fundraisers for the Free Huey defense were communal events featuring soul food and barbecue for sale. On average a third of the crowd was white. Buckets circulated for donations and additional funds were raised through sales of the Black Panther and promotional items such as posters and pinback buttons. The BPP and P&F alliance was never an easy one. 75 Lest anyone think their working relationship was anything but a limited partnership, on January 27 and 28, 1968, P&F issued a policy statement. “Peace and Freedom… is an independent, permanent radical political party, permanently separate and distinct from any other political party” standing for “immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam” and support for “the Black Liberation Movement in its struggle for equality and selfdetermination.” 76 Thus, “peace” in Vietnam and “freedom” for African Americans at home. While P&F supported the black freedom struggle, they nevertheless stressed that they were “separate and distinct.” They were adamantly not an organization “committed to being the white tail on the black dog,” as some feared.77 The BPP was unique among black activist groups of the late 1960s for collaborating with whites at all, and this left them vulnerable to criticism—their black panther wagged by a white tail, perhaps? They were chastised for not hiring a black lawyer in Newton’s defense such as Don Warden or John George, both well known and respected locally. Instead, they retained Charles Garry, a prominent, successful defender of leftists since the early 1960s, whom Beverly Axelrod had recommended.78 In 1966, SNCC had begun advancing the goal of Black Power over integration. Tension rose in the ranks about whether or not to continue being inclusive of whites. Stokely Carmichael, who had taken over from John Lewis, advocated purging whites from the ranks and directing them instead to go into the white community and fix things there.79 This was a marked departure from the leadership of Robert Moses and Allan Lowenstein in 1963 and the following summer of 1964. As Todd Gitlin observed, “to identify with SNCC was not only an act of solidarity” for white radical students, “it was an alliance with brothers and sisters against the old white men who deadlocked the Democratic Party and fueled future

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wars.” 80 Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, and others who began the Free Speech Movement, had returned to California after volunteering with SNCC to find university administrators kowtowing to rightwing politicians opposed to recruitment or the raising of money for civil rights initiatives on campus. Fresh from Mississippi Freedom Summer, the students recognized a familiar paternalism of which they wanted no part.81 Now in 1968, with the new Peace and Freedom Party, many students were tentatively finding their way back to join with “brothers and sisters,” this time the Black Panthers, against “old white men” and their domination. Cleaver, incarcerated during the Civil Rights movement, was perhaps more open to coalitions with white organizations. According to Tom Hayden, “Few whites realized the risks that the Panthers took in pursuing this line. It left the party exposed to constant, baiting criticism by black ‘cultural-nationalist’ groups… raising fears of a return to old-style coalitions, in which black people had been submerged and their interests made secondary to the class struggle.”82 The Panthers used the threat of perceived white privilege to their advantage. At a P&F forum on January 31, 1968, Kathleen Cleaver spoke at length to negotiate a favorable position for the Panthers in the balance of power with Peace and Freedom. She successfully lobbied for Newton as a P&F congressional candidate by arguing that to do otherwise would be taken within the black community as “an admission of the inability of whites to change their pattern of oppression and exploitation.” It was hoped that having Newton run for office would benefit his public image during a time when jury selection was ongoing.83 The vast difference between how the Panthers and P&F used signage and visual ephemera persisted. The Free Speech Movement had one banner and the Vietnam Day Committee marchers occasionally boasted “Stop the Draft” signs, but the white left never embraced the personality poster. Even Cleaver’s pals shied away from them. Stew Albert, the friend Cleaver had met through Axelrod right after he arrived, shuddered when he showed up with a large stack of Newton posters and asked him to pass them out. Albert accepted, but hesitated to do as requested, finding them “narcissistic and quasi-cultic, not really idea food for egalitarian revolutionaries.”84 With the exception of martyrs, an occasional Che or Malcolm poster, the white political left did not use portraits to encapsulate ideology. During the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio had resisted being singled out as leader. “To focus on personalities rather than on issues is to obscure the issues and encourage the least democratic sentiments of the public,” he had reasoned. 85 In 1968 he remained reluctant to call attention to

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individuals. Robert Cohen writes of Savio’s discomfort with the aligning of Peace and Freedom with the Panthers: “Still committed to nonviolence, and distrustful of leader-centered politics, he looked critically on the Panthers, with their violent rhetoric and idealization of leaders.”86 How the new Peace and Freedom Party came to select Eldridge Cleaver as their 1968 Presidential candidate is a longer story than this essay can accommodate. Sufficed to say, there was considerable debate and internal wrangling. As might be expected, the Cleaver for President campaign featured his photograph on posters and buttons.87

Why the Personality Poster? Why would the Black Panthers, at heart a group of community organizers vowing “All Power to the People,” pay homage in photographs to their upper echelon? When they first came to media attention in Sacramento it was their physical appearance, not their ideas, which was noticed. Certainly Newton, Seale, the Cleavers, and their associates were thinkers—intellectuals with a philosophy of revolution. Panthers wrote and spoke knowledgeably about local, national, and geopolitical issues. They had a steadfast platform. There were campaigns and initiatives. Yet embodying what they stood for had proven an immediate and succinct way to make a point. After all, that thoughtful treatise Newton had composed for Seale to read protesting Mumford’s firearm restriction bill had gone unheard as photographers scrambled over each other to get pictures of black men with guns. A general rule in publicity is to put your best foot forward, to lead with your strengths. Numerous accounts and memoirs about the Black Panther Party mention their physical appeal. Cleaver had recognized “a deep female gleam” and “total admiration” that black women seemed to have for Seale, Newton, and cohorts when he met them.88 White men, too, registered approval. After Don Schanche spent weeks with Cleaver for a Saturday Evening Post article he recalled, “I never saw anyone approach him here or abroad who was not immediately awestruck by his appearance. The man had presence.” An exchange between Cleaver and a woman he met especially impressed the white journalist: “Her eyes seemed to mist over and you could almost feel a coital current between them.”89 Newton’s lighter skin, for which he had suffered taunts as a youth, served him well in the black-and-white medium of photography where the rich darkness of his hair and clothing contrasted with subtle gradations softly fleshing out his face. If he appeared boyish, rather than complicit in

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the warrior pose and attributes Cleaver had so studiously arranged, it added a slightly vulnerable, perhaps guileless aspect to his persona. From the onset, Panther leaders were targeted: first by local police, later by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). J. Edgar Hoover famously called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and made it his work to eliminate them. With arrests came the immediate need for bail money, lawyer’s fees, and court costs. To prepare a proper defense, it was crucial that people knew and cared about the accused. Photographs personalized them. The use of large portrait posters, pioneered for Newton, had become prolific by the time his first trial was over. Campaigns to raise money and shape public opinion, such as mounted to “Free Huey,” went into gear to “Free Bobby.” Panther rallies became perpetual fundraisers resembling mobile photo galleries (fig. 5-9). The law-and-order faction used photographic posters, too. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was shot in a confrontation with police that left young Panther Bobby Hutton dead. Cleaver was wounded and sent back to jail. With the help of defense lawyer Charles Garry and money from publisher Edward Keating and others, he made bail and then fled the country that November. Now Cleaver-the-fugitive found his photo on another type of personality poster, one issued on December 10, 1968 under the headline, “Wanted by the FBI: Interstate flight—assault with intent to commit murder.” Here was another late 1960s venue that united Black Power with white resistance. Posters of Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers from Students for a Democratic Society appeared alongside African American fugitives Cleaver, Angela Davis and H. Rap Brown on post office walls throughout the country.90 Newton’s photo circulated through the mainstream and underground press and appeared on flyers, handbills, pin-back buttons and hundreds of posters. His portrait was held aloft by Black Power advocates, the New Left, survivors of the Old Left, Asian Americans, Chicanos, local African Americans and other regular folks, gaining his case ever-widening support and media attention. As a movement, “Free Huey” ultimately influenced public opinion. Although in September 1968, Newton was found guilty for a lesser charge: manslaughter rather than murder. Then there were appeals without decisions, and ultimately charges were dropped in December 1970. As far back as May 1967 in Sacramento, photographs were what made the Black Panther Party famous. After Newton’s arrest, photographic posters and other printed ephemera were key in waging a defense. Since his own days in prison, Cleaver relied on help from white leftists: first Axelrod, then her literary and legal friends and clients who

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were instrumental in securing his parole and sustaining his employment. Without the collaboration of Berkeley’s unique form of resistance with Panther-style Black Power, along with a publicity campaign to raise money and sway public sentiment, it is highly likely that Huey P. Newton would have been convicted, and perhaps executed, for the murder of an Oakland policeman.

Notes 1

Between thirty to sixty University of California, Berkeley (hereafter referred to as Berkeley) students had gone to Mississippi in 1964, including Art Goldberg and Mario Savio who taught at a “freedom school” (schools established for the purpose of racial and social equality) for black children in McComb, Mississippi. The Free Speech Movement began September 1964 after a Berkeley campus Dean issued a fourteen-word edict forbidding political tables and leafleting for the purpose of organizing demonstrations off the campus. Their march through Sather Gate with the Free Speech banner was on November 20, 1964. The phrase “takin’ it to the streets,” or, sharing your problems with the world, was already in common usage when the Doobie Brothers recorded a song of that name in 1976. W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 10, 19, 22. See also Jerry Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 21-22 and Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The F.B.I.’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 176-211. 2 Charles R. Garry and Art Goldberg, Streetfighter in the Courtroom: The People’s Advocate (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 102. See also Edward M. Keating, Free Huey! (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1970), 7, 20. The call to dispatch had been: “I’d like a quick rolling three-six on Adam Zebra Mary 489. It’s a known Black Panther vehicle,” (15). Although Newton’s law book that was found at the scene had blood on it, no crime lab investigation of it was done. 3 Gilbert Moore, A Special Rage (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 118-19. See also Joel Wilson, “Free Huey”: The Black Panther Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Politics of Race in 1968 (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002), 239-40. 4 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, the 1960s, 43-44, 80. 5 Cleaver’s two years in the Bay Area began with his release on parole in December 1966 and spanned to November 1968 when he fled the country after an April 1968 confrontation with police in which Bobby Hutton was killed. He remained in exile until 1975. 6 Cleaver ceased to follow the Nation of Islam when they ousted Malcolm X, but he continued to champion his teachings. Also, it was the practice to move prisoners among California prisons. Cleaver had resided in San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad during his sentence. See: Kathleen Cleaver, “On Eldridge Cleaver,” Ramparts (June 1969): 4-11.

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Don A. Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma (New York: D. McKay Co., 1970), 43-44. 8 Melanie Margaret Kask, Soul Mates: The Prison Letters of Eldridge Cleaver and Beverly Axelrod (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003), 3, 35. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 97. 11 Keating, Free Huey! , 60-61. Keating had become wealthy through real estate. In 1962, he bought Ramparts, then a small lay-Catholic quarterly, and made it a monthly with a leftist perspective (Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 116). See also: Eldridge Cleaver, “Notes on a Native Son,” Ramparts (June 1966): 5156; and Eldridge Cleaver, “Letters From Prison—Sorties in Mad Babylon,” Ramparts (August 1966): 15-26. 12 Kask, Soul Mates, 100. In August 1966, Axelrod was in Washington, DC defending Jerry Rubin at his House Un-American Activities Committee trial. Taking advantage of the proximity, she traveled to New York and walked into the office of McGraw-Hill, resulting in a publishing agreement that would result in Soul On Ice. 13 Ibid., 106. 14 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, the 1960s, 10 and Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution, 21. Despite the ban, Mario Savio had successfully given out pamphlets for a CORE-sponsored student sit-in at the San Francisco Sheraton Palace Hotel. After the twenty-two-hour protest, the hotel agreed to hire more union blacks with equal pay and visibility at their thirty-five hotel locations. See: Rosenfeld, Subversives, 177. 15 Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution, 10, 61. 16 Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, xix. Axelrod was acquainted with LeRoi Jones and others who were part of the Black Arts Movement. 17 Jerry Rubin and his wife, Nancy, along with Abbie Hoffman and his wife, Anita, and Paul Krassner finalized the mandate for the new party on New Year’s Eve, 1967. 18 Kathleen Sullivan, “Beverly Axelrod—Attorney to Black Panthers,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 21, 2002. 19 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, the 1960s, 80; Rubin, Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution, 10-11. 20 Michael Lowe, “Radical Action and a National Antiwar Movement: The Vietnam Day Committee,” Western Illinois Historical Review 4 (Spring 2012): 27. 21 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1970; repr. Black Classic Press, 1991), 181-182. 22 Kask, Soul Mates, 118-119. There are conflicting accounts of who actually shot the photograph, although it is presumed to be a white male, whom Kask identifies as Blair Stapp. Seale referred to a “white mother country photographer.” Leigh Raiford interviewed photographer Roz Payne who claims the photographer was Brent Jones. Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 129.

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23 Seale, Seize the Time, 181. See: Box 1, Eldridge Cleaver Photograph Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The shields and spears used in the photograph belonged to Axelrod’s sons Clay and Douglas. They were purchased at the original San Francisco Cost Plus, likely also as was the wicker chair, on loan from Axelrod’s hairdresser. Kask, Soul Mates, 119. 24 Gene Marine, The Black Panthers (New York: New American Library, 1969), 53; Moore, A Special Rage, 57, 105; Seale, Seize the Time, 85, 114-115. 25 Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 156-59. 26 Jerry Belcher, “Its All Legal: Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns, Talk Revolution,” San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, April 30, 1967. (These were separate dailies but they co-published a Sunday edition.) Indications that Cleaver played a role in designing promotional items are found in the Eldridge Cleaver Photograph Collection, Box 1. On the reverse side of photographs are handwritten designs for pinback buttons, presumably made by Cleaver. 27 In a series of relocations, the Black Panther Party office moved further west over time into less affluent areas of Oakland. The first office at 5624 Grove Street was next to Merritt College and not far from the Berkeley city line. The second office was twelve blocks west at 4419 Grove Street, and the eventual address was established at 1943 Peralta Street. In the Official Black Panther Party Historical Tour Guide, the Peralta Street site is said to have “symbolized the party’s ‘return to the base’ of black community.” 28 Seale, Seize the Time, 28; Keating, Free Huey! ,183. 29 Seale, Seize the Time, 80-81. Seale first described details of the fundraising venture in “Selections from the Biography of Huey P. Newton,” Ramparts (October 1968), 23-34: 30. 30 Diane Fujino, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 127, and Rosenfeld, Subversives, 422. Aoki majored in sociology at Berkeley. He was a friend of Newton’s older brother Melvin, had studied at Merritt College, and attended Soul Students Advisory Council meetings. 31 Seale, Seize the Time, 13, 25. Also active locally was the Afro-American Association, the first indigenous, black nationalist organization on the West Coast, founded by Berkeley law student Don Warden in 1962. See: Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 222. 32 David Hilliard and Donald Weise, eds., The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 51. 33 Seale, Seize the Time, 25. 34 Hilliard and Weise, The Huey P. Newton Reader, 51; Fujino, Samurai Among Panthers, 133. 35 Seale, Seize the Time, 59-62; Huey P. Newton, War Against the Panthers—A Study of Repression in America (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1980), 38. 36 Seale, Seize the Time, 72-73, 93-99. 37 Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 86; Marine, The Black Panthers, 76;

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Self, American Babylon, 77-78; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, the 1960s, 117. 38 “An ‘Invasion’ by Armed ‘Black Panthers’,” US News and World Report, May 15, 1967. 39 Sacramento Union, May 3, 1967, 1, 3. 40 San Francisco Examiner, May 2, 1967. 41 Oakland Tribune, May 3, 1967. 42 ,Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007), 5-6. “These visual and verbal images tapped into white Americans’ primal fears of black male sexuality, black American violence, and the potential of an all-out race war,” (70). 43 David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hiliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001), 122; Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 147; Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 247; Marine, The Black Panthers, 63-69; Seale, Seize the Time, 148, 153; and Keating, Free Huey!, 79. Newton was on probation from an October 29, 1964 conviction for a knife assault at a party. 44 Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 50. Oakland Tribune, May 3, 1967. 45 Seale, 162. Shortly after their founding the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the leaders dropped “self defense” from the title as their focus broadened to other community-oriented programs. 46 Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 107. 47 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 26-27. 48 Rosenfeld, Subversives, 351. In 1958, Max Scherr acquired the Steppenwolf at 2136 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, then sold it in 1965. With the $10,000 proceeds he started the Berkeley Barb, and the first issue was sold on August 13, 1965. 49 Robert J. Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 84. A few top editors were paid nominal weekly wages but most staff received minimum wage, or less when paid by column inch. 50 Emory Douglas, interview by the author, Illinois Artist Conversations, WIU-TV, Macomb, Illinois, December 3, 2009. For more on Douglas’s career and a retrospective of his artwork see Emory Douglas, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). 51 Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 197. 52 Glessing, The Underground Press in America, 89. 53 Rorabaugh, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 94. The BPP’s own Black Panther began in late April 1967. 54 Rosenfeld, Subversives, 272. 55 Self, American Babylon, 223. 56 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 253.

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Rosenfeld, Subversives, 306 Gitlin, Sixties, 285. 59 Keating, Free Huey!, 50. 60 Rosenfeld, Subversives, 351. 61 Garry and Goldberg, Streetfighter in the Courtroom, 102; Marine, The Black Panthers, 76; Keating, Free Huey!, 78. See also: Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2006), 179. 62 Wilson, “Free Huey,” 74. 63 Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 140. 64 Debbie Majteles, “Newton Trial Monday” Daily Californian 199, no. 7 (July 12, 1968): 1. 65 Joel Wilson, “Free Huey,” 1; Keating, Free Huey!, 34. See also: “Officer Slain in Gun Battle,” Oakland Tribune, October 29, 1967. 66 San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1968. 67 Earl Anthony, Picking up the Gun: A Report on the Black Panthers (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 57-58. 68 Kathleen Cleaver, “On Eldridge Cleaver,” Ramparts (June 1969): 4-11; Eldridge Cleaver, “My Father and Stokely Carmichael,” Ramparts (April 1967): 10-14. 69 Kask, Soul Mates, xx. Interviewed by Kask in April 1998, Alex Hoffman recalled Cleaver’s pleasure in meeting “a black Beverly Axelrod.” Maya Angelou was among his Black House guests who disapproved of the interracial liaison. 70 Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 47; Kask, Soul Mates, xx. As a condition of his parole, Cleaver was not able to marry for six months. On February 27, 1967, he petitioned to marry Axelrod. The next month he met Kathleen Neal. He petitioned to marry Neal in August 2, 1967, and they were married in December 1967. 71 Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 132. 72 Wilson, “Free Huey,” 97, 81. 73 Joel Wilson, “Invisible Cages: Racialized Politics and the Alliance between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party,” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 193; Wilson, “Free Huey,” 127. Berkeley Barb, December 22, 1967, 1, 3. 74 Seale, 208; Anthony, 65. The $3,000 went to retain lawyer Charles R. Garry, recommended by Beverly Axelrod, who agreed to represent Newton even before they could pay him. 75 Wilson, “Free Huey,” 130. 76 Ibid., 151. 77 Wilson, “Invisible Cages,” 193. In the first California statewide meeting of Peace and Freedom as they were laying a foundation, some despaired over how to be inclusive. They could not “go out to white people and ask them to join an organization already committed to being the white tail on the black dog.” People’s World, September 23, 1967. 78 Wilson, “Free Huey,” 69. Garry had gone immediately to meet Newton at Highland Hospital just three days after the shooting. He had been on the team that defended Berkeley student Robert Meisenbach in spring 1961 after the English 58

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major was singled out from student protests over HUAC meetings at San Francisco City Hall in May 1960. See: Rosenfeld, Subversives, 77-104. 79 Tom Hayden, Trial (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 119. 80 Gitlin, The Sixties, 128, 150; Rosenfeld, 176-78. 81 Gitlin, The Sixties, 164. 82 Hayden, Trial, 119. 83 Wilson, “Free Huey,” 199-200. 84 Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 132-33. 85 Rosenfeld, Subversives, 353. 86 Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 258. 87 For more on Cleaver’s association with the Peace and Freedom Party see: Wilson, “Invisible Cages,” 191-122. 88 Marine, The Black Panthers, 53. 89 Schanche, The (Black) Panther Paradox, 10-12. That the author Schanche was himself smitten by Cleaver’s charisma seems evident in his detailed description of his appearance. “[T]he thing that transfixes you is the startling green irises, as cool and impervious beneath their confident shield as the steel bars of a prison. …Cleaver projects an image of strength and internal power in the rest of his makeup, too. He is tall, six feet two inches, and his body is that of a conditioned athlete, finely muscled and tapered like a funnel from his broad shoulders and chest to slim waist and sinuous, lanky legs. “The Panther uniform that he affects adds to the image of power because it accentuates pure blackness, reminds you on the sleek gloss of its tailored, hiplength leather jacket that this is the black leather of a black army, ominous as a black robed medieval executioner or an ebony-coated cat in the jungle. His gaiter boots were impeccably spit-shined, like those of a soldier, and his slim-legged black worsted trousers creased as if for the parade ground. He wore a pale blue Dacron and cotton turtleneck shirt that seemed to lift his well-formed head like an aristocratic knight’s helmet about the black-armored body. In the lobe of his ear was a gold earbob” (10).

IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE IN THIS VERSION

Fig. 1-1 Romaine Brooks, La France croisée (The Cross of France), 1914. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 33 1/2 in. (116.2 x 85.0 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Artist. Photo and permission: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Fig. 1-2 Red Cross recruiting poster, “Ten Thousand by June, Graduate Nurses Your Country Needs You,” c.1917

Fig. 1-3 Postcard, produced by J. Courcier, c.1914

Fig. 1-4 Anonymous, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry ambulance drivers attached to the Belgian Army at Calais, France, c.1918

Fig. 1-5 Anonymous, ambulance drivers, Étaples, France, c.1915

Fig. 2-1 “A large city as the bombardier sees it. A photograph from 24,000 feet.” From Robert P. Breckenridge, Modern Camouflage: The New Science of Protective Concealment. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942

Fig. 2-2 “Regional Civilian Camouflage Schools Conducted under O.C.D. Guidance.” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 2-3 Office of Civilian Defense civilian camouflage course certificate. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 2-4 “Thhe Engineer School, Fort Belvoir, Viirginia, Third Civilian Camouflage Course, July 6, 6 1942 to Jully 18, 1942.” National Arcchives and ministration, Waashington, D.C. Records Adm

Fig. 3-1 Cheester R. Miller, Free Workers,, Free Industryy, for the Think American Institute, no. 164, c.1942. From F the collecction of the Inddiana State Mu useum and Historic Sitess

Fig. 3-2 Chester R. Miller, Dictatorship, for the Think American Institute, no. 147, c.1942. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites

Fig. 3-3 Harry Gottlieb, The Strike is Won!, 1937. Collection of Belverd and Marian Needles. Copyright by Amy Gottlieb.

Fig. 3-4 Chester R. Miller, Future U.S. Progress..., for the Think American Institute, no. 159, c.1942. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites

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Fig. 4-1 Martha Rosler, Vacation Getaway, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist

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Fig. 4-2 Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. Gouache and ink on paper. 18.5 x 23.75 inches. The Williams College Museum of Art. © The Estate of Nancy Spero. Licensed by VAGA, New York / Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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Fig. 4-3 Vija Celmins, Bikini, 1968. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper. 13 3/8 x 18 ¼ inches (34 x 46.4 cm). Gift of Edward R. Broida. The Museum of Modern Art. Celmins, Vija (b. 1939) © Copyright. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Fig. 5-1 Ron Enfield, Marchers pass through Sather Gate on the UC Berkeley campus, November 20, 1964, lead by FSM Steering Committee members Ron Anastasi and Mike Rossman carrying the banner, Mario Savio beside Rossman, and faculty-supporter John Leggett, in dark glasses behind the banner.

Fig. 5.2 Gerhard Gscheidle, Demonstration to Free Huey at the Alameda County Courthouse, 1968. © Gerhard Gscheidle

Fig. 5-3 Gerhard Gscheidle, Bobby Seale speaking at the Alameda County Court House, with Emory Douglas to his right, January 1968. © Gerhard Gscheidle

Fig. 5-4 Ruth-Marion Baruch, Eldridge Cleaver talking to Panthers Kenny Demon and Charles Brunson, Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, California, #60 from the series Black Panthers 1968, August 28, 1968. © 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation

Fig. 5-5 Photograph of Huey P. Newton, 1967. Courtesy of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Green Library, Stanford University

Fig. 5-6 Eldridge Cleaver, Beverly Axelrod at home in San Francisco, January 1967. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Fig. 5-7 Harvey Richards, Vietnam Day Committee Protest, October 15, 1965. Courtesy The Harvey Richards Media Archive

Fig. 5-8 Pirkle Jones, Bobby Seale speaking at Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, #9 from the series Black Panthers 1968, July 14, 1968. © 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation

Fig. 5-9 Ilka Hartmann, Young girls at Black Panther demonstration in San Francisco, CA, February 11, 1970. © 2014 Ilka Hartmann.

Fig. 6-1 Corita Kent, my people, 1965, serigraph. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles. Photograph by Josh White

Fig. 6-2 Corita Kent, people like us yes, 1965, serigraph. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles. Photograph by Josh White

Fig. 6-3 Barrio Mobile Art Studio, Community Workshop, 1970s. © 1976-2015 Self Help Graphics & Art, www.selfhelpgraphics.com. Photo Courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara, Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives

Fig. 6-4 Mary’s Day, 1964. Reprinted with permission from the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Fig. 6-5 Mass at Evergreen Cemetery, Day of the Dead, 1976. © 1976-2015 Self Help Graphics & Art, www.selfhelpgraphics.com. Photo Courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara, Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives

Fig. 7-1 Aviva Rahmani and Marni Gud, Two Nice Jewish Girls, installation and performance at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1972. Courtesy Aviva Rahmani.

Fig. 7-2 Crowds interacting with Aviva Rahmani and Marni Gud, Two Nice Jewish Girls, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1972. Courtesy Aviva Rahmani.

Fig. 7-3 Cyclona in The Wedding of Maria Theresa Conchita Con Chin Gow, 1971. Scrapbook page, box 5, folder 16. The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta Cyclona Collection, 500, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Fig. 8-1 “If We Lived Here, We’d Be Home,” from The Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, Let’s Shut Down Seabrook!, 1979, p. 3.

Fig. 8-2 Dona Ann McAdams, “Rancho Seco, Sacramento, California, Sacramento Municipal Utility District,” recto and verso of postcard from the series, The Nuclear Survival Kit: They’re Juggling Our Genes!, 1981. Courtesy of the PAD/D Archive at the Museum of Modern Art Library. © Dona Ann McAdams

Fig. 8-3 War Resisters League, Nuclear America, c. 1978, offset lithograph poster. © War Resisters League

Fig. 8-4 Sharon Gilbert, detail of 3-Mile Island Reproductions (1-8), 1979, Xerox. © Sharon Gilbert

Fig. 8-5 Sharon Gilbert, details from A Nuclear Atlas (Rosendale, New York: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1982). © Sharon Gilbert

Fig. 9-1 Brian Doan, the vandalized Thu Duc. Photo by the artist, reproduced with his permission

Fig. 9-2 Map of Little Saigon, Westminster, Orange County. Reproduced with permission from Matthew Allen

Fig. 9-3 Westminster, CA shopping strip, showing pre-1975 construction and signage with minimal modern-day alterations, 2008-13. Photo by the author

Fig. 9-4 Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Twelve Pillar Pagoda, 2008-13. Photo by author

Fig. 9-5 Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Vietnamese Veterans Cemetery section, 2008-13. Photo by author

Fig. 9-6 Garden of Peaceful Eternity, Boat People Memorial, 2008-13. Photo by author

Fig. 9-7 Khanh Ba Nguyen, Harmony Bridge, first version, 1996. Published in the Orange County Register, January, 23, 1996

Fig. 9-8 Khanh Ba Nguyen, Harmony Bridge, second version, 1996. Published in the Orange County Register, April 26, 1996

Fig. 9-9 Tuaan Nguyen, Westminster W Viietnam War M Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Parkk, 2003. Photo by b author, repro oduced with per ermission from the t artist

CHAPTER SIX CATHOLIC ART AND ACTIVISM IN POSTWAR LOS ANGELES KRISTEN GAYLORD

In 1965 an internationally famous artist wrote about her identity as a woman religious: A sister is the same as any other woman. She wants to be beautiful and human and Christian—not less beautiful, less human, less Christian than other women. A sister is only different in the job she chooses to do. And to do this job she has promised to enjoy things fully and not to possess them for herself, to love people greatly and not to possess them, to unite with a group of people who want to do the same job which is too big for an individual or an individual family to do alone. To the extent that her community prevents her from being beautiful and human and Christian, that community must be remade and remade over and over again. For this job the sister needs to be an artist—a maker.

The artist was Sister Mary Corita Kent (hereafter referred to as “Corita”1) in an essay called “Art and Beauty in the Life of the Sister.”2 Her ethical understanding of what it means to be a nun—and how being a nun necessitates being an artist—shaped Corita’s artwork and career, forming a scaffolding for her teaching, creating, worshipping, and protesting. From her childhood through her late forties, Corita did all this in Los Angeles as a fixture in the local artistic and religious scenes. Our understanding of Corita’s work has relied for a long time upon biography and a limited circle of friends and acquaintances (although recently scholarship has been increasing).3 While helpfully illuminating her long and productive career, such an approach has limited the study of Corita, removing her from the various groups and conversations of which she was an active part, including Pop Art, Los Angeles culture, and activist movements. This essay takes a different tack, attempting to understand Corita within the background of 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles

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social and political movements, viewed through the lens of her Catholic commitment. To do this, Corita will be discussed along with her student and friend, Sister Karen Boccalero. As a fellow Angeleno woman religious, Sister Karen’s career provides both points of correspondence and departure from Corita’s. This comparison of artists, who, from a mainstream vantage point, look so similar in their profiles, will clarify and concretize the specific nuances of their work and artistic principles. Analyzing these artists together exposes the strategies and systems of their engagement with the counterculture as well as gestures towards the diversity of approaches available within a Catholic activist context. Examining their work against this political and religious backdrop will provide a way of critically examining Corita and Sister Karen’s art and a way of linking them to broader social, historical, and artistic concerns. Both Corita and Sister Karen utilized the social structures of art making to enact political goals in the collaborative contexts of their respective institutions. Although their own prints sometimes incorporated political messages, these artists’ most effective activism happened at the site of art production. These examinations of the processes and systems surrounding art were undertaken by artists at Immaculate Heart College (IHC), where Corita taught in the art department from 1949 to 1968, and Self Help Graphics and Art (SHGA), which Sister Karen founded and directed from 1972 to 1997 after studying with Corita at IHC. The community events, political posters, and unorthodox pedagogies of Corita and Sister Karen rose from their understanding of their religious vocation. Their activism was rooted in their theological commitments and Catholic identity, reflecting debates that had arisen in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Under Corita and Sister Karen’s auspices, IHC and SHGA transformed the creation and dissemination of art into a community-oriented, political act. The basic similarities in Corita and Sister Karen’s situations—as nuns in Los Angeles at the same time who were committed to populist art and social engagement—would alone provide compelling reason to compare the careers and artistic practices of these two women. Nevertheless, differences in personality, community, and historical context helped to direct each artist toward her own distinct narrative, and their work will be examined here in tandem to provide two different examples of activist artmaking that flowed from American Catholicism. Corita’s art embodies a more liberal, humanist approach to the world, compared to Sister Karen’s entrenchment in a specific marginalized community. This difference was reinforced by the shift in protest culture from the 1960s, when Corita was active in Los Angeles, to the 1970s, when Sister Karen founded Self Help.

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Considering these narratives together reveals the distinctions of these artists as Catholic activists—including the strengths and failures of their political art practices—and their relationships with the counterculture in Los Angeles and the pivotal reorientation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church.

Sisters in Los Angeles By the 1960s, when Sister Karen Boccalero was a student of Corita’s at Immaculate Heart College, the school had become known for providing a creative and progressive education for women. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) had long been known as a teaching order, providing quality education to the middle-class children of Angelenos.4 The school offered classes in the core Liberal Arts subjects, but was especially praised for its Art Department. Corita’s pedagogical strategies at Immaculate Heart College challenged students, who have described her classes as exhausting and exhilarating. She took a “more is more” approach, in which students were given assignments such as developing 200 questions about a film or looking at a Coke bottle for an hour.5 The famous Art Department rules embodied this work ethic with imperatives such as “Pull everything out of your teacher,” “The only rule is work,” and “Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything.” This environment of constant work and experimentation pushed students to try new things, to become engaged in the life of their school and community, and to create furiously and edit ruthlessly. Corita was a leader of this approach, and modeled it for her students, and as a student Sister Karen was deeply impacted by this dedicated work ethic. Corita was the chair and most famous faculty member of the Art Department in the 1960s. Having only started printing in 1951, the next year she won a printmaking competition at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art (which later split into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA] and the Natural History Museum), and had, since then, shown work in exhibitions around the world. She received commissions from corporations such as IBM and Westinghouse and toured the country annually on a lecture circuit, keeping up with the many galleries that sold her work and finishing in New York City, where she would visit the most recent art exhibitions and meet artists such as Ben Shahn. In 1967 Corita was on the cover of Newsweek; by that

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point she had become—at least among Catholics, printmakers, and Californians—a household name. While Corita was certainly the most visible representative of the IHC community, she was not the only professor whose innovative outlook informed it. Her fellow teachers and sisters were also interested in progressive understandings of their world and religion, and fostered experimentation in the student body.6 Masses sometimes consisted of public radio instead of a homily and the faculty made use of the vibrant Los Angeles environment around them, taking their classes into gas stations and supermarkets, and inviting local intellectuals and artists such as Buckminster Fuller and filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock to speak. These amendments to the traditions of Catholic education and liturgy did not meet the approval of the conservative and authoritarian Archbishop of Los Angeles, Francis McIntyre.7 The sisters and McIntyre had a contentious relationship over many aspects of the order’s conduct. They had been excited and challenged by the mandates of the 1965 Perfectae Caritatis issued by the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged orders to seek the original intent of their founders. Although almost unanimously approved by the Council, the latitude given to orders in the document led to friction between the IHMs and McIntyre, who disagreed on the decree’s implications. The Ninth General Council of the IHM met in 1967 and decided upon a number of changes to their community that would put them more in line with the original mission of the order. Among these were abandoning the traditional habit for street clothes, the option to retain birth names, and more choice in where to work.8 This last difference was key: the sisters had become known as a teaching order and were dependable employees of the best parochial schools in Los Angeles. But the IHM founder, Joaquin Masmitja de Puig, founded the order in Spain in 1848 as a mission-oriented one, which worked among the poor and lived a semi-cloistered life. The IHMs of the mid-1960s were following the Vatican’s guidance when seeking to diversify their work so as to better serve their life religious, but McIntyre was not keen to lose dutiful parochial school workers to other careers. Even though he had no direct authority over the sisters—their order reported directly to the Sacred Congregation of Religious in Rome—he responded to their announcement of changes with threats and intimidation.9 The dispute went to the Vatican, who, to the sisters’ dismay, sided with McIntyre. The intrepid leader of the order Anita Caspary, known then as Mother Humiliata, was given an ultimatum and the women decided their own fate: about fifty sisters remained in the order, about 150 left religious life altogether, and the approximately 360 remaining sisters

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formed a lay community under Caspary. In 1970, the dissenting IHM sisters became the single largest group of women religious in the history of the American Catholic Church to be released from their vows. But Corita was out of California by the time that the IHMs were officially released, having left the order on her own and decamped to Massachusetts. Although she was not a formalized leader in the order, as its most public member she had been responsible for some of the friction between the Archdiocese and the IHMs. In the late 1960s she grew more and more tired and disheartened by the tension, which, coupled with her physical and artistic exhaustion after years of overwork, led Corita to take a sabbatical to Boston in early 1968. Years later she explained that, unbeknownst to her at the time, a friend had written a letter to the college president warning that Corita was heading toward “a nervous breakdown” if she didn’t slow down. Once in Boston, Corita claims, she realized “I just couldn’t teach anymore, that I didn’t want to teach anymore.”10 She maintained a presence in Los Angeles, selling prints through IHC and eventually through the gallery Corita Prints, but lived in Boston the rest of her life. Sister Karen had a very different relationship with her religious vocation, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, than Corita did. She had attended IHC in the 1960s and knew about the order’s struggles with the Church, but was not an IHM herself, rather a nun of the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity. Sister Karen experienced none of the ecclesiastical restraints that Corita did. Her order was supportive from the very beginning, allowing her to live in a house in Los Angeles with fellow Sisters of St. Francis in what was the order’s first approved off-site residence.11 They provided real estate and money to Self Help, remaining one of the art center’s largest donors for years. In January of 1976 Sister Karen wrote to two Franciscan Fathers to explain Self Help’s financial situation. That year Self Help had been given $17,000 dollars by the order, along with a promised stipend of $700 per month. As Sister Karen explained, “I believe that the community should know when the church is supporting them. Up to now, I have hesitated, except by word of mouth, to publicize the help the Franciscans have given us. When I am able, I would like to paint on the step-van, both my community’s name and the Franciscan priests name’s [sic]. If you do not agree with this, please let me know.”12 That year Self Help was in particular financial trouble. A delay in city funding left Self Help with a budget shortfall; Sister Karen had to lay off fourteen workers in July, and write the new Superior of the order what she called a “begging letter.”13

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Father McCoy’s response to Sister Karen’s suggestion that the support of the order be more publicized is indicative of one of many differences between Corita and Karen’s situations. He responded, “As for any publicity on the step-van, I would hesitate to identity [sic] the help any more than through the general word Franciscans. Somehow, I feel that we do not want to come on in any paternalistic way.”14 The Franciscan community was the most important supporter of Self Help for many years. It provided key early finances, as well as provided for Sister Karen’s sustenance and labor at Self Help for the rest of her life. Yet the order was sensitive to the public implications of its support, wanting to focus on the work of the art center and the people at it, rather than its potentially “paternalistic” assistance. Instead of the tight control over Corita that McIntyre sought, Sister Karen’s superiors gave her wide leeway in the enacting of her vocation, continually affirming the good work she did through both material and immaterial means.15 While the work of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was desired and controlled by McIntyre—facilitating a feminist reading of McIntyre’s anger at losing women’s labor to which he felt entitled—the Sisters of St. Francis were given freedom and agency to interpret the dictates of their religious vocation amongst a variety of possible jobs. Although Sister Karen had desires similar to Corita’s—to spend more time on her own work—the decades-long support of her order allowed her to stay rooted in Los Angeles, cultivating Self Help, which is one of the few Chicano art centers from the 1960s and 1970s still in operation today.16 In this way the art practices of both Corita and Sister Karen were shaped to the contours of their religious vocations and resulting lifestyles. Corita was part of a tumultuous and intense community of fellow Catholic activists in the 1950s and 1960s that saw in the Christian narrative the possibilities of a better world. That idealism met burdensome expectations and the different vision of Catholics like McIntyre, until Corita left everything—IHC, the IHMs, California, and even the Roman Catholic Church—except her art. Sister Karen, on the other hand, was a pragmatist from the beginning, following the style of her evolving order. She was free to choose her career and was supported in it. Over almost two decades she built up Self Help, facing all the fundraising and political challenges of any such art center, and although her fame never approached that of Corita’s, she was able to maintain a relationship with many of the things Corita gave up: her institution, her order, her home state, and her church.

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Progressivism at Immaculate Heart College Although Corita was overworked and exhausted by the late 1960s she spent an incredibly productive few years in the Immaculate Heart College environment. Her early serigraphs treated mostly religious themes, and starting in the early 1960s she created Pop-influenced work and dealt with current events. She gradually started to make more overtly political work, usually focusing on the Vietnam War but also creating serigraphs in response to the Civil Rights movement and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In many different forms over the years, Corita claimed that she couldn’t protest in the streets, but saw her art as her contribution to the social movements. In 1971 she explained, “You see, I’m not good at marching and speaking politically. But I want to do what I can to put myself to the greatest use in supporting that which I believe. So naturally, with me, it would have to be through my art.”17 In 1977 she said that compared to front-liners such as the Berrigan brothers (priests known for their social activist stance), she “really had no guts at all, until it finally occurred to me that I really had my own place. […] I couldn’t march and be in the public that way. I had to bring it into the work and into the students’ work, make it available that way.”18 And in 1984 she told columnist Mary Bruno, “I always felt I couldn’t march or do political things but could help by doing my own task—posters, work with students to get them involved in, etc.”19 Corita conceived of her “own place” and her “own task” as bipartite: the creating of political posters and the awakening of political consciousness in her students. Of these screen prints, her most evocative are those that deal with war and violence: works such as stop the bombing (1967), moonflowers and manflowers (1969), and american sampler (1969). Corita handled the struggles of marginalized peoples less deftly, and rarely broached issues that fell outside of a general humanist ideology. Although she was incredibly well read, and widely informed about current events in the United States and around the world, her handling of race in particular was not always sure-footed. Two 1965 works exemplify the strength of her treatment of poverty, and the occasional misstep in her treatment of race. On my people, Corita screen printed the front page of the August 14, 1965 Los Angeles Times, four days into the weeklong Watts Rebellion (fig. 6-1). The title reads “Eight Men Slain: Guard Moves In,” referencing the arrival of thousands of National Guardsmen to impose martial law on the South L.A. neighborhood. The quotation Corita included on the print reads:

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Chapter Six The body of Christ is no more comfortable now than it was when it hung from the cross. Those who live in the well organized, well ordered, nourished, clean, calm and comfortable middle class part of Christ's body can easily forget that the body of Christ, as it now exists, is mostly disorganized, devoid of order, concerned with the material needs, hungry, dirty, not motivated by reason, fermenting in agonizing uncertainty and certainly most uncomfortable. Youth is a time of rebellion. Rather than squelch the rebellion, we might better enlist the rebels to join that greatest rebel of his time—Christ himself.

The excerpt is one she also used on people like us yes, from the same year—and, given the feverish way she worked, probably from the same few weeks of August (fig. 6-2). The words are by Maurice Ouellet, a priest in the Society of St. Edmund who was actively engaged in Civil Rights protests in Selma, Alabama until his transfer in 1965 because his archbishop disapproved of his political involvement. With the IHM sisters being ever more closely watched by their own conservative archbishop, Corita must have felt drawn to the words of Ouellet for both their shared political goals and their shared persecution by Catholic superiors. Corita’s use of this provocative excerpt within two different prints provides a useful summary of the tension within her 1960s approach to politics and art. In one, Corita adroitly redeploys the language of corporate America to advocate social equality; in the other, her use of a current event perpetuates—consciously or not—racist tropes about African Americans. In people like us yes, the text is juxtaposed with the slogans of First Federal Savings and Loan (“people like us”) and Chevrolet (“Workpower”). Here, it acts as a general call to arms. “People like us,” Corita implies, are the middle class Ouellet was describing (especially true of the students at IHC), and the women, in their energetic and rebellious youth, need to harness “workpower” to improve the condition of the rest of the church. The print is done in a jaunty orange color, with the bold slogans taking up most of the composition and the affirmative “yes” the largest word of all. Corita uses the advertising strategies of successful corporations—efficiently appropriating the work of professional copywriters and the associations these phrases built up over time in the contemporaneous viewer’s mind—to put forward the liberal but not particularly radical message that while Christ himself was an outsider (an itinerant agitator) the Christian, American middle class seems to conveniently forget this identity.

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In my people, the different context for Ouellet’s words turns the poster into a sharper and more political artwork. Paired with the front page of the Los Angeles Times describing the conflict and death happening less than twenty miles away from IHC, it gives a specific identity to some of the “hungry, dirty” in the body of Christ. The slight difference in title is also telling; “people like us” speaks in a comfortable tone to an in-group, whereas “my people” is the voice of political tribal identification; it is also the title of a Langston Hughes poem that declares the beauty of “my people,” comparing their faces and eyes and souls to the night and stars and sun.20 The stark, blood red on the bottom of the print provides the color that the newspaper page is missing. And whereas in people like us yes Corita edited out the superfluous images and text that originally appeared around the advertising words, in my people the entirety of the Los Angeles Times front page is reproduced, with all of its urgency (“EXTRA” and “FINAL” adorn the masthead), alarmism (article titles include “‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs” and “Anarchy Must End”), and racism (another title: “Racial Unrest Laid to Negro Family Failure”). Corita’s inclusion of these failings on the part of the Los Angeles Times could be seen as a critical maneuver. But the context of the Watts Rebellion betrays the problems with Corita’s (and Ouellet’s) conceptions of those outside of the (white) middle class. Ouellet contrasts those “mostly disorganized, devoid of order, […] not motivated by reason” with the middle class, setting up a divide between the materially deprived and the comfortable that draws upon essentialist language. In this configuration, the poor are not just desperate, they are irrational; they are not just powerless, they are undisciplined and chaotic. This stance is amplified when Corita applies it to the situation in Watts. The division she sets up is between the (mainly) white staff of the Los Angeles Times and its readership and the black citizens of Watts, paternalistic in its understanding of the anger of black South Angelenos. The inclusion of the final call of the excerpt—to bring the “youth” rebellion to Jesus—is patronizing in this context, and conjures up centuries of portraying people of color as young and in need of guidance.21 The power of the image and the smear of blood filling the lower half are both undercut by the misguided application of words that at their best do not counter the racism of the newspaper, and at their worst complement and perpetuate it. Although my people is unusual among Corita’s mid-1960s oeuvre— its directness and use of photographic imagery are much more common in the late 1960s prints—it betrays both the strengths and weaknesses of her political engagement. On one hand, Corita was aware of the world around

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her and, through the poster medium, was able to respond quickly and deftly to cultural and political events and movements with what she understood as a form of activism. As an aware and informed reader and viewer, she was skilled at putting together images and words from diverse contexts to create prints with multiple layers of meaning and interpretation: prints that were direct but also complex. Her art is best when broad and uniting, such as is accomplished by her memorial posters, her anti-war and anti-nuclear work, and her designs for George McGovern’s campaign. On the other hand, Corita’s general, liberal, humanist beliefs did not equip her well to handle the intersecting issues of marginalized populations.22

Empowerment at Self Help Graphics Like Corita, Sister Karen Boccalero became a nun when she was eighteen years old, immediately after high school. She joined the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, an order with a history of working with immigrant communities and their most pressing needs, and attended IHC. She had grown up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, an Italian-American in a diverse community,23 and remained active there in the local art world. In 1970, Sister Karen and fellow artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, and Frank Hernández formed the idea of an East L.A. Chicano art center. They began working to realize this dream immediately, hosting an exhibition and seeking out funding until they secured a space on Brooklyn Avenue, a main thoroughfare of the Boyle Heights and Brooklyn Heights barrios, in 1972. From this crucial location—and from the very beginning—Self Help Graphics and Art was conceived of as a distinctly Chicano, distinctly East L.A. institution. Sister Karen explained, “the original bylaw is to encourage and promote Chicano art in the Los Angeles community—the organization was created for that purpose.”24 The organization was not exclusionary, but rather celebratory: an affirmation and encouragement of a population that was beset by economic and social oppression. In the years before the founding of Self Help, the Los Angeles and wider Chicano communities had been mobilizing to protest unequal social opportunities and exploitative labor treatment. Tensions had been present for decades—including the famous examples of Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots in the 1940s—but the 1962 founding of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta is often cited as a foundational event in the Chicano movement.25 In 1965, the NFWA supported a group of Filipino workers to advocate a Delano,

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California grape protest that involved strikes and boycotts, condemning the company for its low wages. The activism of the NFWA was accompanied by a flowering of Chicano posters, which continued a venerable tradition of poster making in the Spanish-speaking activist world. Images such as Viva La Huelga and Boycott Grapes indicted the agricultural industry that exploited undocumented and vulnerable workers, often of Mexican heritage. In 1966 the farmworkers famously marched from Delano to Sacramento to demand legislative action. Although the strike took years, it was eventually successful, culminating in a 1970 collective bargaining agreement between the growers and the workers. More locally, 1967 saw the founding of the Brown Berets in Los Angeles, a Chicano nationalist group organized on the template of the Black Panther Party, which had gained international attention from its Northern Californian base. The Brown Berets called for the return of all lands captured in the Mexican-American War and sought educational and other equality for the Chicano population. Educational opportunity was a fiercely contested issue in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s; the East L.A. Walkouts of 1968 saw thousands of students boycott sub-par high schools such as Roosevelt, Lincoln, Wilson, Belmont, and Garfield for eight days. In 1969 multiple Chicano and Mexican-American art centers were founded in Los Angeles, including Plaza de la Raza, Mechicano Art Center, and Goez Art Studios and Gallery.26 Then, the same year that the founders decided to begin Self Help, the Brown Berets organized the Chicano Moratorium, which took place in the center of East L.A. on Whittier Boulevard on August 29. Tens of thousands of protesters came out against the Vietnam War, the disproportionate affect it had on minority communities, and the need to attain social justice at home. Police brutality and rioting broke out, resulting in three deaths, including the killing by police of Rubén Salazar, a Los Angeles Times journalist who was in a local restaurant that was teargassed. The anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium march remains an important date in Chicano culture. A local park was renamed in Salazar’s honor, and just four years later the radical arts collective ASCO would memorialize the march in their performance piece First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974. It is within this climate of rising self-consciousness and protest amongst the Los Angeles Chicano population that Sister Karen, Bueno, Ibañez, and Hernández founded Self Help Graphics.27 Bueno and Ibáñez were Mexican-American artists, and Hernández identified as a Chicano. As previously mentioned, Sister Karen was an Italian-American from East Los Angeles, where she had lived from her childhood. Although Sister

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Karen was not Chicana herself, her local embeddedness determined the community she felt called to work with. She wanted to create art, exhibit it, and work alongside the next generation of East L.A. artists—who were mainly Chicano. An early letter asking for support makes no mention of Chicanos specifically, but continually references “East Los Angeles” as the nascent foundation’s environment. Much like Corita, Sister Karen was not a marching activist; instead, she wanted to empower the local youth through art. She claimed that she, Ibañez, and Bueno (there is here no mention of Hernández) wanted “to give individuals who have talent, energy and motivation an opportunity to work, to learn, to develop and to be promoted as professional artists.”28 This use of the word “professional” does not appear as often in the later years.29 Although she was a trained artist, Sister Karen was more devoted to the service aspect of Self Help’s mission than in building a fine arts academy.30 A clear example of these priorities is the Barrio Mobile Art Studio (BMAS). This program was begun in 1975 to bring the artists of Self Help to the local schools to teach printmaking, batik, photography, sculpture, and other mediums to students (fig. 6-3). The BMAS staff were skilled artists from the community, such as Linda Vallejo and Michael Amescua, who taught students about art through anthropology and history, especially about the art and artifacts of Mesoamerican and Mexican cultures. Students were encouraged to view their work in this historic context, while learning and becoming literate in their cultural heritage.31 Self Help recognized that Chicano children were not taught their own history in the curriculum of public schools, and so saw the BMAS as a supplementary education that would instill in them pride and a sense of rich lineage. While it was operational, the program served over 7,000 students a year. In this way, the work of Self Help combined pedagogical goals with political ones. Sister Karen knew the East Los Angeles Chicano community intimately—she had grown up within it, and was a fixture in the local arts scene. Self Help hired prominent local Chicano artists and started community programs to further develop East L.A. talent. Its insistence on geographic and cultural rootedness was different than IHC’s outward-looking stance. While the students at IHC were encouraged to get involved in world affairs, stay informed about political and social current events, and take up social justice movements, Sister Karen kept Self Help Graphics and Art a provincial institution. The immediate concerns there were of the students and artists within blocks of the art center: their understandings of themselves and their culture, their opportunities for creativity and education, and their forms of social and individual identity. As she wrote in a letter in 1975, “In truth, (my opinion) art and working in

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art is a viable and necessary part of working with the poor. After all, values are transmitted through images (art) in many fields. Art is communication and the poor need a means of communicating their ideas and their dreams as well as their values.”32 Sister Karen wanted to provide a marginalized population with a way to communicate their values, ideas, and dreams, connecting them not only with each other, but also with their historical past and their empowered future.

Mary’s Day and Day of the Dead This paper has briefly outlined the ways Corita and Sister Karen’s work drew from the artists’ religious contexts, pedagogies, and particular institutions; it is helpful to look at two events organized by IHC and Self Help Graphics to emphasize the differences between them. While both IHC and Self Help are widely known for their screen prints, they also hosted (and, in the case of Self Help, continue to host) community events. IHC was especially known for its annual Mary’s Day in May. Long a formal, traditional religious ceremony, in the early 1960s the Mary’s Day event was given to Corita to plan. She thought it previously to have been “a very dismal affair,”33 and turned it into a “real celebration,” introducing colorful banners and balloons and music and artwork.34 By 1964 the festivities had expanded, and included a procession on the IHC campus hill, lectures by guest speakers, and much socializing and general merriment (fig. 6-4). Corita and the art department invested the day with the same Pop-influenced appreciation of mass-media art and culture that was used in her posters. The signs and banners held by participants were typical of Corita and IHC’s work: “God loves me” next to advertisements for Coke, fruit, and eggs. Cardboard boxes decorated with collaged art and magazine images were used as versatile blocks: carried as signs, then stacked as altars.35 Corita continued the cycle of life-into-art-into-life by turning tape of the events into films that she screened at lectures and Happenings. Each year the day had a theme, including “Food for Peace,” “Challenge to Change,” and “Revolving.”36 At the 1966 celebration— which featured a brochure by Daniel Berrigan with Corita’s iconic “Come Alive” and “Power Up” Pop motifs—poet, author, and former editor of the Catholic magazine Jubilee Ned O’Gorman was the keynote speaker. He challenged his listeners, saying “we are the children of the revolution […] To be a Christian is to be in a flourishing state of revolution.”37 O’Gorman defended the Second Vatican Council, exhorting that “where we find it mocked and scorned, limited and subjected to bourgouise [sic] fears of

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change and renewal, we must shout aloud our sorrow and love and tact and and [sic] wit and seriousness and joy. Like the bird to air and fish to sea and rock to earth and farmer to season we are committed to that council.”38 In his final words he commissioned the congregation: Go then and renew the world, renew the dark, renew the sick, the dead, the [d]ying. Seek peace, seek justice[,] seek the Master. But he is here, beside you, in that car, on that sidewalk, in that jail, in that burned out church, in that trench, in that mad house, in that school, in that cathedral, on that mountain, in that sailboard, in the world. The man of the Alleluias. The revolutionary, the prophet, the cel[e]brater, the center[,] the arch-stone, the bridge, the Man of gold and wisdom, the beginner of all anniversaries.39

These words of action were aimed at fellow Catholics; at one point O’Gorman made sure that the audience knew that one must choose to be a Catholic to truly be one. This is send-them-out-into-the-world language, calling upon Christians to be light and salt, the spreaders of good news and good works. It is poetic, and it is abstract, relying on metaphor and parable. Although Mary’s Day was open to the community, it remained a specifically Catholic celebration, which affirmed orthodox theology; O’Gorman could count on speaking to his audience in familiar Christian language. The IHC community was progressive and outward focused, and its urge to social action stemmed from its understanding of itself and the Roman Catholic faith. Accordingly, the challenges it posed to people like McIntyre were intra-Church, and had to do with theology, hierarchy, and liturgy. McIntyre disagreed with the IHM’s manifestation of their religious vocation, but the specific topics of contention and format of the battles can only be understood within a Roman Catholic context. The celebration Self Help became best known for—its annual Day of the Dead (a religious holiday honoring the deceased celebrated throughout Latin America and especially Mexico)—although probably informed by Sister Karen’s experiences at IHC, was wholly different in its goal, its organization, and its audience. Beginning in 1974, Self Help hosted a Los Angeles celebration that included a ceremony and mass at Evergreen Cemetery and a procession down Brooklyn Avenue to Self Help for festivities and entertainment (fig. 6-5). When KNXT did not cover the first iteration of the event to Sister Karen’s satisfaction, she fired off a typically spirited letter to News Director Bill Eames. She told him, You had an opportunity to show to the East Los Angeles area, as well as the greater Los Angeles community, a very positive and important cultural event.

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We find it extremely discouraging that KNXT as well as other news stations in Los Angeles are quick to report any related violence or a killing but when you have the opportunity to report a very uplifting and positive cultural event such as Dia de los Muertos, where are you? We believe it is very important that every community be able to view positive accomplishments which take place in their neighborhood. We have observed by watching KNXT news that you regularly report human interest stories which occur on the west side of town but are not as responsive to events on the east side. We feel that the East Los Angeles area is rich with human interest stories which reflect an encouraging image.40

This compelling excerpt contains many insights about Sister Karen’s (and, therefore, Self Help's) values and priorities regarding the art center and especially el Día de los Muertos. Always a forceful advocate for Self Help, Sister Karen tirelessly spent her time writing publicity and fundraising letters, chiding politicians and funders for lackluster support, and applying for dozens of grants.41 The language that Sister Karen used in these letters to argue for Self Help’s relevancy and importance was slightly tailored, but largely uniform. Tellingly, the only time she used religious language was in letters to fellow vocational Catholics—in those instances she would briefly mention the Christian mission or sign her letters with statements of faith, blessings, and prayer. When writing to Father Martial, as described previously, she included the very rarely expressed idea that “we are able to put into practice our work, the emphasis on art as a significant move toward the reinforcement of Christian values in the Chicano community”—a missional vision that is not extant anywhere else and that was probably meant to encourage the Father’s continuation of funds.42 Otherwise, Sister Karen used the diction present in the letter to Eames: “uplifting and positive,” “accomplishments,” “encouraging.” She wrote of education and empowerment, of cultural heritage and socio-economic opportunity. However Sister Karen interpreted her own religious beliefs and their relationship to her work at Self Help,43 the institution itself focused on cultural, instead of religious, mandates. Its revitalizing of el Día de los Muertos was meant as a celebration of a Mexican holiday; its Catholic inclusions, such as mass, were part of the Self Help event because they were part of the original Mexican festivities—not because Self Help was in any way Catholic or evangelical in its mission. In the KNXT letter Sister Karen betrays concern for both how East Los Angeles is viewed by others, and by itself. She acknowledges the success of the celebration, but also points out the racism and elitism of the

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media in its decisions about what constitutes a “worthwhile” news event. Self Help had to constantly fight for recognition and serious consideration: a 1979 letter from Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson, responding to Self Help supporters who complained that the newspaper never reviewed its shows, is filled with condescension.44 Sister Karen recognized the media’s racist portrayal of East Los Angeles as violent and dangerous, as it conveniently ignored the sort of redeeming community events that were often featured in articles about whiter areas of the city. Although Sister Karen wrote to Father Martial that their goal was the “reinforcement of Christian values,” the vast majority of her statements in newspapers and letters about Self Help are concerned instead with the self-respect, empowerment, and agency of her local Chicano community.

Two Versions of Los Angeles Populism Corita was an artist and a teacher—she was interested in the outside world, traveled and read extensively, struggled with McIntyre’s authority, and eventually left the order to devote herself full-time to her art. Although Sister Karen always viewed herself as an artist and lamented the loss of time to do her own work,45 she stayed enmeshed in East Los Angeles and dedicated to her job as executive director of Self Help until her death. She also remained in her order and in the Roman Catholic Church, and her letters show astuteness about how to handle the strictures of a nun’s life, as well as genuine affection for the nuns and priests in her order. The formula is over-simplified, but the devotion of each woman’s life can be summarized by what her legacy has become: both women were artists and leaders, but Corita is chiefly remembered as an artist and Sister Karen as Self Help’s founder and director. Corita and Sister Karen mobilized their religious commitments to offer two distinct examples of postwar Catholic activism. Corita, who was friends with Daniel and Philip Berrigan, priests famous for their peace activism and the several years they spent in jail because of it, understood her vocation as one that required her to “enjoy things fully and not to possess them for herself, to love people greatly and not to possess them, to unite with a group of people who want to do the same job which is too big for an individual or an individual family to do alone.”46 This “uniting” was a key component of her life and work: manifested in her community living, her collaboratively created art, and her emphasis on connecting with others to work for peace and understanding, the “job […] too big for an individual.” A belief like this could be called “evangelical”—there is a good message to be spread, hearts and minds to be changed, and

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supporters to be rallied and commissioned. Sister Karen, meanwhile, approached her vocation in a more traditional way for a nun: as someone rooted to a location, serving the community around her however she was needed. Although she did not live in a typical convent, Sister Karen devoted her professional and personal life to Self Help47 in a form of life religious that could be called “service-oriented.” Although Corita and Sister Karen emphasized different aspects of art, politics, and social justice in their careers, both sisters were dedicated to populist ideals, particularly in the way they organized and pursued their work. And their beliefs were not empty rhetoric. Both Corita and Sister Karen prioritized the affordability and accessibility of their art above their own profit, at some expense to themselves. Corita once explained, “Dealers come to me and say my name is not ‘big’ enough, and my prints are not expensive enough. On the other hand, I hear of people who must buy on the lay-away plan and who pay $10 a month and to them the cost of art is not a funny game.”48 And Sister Karen said almost the exact same thing in a fundraising letter to a Franciscan priest: “We are also trying to earn money from our small silk-screen department, in order to help us with small expenses. Since we feel we must keep our prices well within the reach of the community that we serve, the profit is minimal. We are currently earning approximately $50 per month.”49 In fact, the sisters’ most political acts were not the products of the art they made or sponsored, but their stubborn opting-out of the profit-driven gallery system, and opting-in to a community-based framework that valued affordability, reproducibility, and collaboration. Corita did not limit the number of her prints to increase their rarity and value—a practice she found unnecessary and elitist when applied to the screen printing medium50—and Sister Karen chose to seek finances from supporters instead of raising the prices of the prints Self Help sold, even though fundraising was a constant worry. While the political nature of both the prints and the institutions so synonymous with Corita and Sister Karen effectively garnered support and controversy for the sisters’ projects and careers, their most radical action was a refusal. Corita and Sister Karen did not simply “critique” or “comment on” the capitalist system of the art world—they disavowed it. This does not mean that they gave away their work for free, although they very nearly did, with Corita often doing pro bono or highly reduced commissions for non-profit organizations and Sister Karen living on a stipend from her order to fund the bare essentials of her life. But they chose to let forces other than those of the market determine the wages for their labor and the prices of their creations.

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Both women religious had multiple roles as teachers, artists, and leaders in variant contexts: the Roman Catholic Church, their respective orders, the City of Los Angeles, their institutions, and, in Corita’s case, on the national art scene. The navigation of these shifting and multivalent demands depended on Corita and Sister Karen’s priorities and contexts, which resulted in the divergence of their careers. But through these differences they accomplished great work that expands our conception of what “political art” can look like. Not only is an activist poster a political work of art; the very “work” of the structures of art is political: its creation, its financing, its publicizing, and its dissemination. And it is this conception of the totality of art that Corita and Sister Karen understood through their Roman Catholic ethics: a vision of art rooted in the material world that concretized their collaborative, radical, and empowering theology.

Notes 1

Throughout this essay, I am calling the artists by the names they preferred to go by in their later years, specifically “Corita” (née Frances Kent) and “Sister Karen” (née Carmen Boccalero). Although in some ways referring to them in such a casual way might be seen as contributing to the undermining of their legitimacy as artists, I want to be respectful to their wishes, as well as underline, at least in this paper, the centrality of their position as women religious to their work. 2 Corita Kent, “Art and Beauty in the Life of the Sister,” in The Changing Sister, ed. Sister M. Charles Borromeo Muckenhirn, CSC (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1965), 228. 3 The field has for almost a decade consisted of Julie Ault’s important book, Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (London: Four Corners Books, 2006). With the recent publication of two exhibition catalogues—Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, eds., Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent (New York: Prestel, 2013) and Susan Dackerman, ed., Corita Kent and the Language of Pop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)—the amount and quality of research is growing. 4 Mark Stephen Massa, The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 100. 5 Corita Kent, interview with Bernard Galm, April 5, 1976. Transcribed as “Los Angeles Art Community – Group Portrait,” Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles, 51. 6 The former chair of the department, Sister Magdalen Mary, was an especially pivotal figure. She founded the IHC periodical The Irregular Bulletin, and was for many years Corita’s mentor and the force behind the department. Corita later remarked that the Art Department’s fame might have caused resentment among

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other professors and departments at the college. Kent, interview with Bernard Galm, 106-7. 7 Much of this paragraph and the next is based upon Massa’s critical history in his chapter “The Dangers of History” in The American Catholic Revolution and Anita Marie Caspary’s book, Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003). A more sympathetic understanding of McIntyre’s leadership is provided in Monsignor Francis J. Weber, His Eminence of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre (Mission Hills, CA: Saint Francis Historical Society, 1997). 8 Beth Gregory, interview with the author, April 18, 2015. 9 See Caspary’s chapters, “The Archdiocesan Visitations” and “The Cardinal’s Response to Renewal,” in Witness to Integrity. 10 Kent, interview with Bernard Galm, 100. 11 Gregory, interview. 12 Letter from Sister Karen to Father Alan McCoy, January 15, 1976. Folder 4.4. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives, CEMA 3, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara (hereafter Self Help Graphics and Art Archives). 13 Letter from Sister Karen to Father John Vaughn, August 9, 1976. Folder 4.4. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. At the time, Self Help was paying rent and one secretary just to keep the building open. These layoffs and furloughs were a constant part of life as a Self Help employee. See “The Early Years, 1970-1985: An Interview with Michael Amescua, Mari Cárdenas Yáñez, Yreina Cervantez, Leo Limón, Peter Tovar, and Linda Vallejo” in Colin Gunckel, ed., Self Help Graphics and Art: Art in the Heart of East Los Angeles (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2014). The term “begging” would have carried deep meaning for the Franciscans, who are known as a “begging order.” 14 Letter from Father Alan McCoy to Sister Karen, January 21, 1976, Folder 2.1. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 15 Sister Karen’s file at the Provincial Archives lists her “Convent” from the 1970s to her death as “East L.A. Community” and “Self Help Graphics.” Box 212, folder “Boccalero, Sr. Karen.” Provincial Archives, Redwood City, CA. 16 Other Los Angeles Chicano art centers of the time that have closed include Goez Art Studio (1969-81), Centro de Arte Público (1976-78), and Mechicano Art Center (1969-78). Plaza de la Raza, a cultural center founded in 1970, is still active. For more on Goez and Mechicano, see essays by Karen Mary Davalos and Reina Alejandra Prado Saldivar, respectively, in Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, eds., L.A. Xicano (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011). 17 Mert Guswiler, “Corita Kent’s ‘Time of Conversation,’” Los Angeles HeraldExaminer, March 14, 1971. 18 Kent, interview with Bernard Galm, 72. 19 Corita Kent, interview with Mary Bruno, November 3, 1984. Transcript in Corita Papers, 1936-1992. MC 583, Folder 2.9. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger

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Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Corita Papers). 20 Langston Hughes, “My People,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 36. 21 For an investigation of how a particular understanding of Christianity was the foundation of slave owners’ paternalism, see Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a study of how racial paternalism continued to play out in Southern literature of the postwar period, see Brannon Costello, Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945-1971 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 22 Corita’s prints dealing with Martin Luther King, Jr. used quotations from 1963 or before. She did not use words from Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, or other Black Power activists in her work. She executed a few prints using the words of Nicolás Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, and César Chávez, but in a career body of over 800 works, these are rare. 23 For more on the racial makeup of postwar Los Angeles, and how it affected local politics, see Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 24 Greg Schneider, “A Conversation with Sister Karen Boccalero, Founder of Self Help Graphics,” Artweek 23, no. 21 (August 1992): 17. 25 For pre- and postwar histories of Mexican Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles, see George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Rodolfo Acuña, A Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975 (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 1984), and Ernesto Chávez, “Mi Raza Primero!” Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 26 See note 16 above. 27 Many have recounted that Sister Karen came to regret the center’s name, but kept it for the sake of continuity. Gunckel, “The Early Years, 1970-1985,” 70, and Tomás Benitez, interview with the author, September 26, 2014. 28 Letter from Sister Karen to Sir Daniel J. Donohue, June 16, 1972. Folder 4.5. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 29 In fact, divergent ideas of Self Help’s mission may have been a reason for the eventual estrangement that developed between Sister Karen and her cofounders. Ibáñez and Bueno were Mexican Americans, trained in the academy system in Mexico, and wanted to promote the traditional idea of fine arts. Benitez, interview with the author. 30 Sister Karen earned an MFA from Temple University, which included a year of study in Rome. 31 Program description, transcript edited by hand. Undated. Folder 29.12. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives.

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Letter from Sister Karen to Richard Freitas, February 11, 1975. Folder 4.3. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 33 Kent, interview with Bernard Galm, 30. 34 Alexandra Carrera, “Oral History” in Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, eds., Someday is Now: the Art of Corita Kent (Munich: DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2013), 43. 35 The cardboard box was a common IHC medium. See Kristen Gaylord, “The Controversy of Peace on Earth: Immaculate Heart College and IBM in 1965,” in “Scandalous,” ed. Nathan Friedman and Ann Lui, special issue, Thresholds 43 (2015): 46-55, 336-345. 36 Sandy Cutuli, “real gusto,” Our Sunday Visitor (August 7, 1966), 10-11. Corita Papers. 37 Transcript, “Remarks for Immaculate Heart, Ned O’Gorman, Mary’s Day, May 5, 1966,” 4. Corita Papers. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 This Mary’s Day was also a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of IHC. Ibid., 6. 40 Letter from Sister Karen (Executive Director) and Antonio Ibáñez (Assistant Director), November 5, 1974. Folder 32.3. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 41 Sister Karen’s chastises Ted Lumpkin (Department of Urban Affairs and Social Services Operations) and Edmund Edelman (Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors) when, in 1976, Self Help was being ignored and not given its renewed grant. Of course this debacle caused a constriction of SHGA funding, as mentioned previously, but Sister Karen was able to raise enough money to reopen. Folder 4.4. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 42 Letter from Sister Karen to Martial Luebke, January 13, 1976. Folder 4.4. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 43 Such personal reflections and understandings have been difficult to discover. Those who knew her well offer suppositions as to Sister Karen’s inner religious life, but she maintained privacy in these issues and was not nearly as vocal as Corita, who left behind multiple books, articles, and interviews defining her theories and beliefs. 44 He writes that the activities of Self Help are not of interest to enough readers, and then states “The proper province of journalistic art criticism is the evaluation of exhibitions of public interest in reputable and established art galleries by art professionals,” stating that the newly established Otra Vez gallery at Self Help may, in time, come to prove worthy of coverage. He signed the letter to the three artists with “I have admired the work of at least one of you. […] There is some consolation in the knowledge that quality eventually wins.” Letter from William Wilson to David Feldman, Ricardo Valverde, and Suda House. Folder 2.1, Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 45 Benitez, interview with the author, and Linda Vallejo, interview with the author, September 26, 2014. 46 Kent, “Art and Beauty in the Life of the Sister,” 228. 47 Benitez, interview with the author and Vallejo, interview with the author.

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Andy Rocchia, “Quieter Messages: Corita Kent Still Paints Words,” Oregon Journal (undated, unpaginated). Corita Art Center Archives, Los Angeles, CA. 49 Letter from Sister Karen to Martial Luebke, January 13, 1976. Folder 4.4. Self Help Graphics and Art Archives. 50 Marian Karpen, “There’s Something New on the Billboard Scene,” Herald Traveler, May 13, 1970. Corita Papers.

CHAPTER SEVEN ART AGAINST THE WORLD: COLLABORATIVE ANTAGONISM IN 1970S LOS ANGELES REBECCA LOWERY

The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. —Jeanette Winterson1

In 1970s Los Angeles, a new generation of artists began to explore a growing sense that, as Michel Foucault wrote in 1973, “something new is about to begin, something that we glimpse only as a thin line of light low on the horizon.”2 Within the heady political climate introduced by the tumult of the late 1960s, many of L.A.’s young artists turned their focus to performance-based investigations of the social body. Across the city, Chicano, African American, and women artists in particular developed mutually implicative performance practices that engaged a yet undefined horizon of experience: art as a shared occasion of social and political dynamism. With the rise of performance, the role of the spectator was suddenly very much in flux. Many artists were in favor of doing away entirely with the hierarchical relationship between them and the audience; for the artist Nancy Buchanan, “the audience was meeting you partway, and so it was like the work was being created in the middle.”3 Many artists thus began demanding that their audiences take active part in the creation of the experience that would result in the artwork. Audience members, if there were any, under these terms would no longer be viewers or spectators, but rather co-conspirators, co-creators, participants, or even witnesses.4 They would be asked to make choices, to endorse or reject, to parse complex

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ethical questions, and to consider their own actions. In short, the artist was dead, the audience was dead, and the experience was alive. The implications of such a shift were manifold. They included important questions about the limits of community, about the ethics of the group, about the consequence and value of dropping the pretenses of normative social existence. Entering this knotty territory, the work ran parallel—sometimes inspired by, sometimes sharing the zeitgeist—with the major social and political forces and upheavals that shaped the early 1970s, including the rise of social psychology experiments, intense debates in contemporary ethics, and, perhaps most importantly, the acrimony and devastation of the Vietnam War.

Two Revels In a gesture of deep artistic self-abnegation, the pioneering performance artist Barbara T. Smith, then a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine), created a chaotic gathering in her studio entitled Mass Meal (1969). She festooned the space with Day-Glo sheets and hot hanging meats, sealed off the room with translucent plastic through which cups of red wine were visible, and left buckets of paint and foam rubber lying around the space. Smith then departed, leaving her guests to complete the performance. For Smith, one of the key goals of such work was to transform the artist/audience relationship: “to bring the audience and the performer into the exact same space, and to bring us back into our priceless bodies. Our European culture had become so intellectualized and so body-mind split that we were just completely out of touch with our bodies”; with performance “what happens is you’re not just a watcher, not at all! Your connection is literal.”5 In Mass Meal, there was no longer any audience, and the event epitomized some of the risk involved with this transformation; Smith’s studio was completely destroyed in the riot-like revel that ensued, and the artist recalls that the experience was “chaotic and scary, and I really couldn’t get over it for a while.”6 In Smith’s action, it is significant that others were freed to add to the content of the work. The enthusiasm among Los Angeles artists to redefine the division between artist and audience joined a growing chorus coming from overseas whose figurehead was Roland Barthes and whose manifesto was his groundbreaking essay, “The Death of the Author.” In fact, the seminal essay had just recently been published, first in English in the avant-garde arts magazine Aspen in 1967, and the following year in French.7 Barthes posited that writing itself was performative: nonexistent

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until the moment it is made, and continually remade in reading, its true locus. In a performance such as Smith’s, the art does not exist until it is experienced and participated in by the audience. Without discernable boundaries between individual experiences in a shared occasion, a logical extension of art’s move into the body was the understanding that an interactive performance had no discernible single author, but was instead created in shared experience, with shared authorship. In the same year, a daring performance in East Los Angeles’s Belvedere Park by artists Gronk, Mundo Meza, and Roberto Legorreta as his drag character Cyclona, Ca-Ca Roaches Have No Friends (1969), was an all-out attack on mental complacency. Advertised around the park as “a play for the whole family,” the event drew a large crowd of locals, who were shocked nearly to the point of rioting by a raunchy display that culminated with Cyclona simulating fellatio on a water balloon and two eggs. Ca-Ca Roaches was brashly countercultural, cutting against the grain of both general cultural dictates of taste and propriety and the specific, socially conservative mores of the Mexican American population of East L.A. According to Legorreta, the audience set trashcans on fire and vowed to kill him, and the municipal Department of Parks and Recreation banned him from ever performing in a public park again.8 The experience epitomized, for Legorreta, “performance art in East L.A. in 1969. It was like life or death because people were so close[d]-minded.”9 For all of their differences, not only in form but in context and social realities, Mass Meal and Ca-Ca Roaches Have No Friends have in common a shared drive, in curator Howard Fox’s words, toward “human development at every level: personal, social, political, spiritual.”10 In such works, artists sought, in very different ways, to abandon the traditional structures of art making and instead engage others in a reconsideration of the culture’s values and core social structures. These same concerns also evinced in Los Angeles’s community-based art practices, its collective art projects, and even its progressive new Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) academic programs, which presented education as an unstructured process of collaborative learning and growth.

Artists Becoming in the Sixties Young artists working in the 1970s had come of age witnessing antiwar protests, the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, and the activism of groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose seminal Port Huron Statement had galvanized a generation of young radicals. The

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embodied experiences of SDS demonstrations, revolutions, street theater, and open-air be-ins suggested real, public, lived experience as a vital alternative to slow-motion calcification through media consumption. Yet the same artists were also witness to the shortcomings of the protest culture of the 1960s. For all of the decade’s energy, not much had changed on the level of basic human equality: the Vietnam War raged abroad, while in the US, activists continued to fight uphill battles against the marginalized condition of women, minorities, and gays and lesbians. By the end of the 1960s, the nation was in a state of deep unrest, and 1968 in particular had been pivotal and deeply traumatic, framed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The escalating horror of Vietnam, which was claiming more lives than ever, was exacerbated among the country’s youth when, in the same summer, the Lyndon Johnson presidential administration announced that it had cancelled the deferment for graduate studies and would be drafting 150,000 graduate students in July. Even the Port Huron Statement, in retrospect, was firmly in the mainstream, calling for the reform of existing political institutions, which it took to be fundamentally sound and ethical. By 1969, such trust in the democratic establishment was no longer as tenable; the essay was omitted from that year’s New Left Reader, which instead featured work from radical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Herbert Marcuse.11 In this context, the pursuit of a more humane and fulfilling life was of critical importance. The search for a theoretical blueprint for this purpose animated Marcuse’s later writings, a body of work that has special resonance with the artwork of 1970s Los Angeles. Marcuse had been a founding member of the Frankfurt School, the group of scholars who gathered under the aegis of Max Horkheimer at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Establishing the intellectual tradition of modern critical theory, Marcuse and others took a sociological approach that drew from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx to compare society’s potential against its reality. In “An Essay on Liberation” (1969), Marcuse, having lived in exile in the United States since World War II and by then resident scholar at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where his lectures began influencing a generation of young radicals, argued that contemporary Western societies, in their deep servitude to advanced capitalism, were beyond reform.12 The only alternative was “a methodological disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. Such a practice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding

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things… [to] become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.”13

The Collaborative Impulse Similarly galvanized by these problems, artists in Los Angeles were bolstered by their inheritance of a Californian tradition that encouraged the free invention of social forms, stretching from communes and cults to the Hollywood stardom machine. Using a variety of strategies more or less encoded as “art” such as forming groups, creating collective art spaces, and even founding nonprofit organizations, artists experimented with the meanings and limits of community as it could be, rather than as it was. As with Marcuse, they were motivated by a meliorative optimism about humanity’s capacity to be just and equitable, as well as a radical refusal of the dominant sociopolitical paradigm. Collaborative performance allowed artists, particularly those from marginalized populations, to “speak” in ways that effected and even exceeded the theoretical claims of Marcuse and Barthes. They created art that was critical theory in action—art concerned with the nature of relationships, the relations of production, and the fundamentals of social change. One of the most recognizable loci of such practices was the feminist art movement. Second-wave feminism in the 1970s was defined, in part, by extensive and energetically organized networks, which made it a particularly privileged position from which to develop a critical-social mode of art making.14 As political inspiration, the example of student organizing in the 1960s had been highly influential for feminists, yet women on the New Left quickly began to realize their own devalued position. In 1964, for example, then-SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael had famously remarked, “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”15 In a country where the annual death toll of illegal abortion was estimated in the thousands and women made on average half the wages of men, marginalization by the reformist, radical left was intolerable. Suzanne Lacy, who graduated with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), has been one of the feminist art movement’s most active and visible figures since the 1970s; according to her, all of Los Angeles performance emerged “in the context of a highly politicized feminist art community.”16 The feminist art movement indeed has its roots in Southern California, particularly with Judy Chicago’s establishment of the Feminist Art Program (FAP) at Fresno State College in 1970, and, together with Miriam Schapiro, at CalArts in 1971. The FAP would eventually also

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inhabit the Woman’s Building, a nonprofit arts facility that would become a major center of art-based community education and collaboration. There and throughout the city, principles of collaboration, open education, community building, and networking in fact became integrated as forms within experimental performance as artists “created works that provided either models for a vision of a different world, or structures for people to experience new ways to interact.”17 This practice has provided inspiration for subsequent generations of artists who work collaboratively, following the feminist art movement’s drive, as Robert Hobbs has written, “to find a new model for successful human behavior that does not depend on aggression and booty but instead is concerned with more human and fulfilling needs that can be grouped under the terms ‘nurturance’ and community.’”18 The investigative nature of the communitarian artwork of this era accords with Marcuse’s assertion that it was impossible to conceptualize a specific alternative to the current paradigm ahead of its materialization. Aviva Rahmani, who attended UCSD prior to enrolling at CalArts, recalls the enormous popularity of Marcuse’s lectures and their formative impact of this message on a number of young artists. For Rahmani, his discussion of the process of building a new society through experimentation was “one of the issues that was most interesting to me about his thinking, that when you want a revolution, you don’t necessarily want anarchy—but although he didn’t necessarily use these terms—perhaps you do want chaos. Because what you really want is the self-organization.”19 Artists such as Lacy and Rahmani began experimenting with the social form. For example, Lacy describes one of her first solo presentations, One Woman Shows (1975), as a performance “structure.” For this work, she developed a word-of-mouth group of roughly fifty participants for a month leading up to the performance; beginning with Lacy, each woman chose three others as her audience, creating an interlinked web of performers and audiences. On opening night at the Woman’s Building, Lacy began with her performance, in which she recounted the day’s police reports for rape and drew her own blood. She then invited her three audience members to come share their own performances and in turn invite their chosen audiences to witness, a relay process that continued for a month as other women brought friends to the gallery to perform their private, undocumented works.20 The concept of this kind of open, creative experimentation was taken as a guiding mission in the region’s new MFA programs at UC Irvine and CalArts, launched in 1970 and 1969, respectively, which both foregrounded collaborative experimentation over traditional, skills- and

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studio-based art education. At CalArts, new dean of the School of Art Allan Kaprow brought his intuition that the “line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible” to bear on the program.21 Having gained international fame as an originator of Happenings, he now felt that something was conspicuously absent in such “spectacle”—how he came to describe his former works—was a sense of the true human interchange and negotiation that actually allowed it to take place. To redress this supposed oversight, Kaprow thereafter focused on more private, modest exchanges called “Activities” that eliminated the audience altogether. According to Kaprow they “were experiments to find out what a relationship might be under the special conditions of a piece. Usually, they would involve two, three or four participants… who would carry out a plan of simple transactions in the everyday world, without an audience.”22 In the Activities, the spectator had completely transformed into active participant. There was no longer a clear demarcation between artist and audience, and thus the work’s meaning inhered in the unfolding experience. This insight would be tremendously influential for the emergent Los Angeles performance scene. The performance work developed by Kaprow and his students reflected this open spirit. Tracts (1970), led by Kaprow as part of his first course on Happenings, was a very loosely structured exercise in absurdity: participants were asked to construct parallel cement footings on a hillside, separating them and increasing their size by a factor of two as they progressed. The resulting set of footings was then to be broken up and reformed into a new set that would reverse the first set, shrinking progressively by a factor of two. Kaprow’s instructions did not specify how large the footings should be, nor how many should be constructed, and so participants were implicitly tasked with navigating these decisions together, as well as negotiating unpredictable factors such as weather and real-life obligations over the course of the labor-intensive activity. Many of Kaprow’s students also created works that began with a basic structure but otherwise left outcomes to be determined by participants. Rahmani, for example, presented a number of works that allowed groups to experiment with their own vulnerabilities and sensitivities, under the distinctly Marcusian premise that relationships themselves—including their slightest elements—could be an art form.23 In the powerful Smelling (1972): A group of us wandered off into a field behind Cal Arts, until we found a valley. There each person slowly and shyly smelled each other as thoroughly as their inhibitions allowed. Then one person at a time was

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Rahmani was following an intuition that a substantive shift in human behavior would be aided by attentive consideration of the practices of human relations, including the intangible qualities of personal space. Attention to personal habits and stories was the driving force of her series of Pocketbook Piece performances (1969-2005), which included an iteration at CalArts in 1971. In this work, several women would sit in a circle and empty out their pocketbooks, which they had been instructed not to edit or clean up, each one describing all of the contents and their significance. This performance could be very revealing and even painful. Rahmani notes, “At the time, women never opened their pocketbooks in public, so to dump out all the contents and describe it was a shocking action… and some of it was absolutely scary. I remember one of the items that somebody described, she said, ‘I was carrying this when I was raped.’ And then she described how that object related to her experience of rape.”25 One of Barbara T. Smith’s earliest performances, Ritual Meal (1969) was, in one sense, another sort of social recoding, and a ritual of terrified becoming. Developed in the wake of Smith’s divorce from her husband of seventeen years, a traumatic yet transformational event through which she began to commit herself fully to being an artist, the event was an immersive, hours-long experience during which participants, guided by silent servers, engaged in a surrealistic feast .26 Wearing surgical gowns and caps, they ate strange food with medical tools, surrounded by projections of surgeries and galaxies and sweeping musical soundtracks replete with heartbeats and ocean sounds. Interviewed by a local television station about his participation in Ritual Meal, the photographer Malcolm Lubliner described himself as feeling “so, so abandoned and infantile during the experience . . . You know when you get involved in any kind of happening it’s usually sort of external, but this was internalized through a very important medium which is your stomach. In other words, your whole tradition of eating was broken down.”27 The eating ritual is a deeply entrenched tradition, and can be profoundly gendered. With this event, Smith reinvented her years of domestic experience serving her family and guests: It takes a little imagination . . . to see that the energy flow and management around the creation of meals in the home in everyday life is as much art/theater and or performance as this piece in an altered consciousness,

Art Against the World: Collaborative Antagonism in 1970s Los Angeles 129 setting, context and time frame. With some imagination one can value these events for their expanded consciousness significance every bit as much as the very practical one of providing food for the body.28

Thus the performance and its shared experience of a profoundly altered communal practice literalized Smith’s shift from an existence predicated by family pressures and cultural expectations to one that was wholly self-created, a metaphor, for her, of “analysis or dismemberment or recreating a body or eating a dead body to get its power.”29 It was a stepping-off point for reimagining the world as it could be, since, as Smith has written, “There is nothing intrinsic in the actions of any ritual that make it meaningful. It is the investment of meaning and seriousness put into the action by the willing belief of the participants that create the sense of meaning to them.”30 A work like Ritual Meal, she found, could be “a literal alteration of space time by its insertion into and beyond the normal flow of things and often an intervention into the psyches of those of us who participated.”31

Sharing the Space of the Performance Some artists continued this engagement of the social body by making themselves vulnerable to others or exploring the dimensions of vulnerability in a group situation. Rahmani pursued her interest in the buried layers of human experience with several performances developed during her time at CalArts, including a joint work with Marni Gud called Two Nice Jewish Girls (1972; fig. 7-1 and 7-2). The two artists had spent several months compiling highly personal material: photographs, journals, letters related to the death of a parent, and documents relating to a divorce. On the first day of Passover, they dressed up nicely, arranged in one of the school’s principal stairways everything they had collected, and then situated themselves on the adjacent mezzanine from nine o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the afternoon. People browsed through the intimate artifacts of the women’s lives, then stopped to have coffee and talk, many sharing their own experiences in return and were, according to Rahmani, “very happy to see something so immediately human and real in the middle of the then very alienated CalArts environment.”32 For Rahmani, it was clear “that people wanted to look behind the façade . . . I think when I grew up, I was really aware of gate-keepers in my life . . . And I think what was really different for people and what I was doing then was I was taking away the gate-keeper, and I was basically saying, c’mon in, let’s talk.”33

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Nancy Buchanan, a fellow student of Smith during their days at UC Irvine, explored a different set of unorthodox social juxtapositions with The Nancy Buchanan Talk Show (1974). Troubled and yet inspired by the personal ads she saw in the Los Angeles Free Press, the artist worked with gallerist Gerald Hayes to advertise a multi-service telephone line in local papers. These ads promised that Buchanan would be available during specified hours, picking up the phone and listening to anyone who called to talk about any topic. According to the artist, her preparation for eclecticism in the calls was a far cry from the reality. Buchanan recalls, “I had a topic of the day, it was around the Ides of March and I had this research I’d done about the Ides of March, I was all prepared to talk about that. I had dictionaries and I was gonna give writing advice, spelling, synonyms, crossword puzzle assistance, gardening tips, the poem of the day, the joke of the day, the recipe of the day.”34 Yet she says when it came to the two shifts she did in Hayes’s gallery from eleven o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the evening, “I would listen to obscene phone calls, and that’s almost all I got.”35 Buchanan’s performance allowed her callers total control over the auditory space of the telephone, and she was unprepared for the heavy psychological effect the callers’ explicit talk would have. Yet the performance added still another layer of confusion to the power dynamics of the artist and the audience: Hayes’s gallery was situated within his enormous home in Westwood, and while Buchanan sat in a small room answering calls, they were narrowcast to another room where more traditional gallery-goers listened in as they sipped wine and enjoyed the flames of an elegant fireplace. While Buchanan sat shaking “because there was just so much aggression coming through the phone,” the audience in the adjacent room was able to experience this as entertainment, amused by the pornographic auditory stream.36 Buchanan, unseen to both audiences, presented a dramatic audio show for one while interacting in uncomfortably intimate ways with the other. In a sense, it was the callers who became the true performers, while the gallery-goers in the main exhibition space became the passive consumers of a traumatizing experience made palatable by their levels of remove and situation within the refined architecture of high society.

Performance and Politics Many artists active in 1970s performance in Los Angeles also brought their backgrounds in political activism to bear on their artwork. Lacy, from her first days as a student at CalArts, immediately began to incorporate her

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training in social activism, having worked with the anti-poverty initiative Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and in mental hospitals as a student of psychology.37 She also focused on social capacity-building projects after graduating from CalArts, recalling that in her first three years after graduating, her focus on organizing—particularly in her work with the Woman’s Building—completely outpaced her artwork.38 The burgeoning number of artists’ collectives in Los Angeles was another testament to this desire to “alter space and time” and change the stakes of the game. One of the most significant of these groups was Asco, co-founded by Gronk with Harry Gamboa, Jr., Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón, III—a group of friends who had met in and around East Los Angeles’s Garfield High School, a locus of Chicano student activism, in the late 1960s. Gamboa and Roberto Legorreta, who later performed as Cyclona, had helped to organize the 1968 Chicano student walkouts there in protest of the poor conditions of neighborhood schools as well as the war’s outsized toll on Chicanos. Garfield was also home to several artists’ collectives, including Gamboa’s “Tree People” group. In this fertile environment, young artists were instinctively finding ways to combine art and political activism to help build, as Marcuse had written, the “radical social content of the aesthetic.”39 Using the streets of East L.A. as their studio, the members of Asco were, in Gronk’s words, “obscure barrio talents act[ing] in concert to convey a sense of social alienation (cultural resistance via performance).”40 While the Chicano movement had constituted an important political education for the group’s members, they also discovered points of major disagreement with many of its self-imposed standards. They felt particularly out of step with the expectations of Chicanismo, or Chicano cultural nationalism, which took artistic forms from the distant indigenous past to represent the present-day struggle. Despite these reservations, however, Asco (which means “nausea” in Spanish) was firmly political, and committed to a contemporary, avantgarde expression of the Chicano experience that was independent of what was expected of them as Chicano artists. Gronk recalls: The serious side of it was that a lot of our friends were coming back in body bags and were dying, and we were seeing a whole generation come back that weren’t alive anymore. And in a sense that gave us nausea—or “nauseous.” And that is ASCO, in a way… For me, it was, ‘I don’t do Virgins of Guadalupe. I don’t do corn goddesses. I can only do what I’m about, and I’m an urban Chicano living in a city. I can’t impose upon my work other things. I can be influenced by a war that’s taking place, that’s killing off people. I can look at the world and say, Yeah, yuk, it’s

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In one of their earliest performances, Stations of the Cross (1971), Asco solemnly paraded along East L.A.’s Whittier Boulevard on Christmas Eve in elaborate costumes, ending at the door of the Marine Corps recruiting center. Their costumes reflected the elaborate ritual displays of Catholicism, yet added a proto-glam rock absurdity and allure. The artists thus made reference to and defied market-driven expectations of Chicano art, while at the same time enacting a requiem for the outsized numbers of their community who had been claimed by the war. For Chon Noriega, this performance “recoded so-called ‘subversive’ acts—street protest, graffiti, leaflets—as performance, a move that allowed the group to reclaim public space, articulate a political critique, and have its message circulate within public discourse.”42 Another major performance group, Bodacious Buggerrilla, cofounded by the African American artist Ed Bereal, satirized American racial politics while performing at laundromats, street festivals, and student clubs, engaging their audiences on topics such as police brutality and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Bereal had emerged from art school in the early 1960s an already buzzed-about painter, quickly securing gallery representation in New York and L.A. and enjoying an unusually successful early career. An impressionistic profile of Bereal in a 1973 survey of the expanding street theater scene, Guerrilla Theater: Scenarios for Revolution, indicates the profound sense of cognitive dissonance that began to emerge as he attended fashionable cocktail parties in wealthy white circles, providing interesting stories for his hosts to tell other wealthy friends as they displayed his work on their walls.”43 For Bereal, the second half of the 1960s—beginning with the Watts Riots of 1965—taught him that an art without purpose was dehumanizing: it served to reinforce a racist, capitalist system, rendering him complicit.44 He began to realize that while men around him were stealing to avoid starving, “at the same time you’ve got artists doing what’s called minimal art—you take a shiny chrome bar… and you put one point of the bar two feet from the corner of a white room and lean the other part into the carpet—Art, right? Now wait a minute, hold it. What does it fuckin’ mean in relation to the human condition?”45 The form and techniques of Bodacious Buggerrilla, which eschewed concern for the distinctions between theater and performance art, emerged almost by necessity from a combination of Bereal’s fine art training and the political environment of the time. Acting in the plural and moving

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away from the model of the lone modernist was crucial, and the tension that came from working together was part of the form: while “making twelve people work as one is really a heavy tune,” he said, “one cat, like me… can do heavier shit if I’ve got a group to run my shit on… than if I’m out there cuttin’ off my ear on top of a hill someplace….”46 Bodacious Buggerrilla understood unfettered imagination as a potential agent of liberation. For Bereal, experimental performance could work toward that end: “How you do a thing can be as political as what you do . . . if you’re usin’ means that are creative for the first time, man, like it really makes people see. I think that can inspire them . . . they go No Shit; Yeah! Hey, I understand that; hey, that is An Idea.”47 Indeed, the group was as significant for its unusual strategies as it was for its content: imagining an art of bringing people together rather than dividing them, they performed in state penitentiaries and posh Los Angeles jazz clubs, opened for Richard Pryor concerts, held political education classes, and established an educational model farm site. Raising questions about the boundaries between art and activism and whether the distinction matters, John Weisman, author of Guerrilla Theater, reported that the group was “an organization. Bereal has taken the standard operating procedures that corporations use—everything from charting the chain of command to the theater’s communal responsibilities, and put them on paper . . . What’s most rewarding is that the thing . . . seems to be working.”48 Echoing key principles of community organizing such as those outlined by Saul Alinksy in Rules for Radicals (1971), which advocated collective action, nonviolent antagonism, and direct action, the atmosphere at their performances evolved according to the needs and desires of the audience. In Watts, for example, where many residents had loved ones who were incarcerated, the shows became venues to share and exchange newspapers from area prisons. Taking a more aggressive and confrontational approach to activism, Roberto Legoretta’s character Cyclona was drawn in deliberately crude strokes inspired by drag conventions, the camp sensibility of the legendarily trashy drag queen Divine, and even the clowns of European theater. Legorreta intended her to possess an in-your-face queer theatricality. Gronk and Cyclona’s performance with Cyclona’s partner Mundo Meza, The Marriage of Maria Conchita Theresa Con Chin-Gow (1970), was advertised around California State University, Los Angeles, as a “Chicano Wedding,” the latter term almost exclusively connoting, in this time and place, a heterosexual marriage ceremony. Yet the public arrived to find Gronk, Mundo Meza, and Cyclona (in bridal regalia) staging a gay wedding ceremony, publicly affirming the existence of queer Chicanos

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and making a highly prescient statement on the second-class legal and cultural status of queer relationships (fig. 7-3). The performance, predictably, was also met with anger and violence. With Legorreta’s brave interventions into deeply inculcated prejudices, Cyclona became a fixture of the East Los Angeles avant-garde; the blatant discrimination that gays and lesbians faced within and well beyond the Chicano community, and even among artists, underscored the importance of Cyclona’s ability, as Robb Hernandez has written, to “raise consciousness and political engagement by inciting the visceral and spectacular with each controversial performance and embodiment.”49

Collective Building Across Los Angeles, artists worked in expansive fashion, collaborating in a quest for education and growth. The leaders of collaborative art projects throughout the city readily embraced an approach that foregrounded community building and an emphasis on socially-based art practices, and were equally dedicated to the creative consideration of those areas of life not typically encoded as art.50 As Rahmani put it, “It seemed to me at the time that if we were making models, and I definitely consciously spoke about making models, it had to be a thorough model.”51 One of the most famous and groundbreaking projects created using this approach was Womanhouse (1974), one of the Feminist Art Program’s first major undertakings. For this collaborative project, participants spent six weeks transforming a condemned mansion at 533 Mariposa Avenue in Hollywood into an interactive art installation that opened to the public in 1972. In order to open the project up beyond the enclosed precinct of the art school, the participants also invited local women artists to participate. Open to the public from January 30 to February 28, Womanhouse was a resounding success and brought subject matter that had been largely unexplored in mainstream art—women’s experiences and their relationships to the home and to their own bodies—to national attention. While collaborative performance comprised a large part of Womanhouse’s public offerings, this groundbreaking project was significant not only as an art installation but because it had been created according to a new set of parameters for art-making and living. As a process, the project required participants to negotiate new skills in home repair along with interpersonal conflict and a policy of open dialogue and constructive dissent. The artists’ development of the art installation proceeded alongside the enormous project of renovating the crumbling structure,

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which entailed everything from replacing drywall and windows to cleaning and painting. Thus the artwork began with the basic materials of construction, and their application to the tasks of renovation. Further, the artists had to learn this array of new skills in an extraordinarily compressed timeframe while struggling through collaboration and compromise. The project was a consciousness-raising session come to life, and in its communal creation, its content, and its shared staffing, arranged around full-time work and mothering duties—activities that Peggy Phelan has called the project’s “‘behind the scenes’ performances,”52—Womanhouse directly reflected the vision of an expanded field of art-making that would aspire well beyond the creation of saleable objects. Chicago later explained: What I have been after from the beginning is a redefinition of the role of the artist, a reexamination of the relation of art and community, and a broadening of the definitions of who controls art and, in fact, an enlarged dialogue about art, with new and more diverse participants.53

In their disparate but politically aligned practices, Smith, Buchanan, Bodacious Buggerrilla, Asco, and the artists of the FAP were trying to change the relations of art production—to wrench it open to make space not just for a more equitable art world but one that was fundamentally truer to life. Such work, in part aimed at instantiating an art world of “new and more diverse participants,” achieved its true force via values of pluralism and collaboration—a direct contradiction of the traditional heroics of the lone artistic genius. For artists in 1970s Los Angeles working in such a mode, putting belief and theory in action, the specific paths were unclear and manifold, but the impetus to action was vital and openness an absolute necessity. In Ed Bereal’s view, the effort could not have graver consequences: “We can theorize for days, but it’s gotta get down to Does It Work? Can You Change The Shit? Cause it’s some pretty painful shit, man. Amerika is a painful muthafucker.”54

Notes I am deeply grateful for the generosity of the artists Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa, Aviva Rahmani, and Barbara T. Smith, who allowed me to interview them in the course of my research. Their illuminating discussions of their work and their reminiscences of this time period in Los Angeles have been invaluable. I would also like to thank Miguel de Baca, Robert Slifkin, Kristin Poor, Lauren Rosati, and Rachel Silveri for their insightful comments on this essay.

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Winterson is an award-winning contemporary English author and journalist. Jeanette Winterson, “Liza Lou,” JeanetteWinterson.com, April 10, 2006, http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/liza-lou. 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 384. 3 Nancy Buchanan, interview with the author, July 23, 2013. 4 In the context of these often difficult performances, the term witness can assume the additional valence of its pre- and early Christian roots, as the translation of the Greek word martys, or martyr: one who bears witness is one who confirms by personal presence and/or gives testimony to an occurrence; in the early Christian context this is increasingly to affirm or deny a controversial cause under threat of great personal harm. 5 Barbara T. Smith, interview with the author, July 17, 2013. 6 Ibid. 7 “The Death of the Author” had its first English-language publication in the American journal Aspen in 1967; this extraordinary double issue was edited and designed by Brian O’Doherty and included contributions from John Cage, Susan Sontag (“The Aesthetics of Silence”), George Kubler, Tony Smith, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and others. The essay’s French debut appeared the following year in the magazine Mantéia. 8 Roberto Legorreta, unidentified interview with Harry Gamboa, 1980. The Fire of Life: The Roberto Legorreta/Cyclona Collection, 1962-2002, Chicano Studies Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 9 Jennifer Sternad, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance Art: An Interview with Robert Legorreta,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 482. 10 Howard N. Fox, “Dreamworks: A Concept of Concept Art in California,” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000, ed. Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 290. 11 As usual, corporate America was astute enough to take notice of this shift in values toward the social good. A 1971 study by a management consulting firm for groups such as General Motors and Chase Manhattan Bank concluded, “Corporate managers will now have to submit to social as well as fiscal audits… Profitability will remain essential but the social forces are not going to permit them to use that as the only criterion of success. The question is to what extent profit can be sacrificed to the new social ends.” “Executive Foresees Social Audits for Business,” New York Times, February 14, 1971, quoted in J. W. Getzels, “On the Transformation of Values: A Decade After Port Huron,” The School Review 80, no. 4 (August 1972): 517. 12 Marcuse who, like the rest of the Frankfurt School, was exiled in the United States during World War Two, chose to remain in the US after the war’s end. After a series of teaching appointments, he eventually accepted a position as professor of philosophy at UCSD in 1965 and remained there as professor emeritus until 1978. His courses and lectures at UCSD were hugely popular, yet his presence was controversial: the Ronald Reagan-helmed Board of Regents attempted to oust him,

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the Ku Klux Klan sent him a death threat, the American Legion offered to buy out his contract, and one typically hyperbolic headline called him “a Dangerous Guru with a Bad Seed.” 13 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 6. 14 Feminist political protest tended in fact to emerge in tandem with artistic concerns in Southern California. In 1970, artists gathered to challenge LACMA’s “Art and Technology” exhibition on the grounds that it did not include a single woman artist. The protesters subsequently formed the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA), which comprised artists, historians, curators, and collectors, and served as a community organizing and networking group. 15 Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay, 1975), 57, quoted in Mary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 90. 16 Suzanne Lacy, “We’ll Think of a Title After We Meet: Women Performance Artists from Los Angeles and London,” curator’s statement for an exhibition curated by Lacy and Susan Hiller at Franklin Furnace, 1981. Series I, Box 31, Folder 1, High Performance magazine records 1953-2005, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (hereafter “Getty Research Institute”). 17 “A Date with Judy: A Dialogue with Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy and Faith Wilding.” Unpublished manuscript, 1980, 6. Box 6, Folder 3, Judy Chicago Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 18 Robert C. Hobbs, “Rewriting History: Artistic Collaboration since 1960,” in Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 79. 19 Aviva Rahmani, interview with the author, June 25, 2013. 20 Suzanne Lacy, “Time, Bones, and Art: Anatomy of a Decade,” in Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974—2007 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 99. 21 Allan Kaprow, “untitled guidelines for happenings” (1965), in Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), n.p. Kaprow’s work, particularly from the late 1960s, was increasingly shaped by his desire to move from the hermetic conversations of the art world. This required careful reconsideration of all elements of his art practice in order to eradicate those driven by what he saw as a provincial system of signification in the arts. A discernible audience gradually disappeared as he increasingly created work for individuals and groups; this work in turn heightened his sense that human interaction and intimacy could be subjects in themselves. 22 Allan Kaprow, “Postscript to Useful Fictions (1985),” The Act 1, no. 1 (1986): 11. 23 “Saving the Moment: Aviva Rahmani,” High Performance 7, no. 2 (September 1979): 71.

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Ibid., 70. Rahmani, interview with the author. 26 The guests included the important Los Angeles collectors and art scene fixtures Stanley and Elyse Grinstein (whose house was the site of the performance), Anne Ferrier (a friend who went on to run a gallery), Hal and Mary Ann Glicksman of the Pasadena Museum of Art, the experimental choreographer Steve Paxton who was staying at the Grinsteins’ home; Leonard and Betty Asher (collectors and parents to the Conceptual artist Michael Asher), the photographer Malcolm Lubliner, Ed and Avelda Moses, the collector Sue Dakin, and California Institute of Technology scientists Elsa and Gordon Garmire. 27 Unpublished Barbara Smith autobiography manuscript, 39. Series I, Box 52, Folder 14, High Performance magazine records, Getty Research Institute. 28 Ibid., 41-42. 29 Barbara T. Smith, interview with Moira Roth, in The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara Smith (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2005), 28. 30 Ibid., 49. 31 Ibid., 50. 32 “Saving the Moment: Aviva Rahmani,” 72. 33 Rahmani, interview with the author. 34 Buchanan, interview with the author. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 VISTA, which had been envisioned by John F. Kennedy as a domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps, was launched by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and later incorporated into the AmeriCorps network in 1993. 38 Richard Newton interview with Suzanne Lacy, “She Who Would Fly,” High Performance 1, no.1 (February 1978): 7. 39 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 28. 40 Gronk, National Endowment for the Arts application, October 15, 1980. Quoted in S. Zaneta Kosiba-Vargas, “Harry Gamboa and ASCO: The Emergence and Development of a Chicano Art Group, 1971-1987” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 5-6. 41 Oral history interview with Gronk, January 20-23, 1997, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 42 Chon A. Noriega, “From Beats to Borders: An Alternative History of Chicano Art in California,” in Reading California, 363. 43 John Weisman, Guerrilla Theater: Scenarios for Revolution (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), 102. 44 This six-day uprising was the largest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era, resulting in thirty-four deaths and nearly 4,000 arrests. Triggered by the arrest of a young African American man for suspicion of drunk driving, it was at its core a mass uprising in protest against the rampant poverty, unemployment, unsafe housing, and substandard schools of South Central Los Angeles. 45 Weisman, Guerrilla Theater, 103. 25

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46

Ed Bereal as quoted in Weisman, Guerrilla Theater, 72. Ibid., 71. 48 Weisman, Guerrilla Theater, 79. 49 Robb Hernandez, “Performing the Archival Body in the Robert ‘Cyclona’ Legorreta Fire of Life/El Fuego de la Vida Collection,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 114. 50 Marcuse himself, according to his student Angela Davis in the documentary Herbert’s Hippopotamus (1996), was “declared an honorary woman” by a local women’s organization, thanks to his important groundwork in pursuit of a richer, and more equitable existence. He also turned increasingly to discussions of feminism and its importance as our “most radical” movement in his later writings. 51 Rahmani, interview with the author. 52 Peggy Phelan, “Violence and Rupture: Misfires of the Ephemeral,” in Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983, Peggy Phelan, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 30. 53 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Conversations with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 70-71. 54 Ed Bereal as quoted in Weisman, Guerrilla Theater, 73. 47



CHAPTER EIGHT PROVING GROUNDS: ART AND ACTIVISM AFTER THREE MILE ISLAND CHRIS BALASCHAK

Nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society... [requiring] a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to.” —Alvin M. Weinberg1 The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure be communicable to others. —Kevin Lynch2

Photography can function as a cartographic and spatial practice by depicting spaces, and thus defining place, through its material presence. As both Alan Trachtenberg and Joel Snyder have shown with regard to nineteenth century American topographic photography, the camera creates territory.3 Photography might also recompose, rearrange, and promote new uses of existing territories when reproduced in print media, and produced in sequences and series. Such is the case with a number of American photo-based practices dating from the period after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, during the final days of March 1979. Located less than 200 miles from a number of major metropolitan areas, including Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City, Three Mile Island became shorthand for the accident itself. As such Three Mile Island stoked anti-nuclear sentiment in an American cultural conscious affected by the recent release of the film The China Syndrome (released March 19, 1979) and a growing non-violent protest movement against nuclear power and



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armaments. Photo-based print media became a site for fomenting antinuclear sentiment, and three artists in particular, Dona Ann McAdams, Lisa Lewenz, and Sharon Gilbert, used print media to fortify the public’s perception of American nuclear landscapes. As a result, their work constitutes an “activist cartography” which symbolically rearranged space as a means of disputing corporate and governmental land use for the production of nuclear power.4 A central aspect of anti-nuclear activism in the late 1970s was land use. Activists questioned the transformation of natural spaces into sites of industry, and also performed non-violent actions that would literally change the way a nuclear power plant’s real estate was used. Consider the examples found in the activist pamphlet Let’s Shut Down Seabrook!, the “Handbook for Oct. 6, 1979 Direct Action Occupation,” which outlined plans for protests and occupations of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. In the handbook’s opening pages, the authors’ Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS) reproduced a photograph of the Seabrook Plant’s construction. A wasteland absent of any indication of surrounding marsh ecology, the image captures distant cranes and infrastructure beyond a bleak and muddy field (fig. 8-1). The caption reads, “If We Lived Here, We’d Be Home,” anchoring the view of Seabrook “as it will appear to groups on the South Marsh.” The image was a prologue to the handbook’s instructions for occupying Seabrook, a protest that had the ultimate goal of repurposing the site of nuclear power production into a place of communal residence. Within the handbook’s pages, tactics for direct action are made clear: we learn where and how to assemble in order to occupy the site, how to deal with and treat police use of tear-gas and mace, are encouraged to find the “right tool” for cutting through chain link fencing, and (importantly) the various necessities that will need to be implemented when establishing “our community” on the land surrounding Seabrook (including production of heat, light, food, and access to medical attention).5 The handbook encourages not only participation in the direct action, but also attending a training session prior to the occupation date. The model for the handbook, and the subsequent occupation, was by this time well established at Seabrook, where non-violent actions had been taking place for the previous two years. By 1979, the CDAS, which had unsuccessfully tried to occupy the site in June 1978, were empowered by rising anti-nuclear sentiment in the Western world. The German anti-nuclear movement, in particular the 1975 occupation of a proposed nuclear power plant site in Wyhl, inspired the CDAS occupation. As Barbara Epstein writes, rather than a “symbolic action,” protestors in Wyhl had pulled “down fences,

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[got] onto the site, and [built] villages.”6 With the participation of around 28,000 people, the Wyhl occupation not only lasted a year, transforming a probable corporate landscape into a communal village, but ended with the successful rescinding of construction on the site. In both the earlier June 1978 and October 1979 direct actions at Seabrook, the CDAS intended to transform Seabrook’s space into “a community in which one could construct a life based on one’s highest values.”7 To allow for such spatial appropriation, the handbook included a number of maps, the most important of which illustrated “Destination Options”: a list of critical buildings on, and entrance locations to, the site.8 The occupation would appropriate the structures and spaces already present at Seabrook, and put in place by the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH). To borrow from Michel de Certeau, the CDAS’s tactic was “the recomposition of space” made possible by appropriating “the imposed knowledge and symbolism” already on site.9 Though ultimately unsuccessful in deterring the establishment of Seabrook Station (which has been in full production since 1990), these “symbolic politics”— recomposing space through acts of appropriation and altered use—was influential on subsequent direct actions, and on visual media produced by artists at the time.10 Through strategies of appropriation, satire, mapping, and with novel forms of production and distribution (such as Xerography), artists protesting nuclear power established confrontational and socially pervasive practices on the politics of nuclear power. Dona Ann McAdams’s The Nuclear Survival Kit (1981) is a photobased project taking several material forms: a series of self-published postcards in 1981, a number of Xeroxed posters distributed and wheatpasted in public spaces between 1981 and 1984, a book containing the posters released in 1982 (as well as subsequent editions released up until 1988), and occasional live performances involving slideshows, McAdams’s narration about radiation, and juggling. The project began in 1978 when Adams developed an interest in photographing the nuclear reactors at Indian Point, New York. This was followed by her direct involvement in protests in Australia against uranium mining, and in those following the accident at Three Mile Island. Throughout 1978 and 1979 McAdams travelled extensively in the United States, and through 1980 made photographs of nuclear power plants across the United States.11 When she was photographing at Turkey Point outside Miami, Florida, McAdams and two friends posed while juggling in front of the plant’s cooling towers. The performance was a means for McAdams to satirize the

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effects of radiation; the postcards of this event, and other visits, would be released with the subtitle They’re Juggling Our Genes! McAdams’s interest in transforming the nuclear plant into a circus is indicative of her subversive engagement with nuclear landscapes. The Nuclear Survival Kit postcards, nineteen in all for the June 1981 edition, present nuclear plants as tourist destinations. In the picaresque manner of Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots postcards (1971), or the road trip concatenation of Robert Frank’s or Robert Adams’s books documenting the American landscape12 (McAdams cites both as influences), Nuclear Survival Kit reshapes our conception of a nuclear plant’s social spaces. Consider her postcard made in San Onofre, California. Rather than focusing on iconic cooling towers, McAdams fixates on a pair of picnic tables outside the visitor center. Notably, her view does not evoke the sublime nature of technology in the American landscape. Such a view could have been found contemporaneously in John Pfahl’s Power Places (1981-84), a series of color photographs that frame power plants within a larger environmental context. Pfahl’s interest in juxtaposing the environment with industry produced a sense of romanticism that was not always well received. As Deborah Bright made clear, Pfahl’s aesthetic preoccupation appeared to overlook the social concerns surrounding his subject matter.13 By engaging nuclear landscapes through the form of a black-and-white postcard, and with ironic performance, McAdams’s images provide a more critical vantage point. The postcards that follow McAdams’s San Onofre image, of Rancho Seco in Sacramento, California, feature two cooling towers in the distance, and Adams in the foreground (fig. 8-2). Posing with a forced smile for the camera, Adams is seated at a picnic table littered with provisions for lunch. Behind her, and in front of the cooling towers, there is a small lake on which several boats sail. Beside the picnic table we find a playpen for a young child. The image’s sense of leisure, coupled with juxtaposed social elements, brings to mind Édouard Manet’s iconic modern painting Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (1863). Here, though, we have not only a picnic, but also a corporate space of energy production being appropriated for domestic use. Indeed, to this day, the park and lake that we see in the image are managed by the utility that owns the nuclear plant; under the guise of a recreational lake, this water feature is in fact a supplementary water supply for emergency use at the plant (which was decommissioned in 2009). Others of McAdams’s postcards draw attention to land use, and the spatial politics at play on these sites. Consider one of four depicting the Shoreham plant on Long Island, New York. Two of the postcards depict

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the plant’s control room (the only interior images from the project), while another (the only vertical image in the series) features a cooling tower looming over McAdams. The fourth of this group is taken from the vantage point of a beachside playground (Shoreham is located on the Long Island Sound), with the cooling tower apparent in the distant background. The number of houses along the beach diminishes our view of the cooling tower, and thus the didactic juxtaposition at play (radiation as a threat to child’s lives is the message). The greater effect is the juxtaposition of this image of a playground with those of Shoreham’s vacant control room. Stacks of Operating Manuals and seemingly endless panels of control switches present the viewer with labyrinthine complexity only emphasized when read against the ordinariness of Shoreham’s public space. The same interpretation can be leveled at one of McAdams’s postcards of Three Mile Island, which juxtaposes the plant’s four hyperbolic cooling towers with adjacent farmland. Given the contrasts established in her postcards, it is clear that McAdams’s concern was for public health and safety. Yet her work is undergirded by spatial politics as well. The construction and operation of nuclear power plants relies upon easy access to water for the sake of cooling or, such as the case was in Rancho Seco, emergency shutdown procedures. The necessity and threat of such proximity to water, and thus to concentrated human population, has clearly been in evidence at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Furthermore, what Fukushima Daiichi has in common with those plants documented by McAdams is that they are the product of private enterprise. In the United States it was only with the 1954 Atomic Energy Act that nuclear power was opened to private enterprise. According to the historians Philip Cantelon and Robert Williams, prior to the Act, publicly operated plants tended to be “located in remote areas” and were relatively uncompetitive in the energy market.14 The Act sought a reversal and “to give nuclear energy a chance to be economically feasible, power companies sought to locate plants near their customers and existing power grids. Therefore, the [Atomic Energy Commission] had to draw up new siting plans, and radiation standards had to ensure the public’s health and safety. A dilemma emerged.”15 The dilemma lay in the public’s skepticism in locating nuclear plants near population centers. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants were linked in the public’s perception. Though this perception dates at least to President John F. Kennedy’s Limited Test Ban Treaty, it held through the Cold War. As Lawrence Wittner writes, in the 1970s and 1980s, nuclear power was viewed as the “silent bomb.” On the

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anti-nuclear power movement, Wittner continues, “although, superficially, this was an environmental movement, the underlying reality was that many of the activists viewed nuclear reactors as merely extensions of nuclear weapons.” Furthermore, referencing the movement’s visual media, he writes, “the graphics used in the campaign [to resist nuclear power] . . . emphasized the nuclear connection: mushroom clouds rising from reactor cooling towers, or a reactor shaped like an egg cracking and giving birth to the Bomb.”16 An apt example of this conflation of nuclear weapons and power is the War Resisters League's poster Nuclear America. Published in 1978 and 1979, the poster is a two-sided lithograph in a standard seventeen by twenty-two inch size. The recto side features the continental United States supplemented by Alaska and Hawaii (fig. 8-3). Icons cover the map, and come in three colors, indicating different aspects of nuclear power or arms: red icons indicate Nuclear Weapons Facilities, black for Nuclear Power Reactors, green for Miscellaneous Facilities, while red oblong shapes for potential Nuclear Targets. As the War Resisters League notes on the verso, “This map was produced to graphically illustrate the magnitude and pervasiveness of the nuclear menace, to help stimulate organizing against nukes, and to emphasize the inseparable link between weapons and power.” The verso also features all sites denoted on the map listed alphabetically by state. The list of information hardly has the impact of the map; the state of a Nuclear America is best rendered cartographically rather than statistically. Also in 1979, a group of three artists who called themselves Women Concerned about Nuclear Power Plants (Nicola Bastian, Debra Crerie, and Raya Bodnarchuk) used the cartographic strategy to promote anti-nuclear sentiment. Their eponymously titled project (1979) took the form of a newspaper filled with cartoons on the health threats of nuclear power; the back cover displayed a crudely drawn map of the continental United States with dots denoting “some of the locations of nuclear industries.” While Nuclear America and Women Concerned About Nuclear Power Plants used cartography as a means to “emancipatory politics,”17 they were not engaged in the symbolic reinterpretation of place we see in McAdams’s work. As John Pickles writes, “cartographic reason . . . has reified places as bounded, known, fixed, accountable and controllable, producing space, as Foucault told us, as the dead, the inert, the fixed.”18 Spaces of institutional power, such as nuclear plants, are bound and controlled. In their appropriation of Seabrook, for instance, the CDAS struggled with the site’s “cartographic reason.” In essence, the CDAS could only occupy the site in the manner it was fixed (and arranged) by its

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corporate owner (Public Service Company of New Hampshire) and the federal regulator (Nuclear Regulatory Commission). They appropriated the site and changed its use, but did not wholly rearrange the site. Recomposition was left to symbolic representations of the site in the group’s literature, in maps and photographs. Consider another photographic project, Lisa Lewenz’s 1984: A View from Three Mile Island. Produced in 1983, the project takes the form of a calendar for the year 1984. Each oblong page features a black-and-white image at the top, and a monthly calendar below. 1984 is spiral bound, suggesting it be used as a wall-hanging calendar. This domestic sensibility derives from Lewenz’s personal connection to the accident, and invokes the private domains she photographed. As she wrote in 1984, “During the first days of the Three Mile Island accident . . . I was unable to face looking at a map. My grandfather lived within 30 miles, and my parents within 50 miles. I resolved never to go there.”19 Lewenz’s 1984 calendar notes dates of historical importance in nuclear power and weaponry. For instance, March 1 reads “US hydrogen bomb test irradiates Marshall Islands 1954,” or July 13, “NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] confirms 2,300 nuclear plant incidents in 1979 [and] 1980.” Like the Nuclear America poster, statistics supplement imagery. Each of the calendar’s twelve photographs was taken inside a house situated near the Three Mile Island plant. The photographs document interior domestic spaces, each including a window or doorway with a view of Three Mile Island’s cooling towers. Aside from the cover image, which is a shot from within the plant’s visitor center, the images within 1984 lack inhabitants. As with McAdams’s, Lewenz’s internal juxtapositions produce an unsettling picture of the public’s proximity to nuclear energy. Lewenz’s dispassionate observation of ordinary domesticity in the shadow of nuclear power affirms potential health hazards, while interrogating the photographic term “view.” As Rosalind Krauss points out in reference to views of the American landscape published in the late 19th and early 20th century, View addresses a notion of authorship in which the natural phenomenon, the point of interest, rises up to confront the viewer, seemingly without the mediation of an individual recorder or artist, leaving “authorship” of the views to their publishers rather than to the operators (as they were called) who took the pictures. Thus, authorship is characteristically made a function of Views, while the photographers remain anonymous. In this sense the phenomenological character of the view, its exaggerated depth and focus, opens onto a second feature, which is the isolating of the object of that view. Indeed, it is a ‘point of interest,’ a natural wonder, a singular

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While Lewenz’s images of Three Mile Island do not focus on nature, they are focused on singular and isolated objects. The nuclear plant’s cooling towers command attention, framed as they are by windows and doorways. Like her landscape photography forbearers, Lewenz was interested in the publication and dissemination of the view. Instead of stereographs, she uses a different material context appropriate to the medium: the photographic calendar. This does not, though, displace Lewenz’s authorship in the way that earlier stereographic view companies (such as Keystone or Underwood & Underwood) displaced their photographers’ names with corporate insignias and copyrights. There is, nonetheless, an issue of power and ownership here. Lewenz shows us that each household in the calendar has a view of the cooling towers. Yet it is the cooling towers, and the corporations controlling the plant (General Public Utilities and Metropolitan Edison), which effectively own that view (they literally own the structures) and impress that view upon adjacent residences. There is “cartographic reasoning” here that establishes control by the corporation, through the view, of private, domestic spaces. By disclosing the different kinds of interiors in these residences, conjoined through a common view, Lewenz affirms how the nuclear power industry’s appropriation of private space results in new articulations of space for the surrounding community. A critical element of McAdams’s and Lewenz’s photographic practice is the question of how visual information is to be presented, and where. During the accident at Three Mile Island in late March 1979, information as to the extent of the accident, and potential harm to the public, was available through joint governmental and corporate news briefings. As discussed by J. Samuel Walker in his book Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis Historical Perspective (2004), it is clear the accident was as much a public relations blunder as an engineering mistake. McAdams and Lewenz worked with photography as a form of public information, using photography in its most tangible forms (as books, posters, postcards, calendars) in order to raise awareness as to the hazards of nuclear power. For artist Sharon Gilbert, photography is only one of several means to reproducing and disseminating information. Gilbert addressed nuclear power in two key projects: 3-Mile Island Reproductions (1-8) (1979), and

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the book A Nuclear Atlas (1982). As the artist stated with regard to 3-Mile Island Reproductions, “The nature of the information made available to the public at the time [of the Three Mile Island accident] determined the form of the work. Without immediate, first-hand experience of the events, I drew on standard authoritative sources, the daily press and the dictionary.”21 3-Mile Island Reproductions is a series of Xerographic reproductions of eight montages. The separate, letter-sized sheets feature combinations of found newspaper photographs and headlines, as well as one sheet (the eighth) featuring dictionary definitions of relevant terminology. The reproductions are housed in a black folio envelope, which includes a photograph showing how the Xeroxes should be displayed. Importantly, the installation is to feature the folio itself, making clear that portability and circulation are critical to the work. A typical sheet from 3-Mile Island Reproductions features a photocopied, black and white newspaper photograph of two cooling towers. Isolated in the middle of the page, the image is anchored by two phrases. Above, “Radioactive Years” reads as a headline, while below the cooling towers, and in a smaller, sub-heading typeface, we read “Nuclear Wastes.” The reproduction thereafter relays this message of nuclear waste and fallout. Here we see parts of several images: a satellite weather map of the continental United States featuring clouds across the eastern seaboard, several figures in a control room, people from the waist down and luggage at their feet, a map of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area accompanied by the word “FACES,” and what appears to be an image of a chalkboard writ with counties and towns in Pennsylvania as well as estimated populations (fig. 8-4). Several of these town or county names are demarcated further by the phrase “10 Mile Only” referring to an initial safety area established around the Three Mile Island plant. Successive pages repeat the motif of safety hazard and paranoia that emerged in the accident’s wake, with several terms recurring throughout the headlines Gilbert appropriates: “crisis” and “bubble.” Indeed, the basis for the crisis was the size of the hydrogen gas bubble inside of reactor unit number two.22 In the only purely textual image in Gilbert’s project, we read “bubble” at the top, “crisis” printed atop “OVER” in the middle, and “WHITE SPACE” at the bottom. We might understand the words as both an indication of an end (the bubble crisis is over, then comes white space), or as a definition of Gilbert’s practice (the use of text on a white page to evoke a calamity and the ways in which it is myopic, limited to a “bubble”). As is clear in 3-Mile Island Reproductions, Gilbert was interested in the correspondence between maps (commonly used in newspaper illustrations accompanying articles on the accident), as well as the

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statistical, journalistic, and photographic information that accompanied them. In A Nuclear Atlas the combination of these info-graphics, photographics, and texts, becomes a wholesale atlas of nuclear power, weaponry, and its presence in mass media. Gilbert’s appropriation of newspaper maps is itself a notable development. Gilbert clearly recognizes the importance of maps as information accompanying journalism. Like photographs, the maps visually relay information that text cannot adequately describe, and journalistic maps are a genre unto themselves, as Mark Monmonier has shown.23 Monmonier writes, “As a cartographic genre, news maps reflect the objectives and values of journalistic institutions. They are timely and narrowly focused, and present highly selective views.”24 The journalistic use of maps emerges in ties to military and war reporting. Monmonier continues, “During the 1930s and 1940s articles in periodicals directed toward the working journalist occasionally cited the usefulness of news maps, especially for reporting the spatial complexities of battles and military strategy.”25 In fact, Monmonier makes it clear that the journalistic map has come under fire from cartographers for a common lack in obeying cartographic standards.26 Gilbert’s work is an extension of this critique. Gilbert manipulates maps that are already shifting our perceptions of the space they represent; she plays the objective disposition of cartography against itself. Much like Nuclear America, A Nuclear Atlas features maps of the continental United States to illustrate the breadth of nuclear power facilities across the country. As a book, Gilbert’s Nuclear Atlas is a topography unto itself, and indeed Gilbert renders, rearranges, and splices maps in such a way as to undermine any authority of “cartographic reason.” The book is a landscape of political expressions meant to counter the presumed dominance of often governmentally controlled mapmaking.27 A Nuclear Atlas is global in scope, with each country displayed through maps as well as clipped headlines and journalistic texts discussing the growing use, and controversies around, nuclear power. Gilbert’s visual syntax displays the globalization of nuclear power as terrifying and destructive. A single spread speaks to this (fig. 8-5). Left of the gutter is a montage of journalistic photographs, five horizontal slices, each from a different image of a different person, and resulting in a monstrous image of a woman screaming. Opposite this portrait, a white-on-black graphic of continental drift, the continents reverberating and covered with various newspaper headlines. “Uncertainties” reads the middle-most text, North America covered with “The Impossible, Venting, Leaks, Accidents, Spill, Dump, A-Test,” or Africa, which simply reads, “Next Door to Danger.” Despite the calamity of text and image that runs throughout A Nuclear

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Atlas, the continental maps Gilbert uses have a scientific accuracy that belies appropriation from official sources. Gilbert’s graphic collision foists the terror of public, mediated attention to nuclear power onto the bureaucratic constancy of cartography. Pertinent to this consideration of photographic, activist cartography, is the visual model of social space in Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City. Looking at the three American cities Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, Lynch aimed to describe the “identity, structure, and meaning” of what he referred to as “an environmental image.”28 The substance of this image could be developed from considering the role of citizens within said city. Lynch noted that an individual citizen “should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image.”29 Attending to individual experiences of social space, Lynch found the image of a city to be a composite “open-ended order” that varied “significantly between different observers.”30 The experiences of individuals were only an initial step in finding the “legibility” of the city that arose across experiences.31 Ultimately, in order to build the image of the city, Lynch bypassed strictly individual observation for common points of experience.32 Lynch admits he “glossed over . . . social meaning of an area, its function, its history, or even its name” for symbolic, shared elements: “paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.”33 Lynch’s project never resulted in the construction of spaces to the scale of those cities he investigated.34 The Image of the City is a theoretical project, and “imageability” is limited to the marginalia of his book.35 Lynch’s methods, though, allow for a more radical form of mapping social space. Instead of understanding space through the bureaucratic structures in place, he proposes that the personal and subjective points of view, from a given space’s inhabitants, be a means to understanding, even reshaping the nature of a place. Photography, deployed in print media, offers the possibility of materially manifesting such recomposed spaces. Lynch even suggests the experience of social space to be analogous to reading print media, “just as this printed page, if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a related pattern of recognizable symbols, so a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an all-over pattern.”36 The “open-ended” and “adaptable” platform Lynch seeks is not unlike the ways in which photography might both reflect and construct new experiences of space. Furthermore, photography-in-print allows the photographer to communicate an experience of social space in an interpersonal format, to engage politics. The artists here—McAdams, Lewenz, Gilbert— consciously chose to work with print media, to use photographic

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reproducibility, in order to rearrange our image of nuclear power, and thus allow their audience new ways of imaging, experiencing, and understanding emerging nuclear realities.

Notes  1

Alvin M. Weinberg as quoted in J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 18. 2 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 9. 3 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 119-163; Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 175-201. 4 “Activist cartography” has been defined by Sebastian Cobarrubias and John Pickles as a visual means of representing “new geographies and spatialities that prefigure the sorts of social relations these [global resistance] movements” produce. Cobarrubias and Pickles introduce the idea of “activist mapping” that is related to the cartographic activism cited in other recent works. See Cobarrubias and Pickles, “Spacing Movements: The Turn to Cartographies and Mapping Practices in Contemporary Social Movements,” (working paper of the New Cartographies Working Group, presented to the Social Movements Research Group, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, February 27, 2006), 15. See also Alex Bhagat and Lize Mogel, eds., An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008) and Jeff Warren, “Grassroots Mapping: Tools for participatory and activist cartography” (BA Thesis, Yale University, 2006). 5 The Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS), Let’s Shut Down Seabrook (Cambridge, MA: Boston Clamshell, 1989), 27-32. 6 Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 61, 69-70, 73. 7 Ibid., 83. 8 CDAS, Let’s Shut Down Seabrook, 15-21. 9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xv, 32. 10 With regard to “symbolic politics” consider the 1981 occupation of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, where members of the Abalone Alliance “hiked into the backcountry” as a means to access and confront the site. For one activist, such tactics were “incredibly successful,” and for others they fulfilled the intent by producing a “sense of place, the opportunity to create a different kind of community and a different relationship to the land.” The idea was to recompose the use and social experience of a place as a means of deterring the nuclear power industry’s ecological intervention. Epstein, 110-11, 122.

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 11

Dona Ann McAdams, interview with the author, April 22, 2013. Dona Ann McAdams, “Artist’s Biography,” dated March 9, 1985, Franklin Furnace artist file, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (hereafter MoMA Archives). 13 Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 135. 14 Philip L. Cantelon and Robert C. Williams, eds., The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 1939-84 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 292-94. 15 Ibid., 294. 16 Lawrence Wittner, “The Forgotten Years of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1975-78,” Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 4 (July 2003): 443. 17 Cobarrubias and Pickles, “Spacing Movements,” 7, 15fn8. 18 John Pickles, “On the Social Lives of Maps and the Politics of Diagrams: A Story of Power, Seduction, and Disappearance,” Area 37, no. 4 (2006): 348. 19 Lisa Lewenz, “Close to Home,” Environmental Action (March 1984): 11. 20 Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986): 140. 21 Sharon Gilbert, “Statement” (June, 1990, on Barrett House letterhead), Artist’s File, MoMA Archives. 22 The “hydrogen explosion panic” is dealt with in depth by Walker, Three Mile Island, 162-69. 23 Mark Monmonier, Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1-24. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid., 188. 26 Ibid., 171-78. 27 The ties between the US Government and topographic photography of the nineteenth century, under the auspices of the US Department of War and the US Geological Society, are well documented. See note 3 above. 28 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 8. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 2. 32 Ibid., 7. 33 Ibid., 46. 34 Lynch was an urban planner and architect, one of the principles of Carr Lynch Associates. The Image of the City undoubtedly played an influential role in his regional planning. Yet the relationship is one of theory to practice. While Lynch’s theory is ambitious, attempting to map the image of a large urban infrastructure, the practical side of his work is often limited to specific spaces within an urban 12

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 setting. For additional insight into the practical side of Carr Lynch Associates, see Stephen Carr, Public Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 35 Filled with maps and graphic representations of the key elements in his study, Lynch’s project is all opportunity. As he writes, “we have the opportunity of forming our new city world into an imageable landscape: visible, coherent, and clear.” Lynch, The Image of the City, 91. 36 Ibid., 3.

CHAPTER NINE SAIGON IN THE SUBURBS: PROTEST, EXCLUSION, AND VISIBILITY1 ERICA ALLEN KIM

No one could say for sure whether [the protestors] would return to this spot. But, said one young woman, the anger of her father’s generation isn’t going away. “There isn’t an end to that,” said Tina Nguyen, of Garden Grove. “Every day, they feel this urge, this need to speak up.”2

Following the forced closure of the provocatively titled F.O.B. II: Art Speaks, a 2009 display of Vietnamese American artists’ works about communism and anti-communism, held in an abandoned bank in Santa Ana, California, one of the exhibited works was vandalized with red spray paint.3 It was Brian Doan’s Thu Duc—Vietnam (2008), a photograph targeted by Vietnamese American protestors including his own father, who spoke out against the work as pro-communist (Fig. 9-1).4 The curators had an entirely different interpretation of Doan’s image of a young woman sitting next to a souvenir portrait bust of Ho Chi Minh; they viewed it as a critique of the commodification of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s symbols. For some Vietnamese refugees, however, the icons of communism triggered feelings of betrayal by the younger generation. Their compulsion to protest, as expressed in the epigraph to this essay, was rooted in the historical and physical trauma of dislocation and forced resettlement. It was also rooted in their disempowerment, that is, the loss of their authorial voice. This loss was the primary driver of the establishment and entrenchment of Little Saigon communities in the United States. From art exhibition protests to city council declarations of “communistfree” zones, such southern California suburbs as Westminster and Garden Grove are sites of intense debate about politics, ethnic identity, and nationalism.5 Since the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, refugees from Vietnam have established a sizable presence in primarily suburban areas in the United States (Fig. 9-2). In Westminster, a small suburb south of Los

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Angeles, the largest city-designated “Little Saigon,” Vietnamese Americans organized a war memorial that countered the marginalization and invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans from memorials and histories of the war in both the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.6 The memorial was installed in 2003 in Westminster’s Civic Center Park. It was the product of aligned political and economic interests between local Vietnamese Americans and established civic power brokers. The memorial site is dominated by larger-than-life statues of a South Vietnamese and an American soldier on equal footing. The project also incorporated features of Maya Lin’s iconic national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC (1982). This hybrid served to connect Vietnamese refugee identity politics with American mainstream commemorative practices. This essay charts the competing geographies of Vietnamese America by examining how diverging ideological views on refugee and Vietnamese American identity have influenced the production of cultural landscapes in Little Saigon, Westminster. The Vietnam War Memorial was one of several proposed and realized projects in Westminster created through ongoing contestations over the community’s collective memory. Art created by Vietnamese Americans, along with work by contemporary Vietnamese artists, present alternate perspectives on individual and collective memory and history that are frequently met with resistance by the memorial-makers. On the one hand, the anti-communist sentiment dominating the older generation has fueled a series of suburban commemorative interventions that promote a conservative view of the war’s legacy. On the other hand, through art projects and the creation of historical archives and exhibitions, the younger generations have raised questions about the transnational relationship between the United States and Vietnam, as well as intergenerational tension, misunderstanding, and the opportunity for community-building. Sociologist Steven J. Tepper has suggested that conflict over art can be simultaneously inwardly and outwardly focused. In the case of protests over the 1996 traveling exhibit An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art from the United States and Vietnam organized by the Smithsonian Institution, which featured work by both Vietnamese and Vietnamese American artists, activists argued that the intended audience of their protests was the Vietnamese government.7 For the most part, the commemorative impulse of the older generation has privileged didactic narrative of war and journey communicated through spaces of contemplation. However, when confronted with art exhibits that include signs or traces of contemporary or communist Vietnam, this contemplative stance transforms into expressions of anger that are manifested in protest.

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Spaces of Protest, Spaces of Remembrance When fifteen refugee families arrived in Westminster, California in 1975, they encountered a small city with dusty strawberry fields, trailer home parks, and languishing strip malls (fig. 9-3).8 By 1984, the city’s main commercial street, Bolsa Avenue, had expanded to over 350 stores and restaurants within a four-block area.9 Through art and protest, Vietnamese American communities, which are ethnically and socially diverse, have sought to shape narratives of history and identity that are deeply embedded in real and imagined geographies. These tensions are both internal to local community dynamics as well as responsive to domestic and broader transnational concerns. For many refugees from the older generation, who initially believed their stay in the United States was temporary, participating in anti-communist activities helped mediate their feelings of loss and impotency. Escalating Cold War tensions fueled paranoia about spies within the refugee community; those same tensions also motivated a more visible attendance at patriotic rallies and the creation of civic organizations dedicated to overthrowing the communist government.10 During this period of intense scrutiny, the Vietnamese community’s anti-communist activities in Westminster focused primarily on fundraising and meetings intended to organize military action in Vietnam. Rallies were held in parking lots to pledge allegiance to the South Vietnamese flag or to honor American veterans and the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN). American organizations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) distributed pamphlets that invited presumptive spies to defect in return for exoneration and protection. A group of 170 former South Vietnamese police officers began informally to screen new immigrants to Orange County for their political loyalties. Beginning in 1982, thousands of refugees were victims of a scam by the rebel group National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (NUFL), which requested support for a secret war in Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia).11 Within two years, NUFL had collected over seven million in donations, the majority of funds sent from Vietnamese in California, with the help of photographs of actors in a Vietnamese American theater production who were deliberately mislabeled by the NUFL as genuine guerilla fighters. Thus the eagerness of newly arrived Vietnamese Americans to distance themselves from communism was well known within and outside the Vietnamese American community. Since 1994, when the Clinton Administration opened the door to rapprochement by lifting the trade embargo on Vietnam, such oppressive

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surveillance and targeted exploitation of Vietnamese Americans and the assassination of Vietnamese American journalists has been superseded by conflicts over images, artworks, flags, and shopping centers.12 Violence toward objects such as photographs and paintings, however, has persisted in contemporary protests, such as the F.O.B. II incident. According to Kim Nguyen, anti-communism is an especially powerful discourse for refugees concerned about racially motivated attacks on their enclaves and activities in predominantly white, suburban communities.13 The focus on anticommunism has also created a political platform for Vietnamese Americans who seek greater agency and visibility in conversations about American foreign policy in Vietnam.14 In a sense, the sometimes-strident voices against perceived communist symbols and icons are bids to establish parity with a host society that may otherwise view refugees as the “other.” Unlike the several demonstrations directed against Vietnamese diplomats since the rapprochement, what became known as the “Hi-Tek Incident” was the first to expose a growing generational and ideological rift. Between January 17 and March 11, 1999, hundreds of protestors camped in the parking lot of a mini-mall on Bolsa Avenue following the display of an eighteen-by-twenty-four inch poster of Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh inside the Hi-Tek TV and VCR store, located in one of the shopping centers in Little Saigon, Westminster. 15 The owner of the store, Truong Van Tran, was a refugee who escaped Vietnam on a boat in 1980. Unlike other refugees of years gone by, Tran possessed an unflagging interest in the normalizing of transnational relations. For instance, in 1994, he unsuccessfully attempted to organize a day of dialogue about relations with communist Vietnam.16 Inviting controversy, Tran installed a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday (in January) and sent notices to local community groups in an act of provocation.17 The poster was illuminated by the same small holiday lights that also lined the walls of the storefront, creating a visual metaphor between the leader and the shop’s public interface. His landlord soon ordered him to remove the poster, and the local court ruled in favor. However, on February 10, the court ruled that Tran’s actions were protected speech, thus overturning the previous injunction. American and South Vietnamese flags were raised quickly at nearly every shopping center in Little Saigon as community members scrambled to display their allegiances, reminiscent of efforts a generation earlier.18 Over $700,000 was spent by the city of Westminster during fifty days of demonstrations in order to maintain order as thousands of people filled

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the parking lots. This excessive amount would later influence the declaration of Westminster and neighboring Garden Grove as “Communist Free Zones” in 2004. This declaration specifically referenced the attempt to avoid future costly demonstrations by discouraging visits by representatives and officials from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.19 The protests ended in early March when the police raided Hi-Tek for pirated entertainment videos and closed the store, thereby sidestepping the more complicated question of free speech for a community already especially sensitive to the issue of policing individual rights in a democratic state. The Hi-Tek demonstrations marked the first time that Little Saigon received attention from the national press. The suburban spaces occupied by Vietnamese refugees, especially the strip mall parking lots, were transformed into places of protest replete with effigies and protestors inside makeshift cages. Tran’s display of Ho Chi Minh was timed cleverly to coincide with the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, Tet. The combination of Tet and political protests further heightened tensions and the controversy’s mainstream media visibility. During Tet, nearly 10,000 people arrived to protest Tran’s attempt to re-install his poster following the Superior Court ruling.20 In August, Tran was finally convicted of video piracy and sentenced to jail time as well as community service based on evidence collected by the police who were assigned to protect him.21 The protestors targeted not only Tran but also Tony Lam, who in 1992 was the first Vietnamese American elected to public office as a Westminster councilman. After Lam decided to avoid the Hi-Tek protests on the advice of the city attorney, his restaurant, Vien Dong, also became the site of demonstrations. Since the protests, Lam has withdrawn from politics, which some have linked to his loss of support following the HiTek controversy.22 The perils of not stepping in line with the dogmatic beliefs of a few were heightened in Vietnamese American communities where questions of identity were dominated by a discourse of loyalty based on a Confucian structure in which the parents and the older generation commanded unwavering obedience from the younger generation.23 Although shopping centers have figured heavily in anti-communist protest, proponents of war commemoration have focused on more traditional sites for memorials. Through the accretion of war memorials and proposed cultural centers and museums, this area of Orange County has been developed as a special site of Vietnam War commemoration. For example, the first Vietnamese American themed cemetery, the Garden of Peaceful Eternity at Westminster Memorial Park, was dedicated in October 1999 (fig. 9-4).24 Councilman Tony Lam served as a consultant for the project, with involvement from ethnic Chinese Vietnamese

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American developer Frank Jao and City Manager Bill Smith. While not a war memorial per se, the idea for a specialized space for Vietnamese Americans—understood as war refugees or descendants of war refugees— within the cemetery was first proposed by Westminster Memorial Park director Stephen Conley.25 In response to the dramatic demographic change in this area of Orange County, he asked “why couldn’t we develop a Disney concept, if you will, so that you have cemeteries within cemeteries? We want to try and make this comfortable for them.”26 Originally containing 2,000 plots with the possibility of expanding to 10,000, the cemetery plans included a Twelve Pillar Pagoda capped by dragons, which was surrounded by a bubbling lake, as well as a wall with 600 niches for cremated remains and eighty larger family plots. The architect, Hieu Phan, of Caskey and Associates Architects in nearby Corona del Mar, California, explained that the pagoda was a “contemporary interpretation of a traditional architecture.”27 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Phan, a graduate of the Ohio State University, also worked as a theme park architect for the Disney Company as well as Disney’s Orlando Studios in Florida.28 The pagoda’s two-tiered design, with its burnt-orange tiles and columns and yellow accents, follows a common color scheme in Vietnamese architecture. Vietnamese American Veterans referred to the new cemetery as “their Arlington,” citing the Arlington National Cemetery for veterans near Washington, DC, and planned to erect a replica of a statue that used to stand in the ARVN cemetery outside of Saigon, which had been decommissioned and vandalized following the communist takeover of South Vietnam.29 In 1999, after the failure of a proposed “Vietnam Monument to Freedom” three years prior, a group of veterans purchased 300 plots in order to set aside space for their fellow military.30 Although a replica of the ARVN statue remains unrealized, the veterans installed a modestly sized black granite stele with a sandblasted image of the iconic figure (fig. 9-5). In addition to the Garden of Peaceful Eternity, an organization headed by Vietnamese Americans has worked with the Vietnamese government to recover the remains of ARVN and bury them in the United States. The Vietnamese, like many other cultural groups, believe that without a properly buried and well-maintained grave, the soul of the deceased will be trapped in a liminal space. This concern for repatriation, which is made more complex for those who are exiles, is part of the larger project of negotiating an identity tied to an unfamiliar place and culture. The question of burial becomes pressing for many whose choice reveals a complex relationship to their homeland.31

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Based on the initial plans for a war memorial in the Garden of Peaceful Eternity, as well the proposed replica of an ARVN cemetery statue, it is clear that Vietnamese in Little Saigon sought to claim part of Westminster Memorial Park for commemorating the military. Although the establishment of the Vietnam War Memorial at Westminster’s Civic Center helped expand the territory of the Vietnamese diaspora, the cemetery has continued to be the focus of various commemorative projects including a Boat People Memorial, which was proposed in 1999 and dedicated in 2009 (fig. 9-6). Organized by Hap Tu Thai and Ai Cam Tran, founders of Rosemead, California’s Saigon Times, the memorial focused on the second wave of refugees, who fled Vietnam primarily by sea during 1978-79.32 The design includes a hull shaped fountain with a sculptural group by the artist Vi Vi and blocks of stone engraved with the names of over 6,000 people who died during this period. Located at the southwestern corner of the cemetery, the fountain is linked to the Twelve Pillar Pagoda by a long, palm-tree lined axial path that connects perpendicularly with the sinuous pathways of the access road. The memorial plan is made of two infinity symbols oriented at a forty-degree angle from the lot corner and leading the visitor toward an American and a South Vietnamese flag. The plan may also be read as a stacked ‘88,’ a number that signifies fortune or good luck in Mandarin Chinese and reminds survivors of the vagaries of chance in contrast to the thousands of named dead at the memorial. At the center of the eye-shaped fountain, standing atop a pink granite boulder, a four-person sculptural group dominates the memorial. Continuing the popular realist expressionism of the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial designed by sculptor Tuan Nguyen in 1999, Vi Vi employed dramatic chiaroscuro to express the emotional weight of the Boat People’s memories. The loose folds of flesh and clothing cast broken shadows in the bright sunlight. Representations of mental anguish and physical exhaustion contrast sharply with the enlivening sounds of fountain jets in the memorial’s fountain and the nearby bubbling lake. The standing group consists of a young man with overgrown hair supporting an elderly woman who turns her wizened face upwards. The deep lines around her mouth emphasize her toothlessness and overall impotence; this state of helplessness is complemented by oral histories preserved online that emphasize the survivors’ belief that they were at the mercy of fate. A young woman crouches in front of the standing figures, her right arm outstretched while her left hand supports a small child clinging to her chest. The relatively placid surroundings of the low fountain wall etched with names and the eight modest jets of water

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encircling the sculpture reinforce a physical and psychological distance between viewer and object. Although the figures are represented in the act of seeking aid, their separation from the visitor suggests that the full force of these stories of personal survival and loss requires mediation in the form of the infinity-loop of the pathways that direct visitors toward the flags representing diasporic and actual nationality, leaving behind a scene of deep pathos.

Harmony Bridge: the Cultural Politics of Transnational Economy During the mid-1990s, when rapprochement with Vietnam was initiated by the Clinton Administration, the “godfather” of Little Saigon, Frank Jao, became embroiled in high profile protests regarding a proposed pedestrian bridge. Although the conflict over Harmony Bridge was expressed in terms of cultural heritage and the legacy of Chinese imperialism in Vietnamese art and architecture, the issue also revealed questions about Jao’s loyalty. These accusations have also colored the majority of protests over cultural projects in Little Saigon including the war memorials and art exhibits. Jao’s proposed “Harmony Bridge,” a thirty-foot wide covered pedestrian bridge connecting the shopping centers Asian Village and Asian Garden Mall, would have appeared innocuous to those unfamiliar with Asian architecture. Capped by a glazed tile roof with two sinuous dragons flanking the words “Welcome to Little Saigon Westminster,” the bridge design was influenced by the decorative gates and arches that have become ubiquitous in Chinatowns throughout the world (fig. 9-7). Critics complained that the project was “too Chinese,” an accusation that carried the weight of prejudices against ethnic Chinese, who are associated with not only the business class in Vietnam, but also a thousand years of imperial rule. The implication that Jao was an outsider in spite of his central role in shaping the built environment of Little Saigon and providing spaces for Vietnamese merchants and cultural activities was apparent in comments made by his most outspoken critics. Mai Cong, president of the nonprofit organization Vietnamese Community of Orange County, and Dinh Le, co-founder of the Ad Hoc Committee to Safeguard Little Saigon, claimed that the design did not represent the refugee enclave, arguing that “the Vietnamese have our own culture, our own architecture. We want this to stay as Little Saigon for the benefit of all who come here.”33 Even with the substitution of six yellow birds, frequently seen on Vietnamese drums, the bridge failed to secure enough support (fig. 9-8). Others criticized the design for being too similar

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to Chinatown gates. One Vietnamese American wrote to the Los Angeles Times to argue that the bridge should evoke “a different feeling than going through San Francisco’s famous Chinatown or Japanese town.”34 Others wondered whether “for the Vietnamese community, Jao’s failures meant that they had preserved their cultural integrity at perhaps the cost of economic growth. . . . the questions would always be whether or not that cultural space was one of choice or imposition.”35 In a letter to the editor, long-time resident Ronald Salcido gleefully suggested that Little Saigon was finally experiencing the alienation felt by long-time residents when refugees began opening shops and erecting signs in Vietnamese in the early 1980s.36 During the public debates about the design, the architect Khanh Ba Nguyen sought to little effect to convince Vietnamese Americans of the uniquely Vietnamese character of Harmony Bridge. He explained the design’s symbolism in Nguoi Viet Weekly, the largest circulating Vietnamese American newspaper, arguing that Harmony Bridge represented a mnemonic device with its two towers supporting the long bridge standing in for the three regions of Vietnam. The North tower was Hanoi’s One Pillar Pagoda, central portion’s roof was “a composite depiction of the Thieu Mu region, which are the Trang Tien bridge and Ben Hui bridge,” and the South tower represented Saigon’s iconic Ben Thanh Market.37 Harmony Bridge was envisioned as literally “bridging the mind, connecting memories and thoughts for Vietnamese Americans with their roots, ancestors, heritage, and the memorable cities throughout the country of Vietnam.”38 The critics, however, were insensible to these explanations. Their attempts to distill a distinctly Vietnamese ethnic identity in the face of California’s increasingly diverse population led to a revisionist stance denying a history of cross-cultural influences and the continued economic dominance of ethnic Chinese in Little Saigons throughout the United States. As with the Hi-Tek Incident, controversy over Harmony Bridge was influenced by renewed anxiety and debates about Vietnamese refugee identity during the early 1990s as Vietnamese and American relations were normalized. The question of whether trade with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was permissible became even more urgent following the lifting of the embargo in 1994. Jao had already begun seeking investment opportunities in Vietnam as early as 1988.39 He was later criticized for being pro-communist and misusing his appointment to the Vietnam Education Fund by President Bush by publicizing this position while on business trips to Vietnam. During this early period of potential rapprochement, several high-profile businessmen such as Co Pham, the

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president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce (VNCOC) suggested trade normalization with Vietnam. Although Jao’s loyalty to Vietnamese American refugees remained unquestioned in the mainstream media, it is likely that Jao would also have been perceived in a negative light for his attempts to operate businesses in Vietnam. As an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, Jao’s identity as Vietnamese American was questioned by several vocal critics in spite of his military service during the war. This policing of the community’s public identity has politicized suburban Westminster and played a key role in the discourse of building Little Saigon.

Memorials and the Fear of Forgetting As the United States as a whole began the normalization process with Vietnam, the question of Vietnamese American relationships to both governments grew increasingly complex. There were many thorny questions still lingering about the legacy of the war in Vietnamese American communities. Liberalization was tied to the problem of family reunification and the ongoing issue of refugees and re-education camp detainees, many of whom were former military or government employees. The Orderly Departure Program (ODP), which was created to facilitate legal resettlement of refugees and detainees, ended in 1994 as part of the normalization process. From 1996 until 2003, the ODP was followed by the Resettlement Opportunity for Vietnamese Returnees, which processed refugees in asylum camps as well as those who had returned to Vietnam. With the continuing arrival of refugees from Southeast Asia, many of them related to resettled Vietnamese Americans, foreign policy issues continued to dominate conversations within Vietnamese American communities. Meanwhile, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon (1995) was visibly marked on a national stage by a highly visible and well-publicized addition to the iconic national Vietnam Veterans Memorial: the Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1993) by the sculptor Glenna Goodacre. As we have seen, the city of Westminster’s intentions for its own Vietnam War Memorial in late 1996 coincided with vocal opposition to Jao’s plans to accelerate Little Saigon’s economic development by creating a landmark structure at the center of Vietnamese American commercial activity in the region. Thus the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial took a different approach and critiqued the invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans and their implied inferiority to the American military at a time when political alliances appeared to be shifting (fig. 9-9). The siting and design of the memorial is the result of efforts by Vietnamese refugees to shape the

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public symbols of Vietnamese American identity through exhibits and public art.40 Westminster’s memorial is also part of a turn away from physical violence to more symbolic declarations that align the politics of exile within a broader discourse of American nationalism and legacies of the Cold War. The loss of authorial voice experienced by the older generation, in particular the military veterans, was in part due to their reception by Americans, who viewed Vietnamese in light of the War’s great unpopularity.41 According to Philip Beidler, the “cliché of the hapless ARVN” rendered Vietnamese veterans invisible to Americans who preferred to forget their military failures.42 The civic setting of the memorial recognized Vietnamese as political and military allies, thereby locating their presence within an American-dominated history of the conflict. In 1994, the same year that the trade embargo was lifted, a group of prominent Vietnamese Americans announced plans for a Vietnam War Memorial. Councilman Tony Lam (who would later be targeted by Hi-Tek protestors) proposed a monument to South Vietnamese veterans at the Garden of Peaceful Eternity at Westminster Memorial Park.43 The “Vietnam Monument to Freedom” was envisioned as a focal point for the three-acre site. However, a lack of consensus about whether the project should include North Vietnamese soldiers stalled fundraising efforts.44 However, in December 1996, not long after the first project’s demise, Mayor Frank Fry proposed a Little Saigon located memorial to both Vietnamese and American veterans during his campaign.45 Fry explained the inclusion of both veterans groups by stating that many of his friends were Vietnamese military.46 In contrast with the first proposed memorial, Fry’s plan sought to broaden its appeal by linking allied military efforts to a symbol of the refugees’ successful economic progress in the United States. In the following three years, however, the memorial supporters sought a less commercial location. Protests about Harmony Bridge as well as the Hi-Tek demonstrations influenced this preference for a civic setting. The committee also argued that the location in the Civic Center would protect the artwork from disruptive gatherings.47 Nonetheless, it was the public nature of the proposed site that was met with resistance by some non-Vietnamese residents who feared that the memorial represented the interests and concerns of only one group. At the maquette’s unveiling in May 1999, and with the Hi-Tek protests fresh in the minds of many, the American Legion of Midway City voiced their disapproval of the project.48 The American Legion, along with the local branch of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, also objected to the proposed joint display of American and South Vietnamese flags from city

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light poles to commemorate the fall of Saigon during the month of April. 49 Following the Vietnamese Consul General’s denunciation of the project in July, the city council publicly rejected his suggestion that the committee substitute the ARVN soldier with a North Vietnamese. 50 Even with the city council’s support of the committee’s site recommendation, local residents continued to resist the project. As late as 2000, opponents argued that a privately funded project “should not be perceived as having the support of the city, nor should it be erected on public property.”51 In 2001 the city council finally approved a Civic Center location after the required funds were raised.52 A new park named after Sid Goldstein, a local World War II veteran, was created as the setting for the memorial’s plaza, statues, and fountain. The plan is a diagram of a broken circle, which represents imperfection or incompletion.53 The sculptural group follows the tradition of the heroic monument, as exemplified by the work’s installation. The dominating presence of the ten-foot tall bronze statues is aided by the five-foot tall granite wall that lifts the soldiers high above eye-level. Westminster’s memorial embraces conventional war monument themes of patriotism, duty, and sacrifice. A project drawing by Tuan expressed these lofty ideals by further exaggerating the dominating scale of the two statues in relation to the depicted visitors. In public statements, the artist contrasted the American soldier standing at attention, “ready to go,” with the South Vietnamese soldier, for whom “the war is still going on.” 54 With helmet and rifle in hand, he advances forward with his left foot. The South Vietnamese soldier’s stance mirrors his counterpart, but his gaze and body language indicate resistance. With his right hand gripping the rifle strap and the left index finger pointing downward, he pantomimes the idealized expression of anticommunism for Vietnamese American communities. In the wake of divisive protests over the loyalty of community members, the decision to locate the memorial in the civic core of Westminster helped to formalize the lexicon of anti-communism as the official message of both the city and the Vietnamese American community.

Communism and the Arts in Little Saigon Free speech in the form of the arts has also been targeted by activists who feel compelled to safeguard Little Saigon from any icons of the communist regime. In 1999, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California displayed seventy-five modern Vietnamese paintings in A Winding River: Contemporary Art in Vietnam from June 15 to October 1, 1999. Museum officials sought to avoid disruptive protests by conducting community

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outreach sessions. Nonetheless, for several weeks nearly 100 peaceful protestors picketed the museum with bulletin boards filled with color reproductions of paintings included in the exhibit. Although reviews of A Winding River considered the selected works as “politically benign,” the protestors interpreted the images as communist propaganda.55 One protestor argued that in a painting of a cat hungrily eyeing a fishbowl, the cat represented the United States, and the five red fish were communist countries that the American government sought to consume.56 Those who stood outside the museum believed it was their job to educate visitors about communist machinations. In contrast, anti-communist protesters were far less civil in the case of F.O.B. II: Art Speaks, the art exhibit organized by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA) in 2009. Although the Bowers Museum was proactive in its handling of a potential controversy, it is likely that the curators’ status as outsiders to the refugee community helped diffuse anger. The sense of betrayal from within the community, especially one that is based on generational difference, has resulted in more sustained and active opposition. Thu Duc—Vietnam by Brian Doan was targeted as a pro-communist image by many who were offended by the mere presence of a small portrait bust of Ho Chi Minh and a bright yellow star on a young woman’s shirt. These icons triggered posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers who were unable to consider discussions of composition, framing, lighting and other topics of art criticism in their visceral reactions to the photograph. In response to disruptive protests and vandalism of the artworks, Santa Ana city officials forced the show to close, claiming that VAALA did not have a permit for displaying art in the abandoned bank building.57 The compulsion to protest rather than reflect drove a wedge between refugees and their children, including those who were born in Vietnam but left at an early age. Although this vehement activism was rooted in the trauma of dislocation, the more telling aspect of “this urge, this need to speak up” was the fear that traditional hierarchies controlling the war narrative had been upended by acculturation in the United States. These ethnic communities served as lightning rods for political controversies, and Westminster’s Little Saigon has been the site of the largest and most publicized protests. As with other immigrants unable to navigate the social landscape of the United States, Vietnamese have created safe places, enclaves that offer the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of an inaccessible homeland. In response to protests, which included the defacement of Thu Duc— Vietnam, Tram Le, the show’s curator, argued that Doan’s photograph was

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“a critique of communism. These symbols are actually banal objects of tourism. They can be bought, sold and exchanged.”58 For the opposition, the symbols were objects of propaganda, even in the hands of their own children.59 One protestor claimed that Doan’s photograph was a sign that communists had infiltrated Little Saigon in spite of attempts by activists to protect the enclave through various interventions on the political and cultural landscape.60 Through the art exhibits, memorial-construction, and protests, Vietnamese American communities have challenged the dominant discourse on the history and legacy of the war. The landscapes occupied by Vietnamese refugees are predominantly suburban, lacking public spaces for political and cultural expression. Parking lots, shopping centers, and cemeteries have become charged terrain for those struggling to articulate a cohesive identity in the face of political and internal differences. The attack on Brian Doan’s photograph, as well as several other cases of art exhibition protests in Orange County, indicated a compulsion to speak up against perceived threats. Perhaps this compulsion can only be satisfied by the heroicizing language of figuration in projects such as the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial and the Boat People Memorial. The act of protest links these two spaces of communal and individual expression and in the process creates a more complex social and physical geography of Vietnamese America.

Notes 1

A portion of this essay was published as part of “Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 21, No. 2 (2014): 31-56. 2 Cameron Bird, “Hundreds Protest Vietnamese Art Show,” Orange County Register, January 17, 2009. 3 F.O.B. is a derogatory term that refers to newly arrived immigrants (“fresh off the boat”). 4 Richard Chang, “Photographer Set Off Little Saigon,” Orange County Register, January 30, 2009. 5 Patrick Young, “Little Saigon’s Second ‘Communist Free Zone’ = Westminster,” Orange County Register, May 20, 2004. 6 There are over 140,000 Vietnamese in Orange County and Los Angeles (Garden Grove, Westminster, Santa Ana, and Los Angeles), according to the 2010 US Census. See author’s forthcoming essay in Buildings and Landscapes. 7 Steven J. Tepper, Not Here, Not Now, Not That!: Protest over Art and Culture in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 204.

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Westminster was incorporated in 1957 with 10,755 residents. Its population increased from 25,750 to 59,865 between 1960 and 1970. Following the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees, the city’s population increased to 78,118 in 1990. 2012 Orange County Progress Report: Westminster (Westminster, CA: City of Westminster, 2012). 9 There were 650 Vietnamese businesses in Orange County by 1984. Kathryn Day and David Holley, “Boom on Bolsa,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1984. 10 David Devoss, “A Long Way From Home,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1986. 11 Ibid. 12 Five Vietnamese American journalists were assassinated during the 1980s, as discussed in Nick Schou, “A History of Violence,” Orange County Weekly, August 16, 2007. Regarding more peaceful anti-communist activities, see protests in 1999 over the Bowers Museum exhibition, "A Winding River," and complaints in 1996 about a proposed pedestrian bridge, Harmony Bridge, in Westminster’s Little Saigon. Both were driven by anger over developer Frank Jao’s business dealings in Vietnam. 13 Kim Nguyen, “‘Without the Luxury of Historical Amnesia’: The Model Postwar Immigrant Remembering the Vietnam War through Anticommunist Protests,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2010): 134-50. 14 Jessica Breiteneicher suggests that the Westminster memorial creates a space within the American memory of the war for Vietnamese Americans and allows them “to see themselves as Americans, participating in a common experience and sharing values and aspirations.” Breiteneicher, “Healing and Dividing: The Westminster Vietnam War Memorial,” in Selected Papers in Asian Studies, Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (Albuquerque, NM: Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, 2000), 1-18. 15 Donna Foote, “The Siege of Little Saigon,” Newsweek, March 1, 1999. 16 Nam Q. Ha, “Business and Politics in Little Saigon, California” (bachelor’s thesis, Rice University, 2002), 40. 17 Finding aid background information, Ly Kien Truc, Photographs of the Hi-Tek Demonstrations. MS-SEA010. Special Collections and Archives, The University of California, Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California (hereafter UC Irvine Special Collections). 18 Ha, “Business and Politics,” 43. 19 Karin Aguilar-San Juan, “Marketplace Multiculturalism: Packaging and Selling Vietnamese America,” Nature, Society, and Thought 19, no. 3 (July 2006): 349. 20 This occurred on February 20. The timeline of the Hi-Tek incident can be found in the Finding aid background information, Ly Kien Truc, UC Irvine Special Collections. 21 Finding aid background information, Ly Kien Truc, Photographs of the Hi-Tek Demonstrations. MS-SEA010. UC Irvine Special Collections. 22 Daniel C. Tsang, “Sanitized for your Consumption: Saigon, USA White-Washes Local History,” Orange County Weekly, May 2-8, 2003. 23 Nguyen, “‘Without the Luxury of Historical Amnesia,’” 134-50. 24 “Viet Vets Cemetery Dedicated,” San Jose Mercury News, October 11, 1999.

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John Pope, “A Fitting Memorial, Westminster Cemetery among Many Adapting to Serve Ethnic Groups,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1996. 26 Paul G. Zielbauer, “Cemetery Plans Asian-Style Addition,” Orange County Register, March 11, 1995. 27 Ibid. The firm is referred to as Caskey and Phan, which is likely an exaggeration; Bill Caskey, the president and founder, has a LinkedIn profile under Caskey and Associates Architects, accessed April 10, 2011, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bill-caskey/a/411/157. However, “Caskey and Phan” was listed on the now-defunct website “vietnameseportal.com” in an attempt to attract Vietnamese American clients. 28 This biographical information can be accessed on Phan’s LinkedIn profile, accessed April 10, 2011, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hieu-phan/a/7a9/913. 29 Louise Roug, “Little Saigon Honors Dead,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1999. 30 Ibid. 31 Saigon U.S.A., directed by Lindsay Jang and Robert C. Winn. KOCE-TV Films, 2004. 32 Although refugees continued to leave Vietnam by boat until 1995, the 1978-79 period is known as a humanitarian crisis because southeast Asian countries closed their borders to the refugees. Nearly 2,000,000 persons were resettled between 1978 and 1997. 33 Lily Dizon, “Acrimony over Project Called 'Harmony,'” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1996. 34 Cindy Pham, “Opinions Cross on Footbridge,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1996. 35 Ha, “Business and Politics,” 34. 36 Ronald Salcido, “Opinions Cross on Foot Bridge, Letters to the Editor,” letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1996. 37 Khanh Ba Nguyen, “The Bridge of Vietnam: A Gateway to Little Saigon,” Nguoi Viet Weekly, June 6, 1996. 38 Ibid. 39 John Gittelsohn, “Little Saigon ‘Godfather’ sets sights on Vietnam,” Orange County Register, September 30, 2006. 40 Kim Nguyen argues that the rewriting of anti-communist protests as familial conflicts serves as a disciplinary practice that sidesteps conversations about race and nationality in the formation of Vietnamese American identity. Nguyen, “‘Without the Luxury of Historical Amnesia,’” 134-50. 41 James W. Tollefson, “Indochinese Refugees: A Challenge to America’s Memory of Vietnam,” in The Legacy: the Vietnam War in the American Imagination, ed. D. Michael Shaver (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 274. 42 Philip Beider, “The Invisible ARVN: The South Vietnamese Soldier in American Representations of the Vietnam War,” War, Literature and the Arts 19, no. 1-2 (January 2007): 308. 43 Vik Jolly, “A Monumental Effort,” Orange County Register, March 20, 2000.

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44 Gordon Dillow, “S. Vietnam’s War Dead Need Own Memorial,” Orange County Register August 20, 1996. 45 Jolly, “A Monumental Effort.” 46 Quyen Do, “Westminster Mayor Proposes Vietnam War Veterans Statue,” Orange County Register, December 3, 1996. 47 Jolly, “A Monumental Effort.” 48 Mai Tran, “Small Version of Vietnam War Statue Set for Unveiling,” Orange County Register, May 2, 1999. 49 Tini Tran and Louise Roug, “Saluting as One: Planned Vietnam Soldier Memorial Brings Westminster’s Fighting Factions Together,” Los Angeles Times, OC Edition, July 18, 1999. 50 Ibid. 51 Jolly, “A Monumental Effort.” 52 Jerry Hicks, “Memorial to Vietnam War Soldiers is Approved,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2001. 53 Tuan Nguyen, interview with the author, January 2014. 54 David Reyes, “Vietnam War Memorial Stirs Memories,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2003. 55 Scarlet Cheng, “Vietnamese Art Show Not So Revolutionary,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1999. 56 Bob Emmers, “Your Art, My Propaganda,” Orange Coast Magazine, September 1999. 57 Bird, “Hundreds Protest Vietnamese Art Show.” 58 Chang, “Photographer Set Off Little Saigon.” 59 Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde has written about the work of another artist included in the exhibition in her chapter “Defying and Redefining Vietnamese Diasporic Art and Media as Seen through Chau Huynh’s Creations,” in Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012), 90-112. 60 Bird, “Hundreds Protest Vietnamese Art Show.”



CONTRIBUTORS

Erica Allen-Kim is a lecturer in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. She is a historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She received her PhD from Harvard University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. She has published on Vietnamese American memorials and transnational Chinatown gates. Her current book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatown within the broader context of modern architecture and planning. Miguel de Baca (editor) is an Associate Professor of Art History at Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the American Studies program. He earned his PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2009, and has held research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Dumbarton Oaks. His scholarly interests include issues of memory, reference and abstraction in modern and contemporary American art, and he is the author of Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture (University of California Press, 2015). Chris Balaschak is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Flagler College, and received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine Program in Visual Studies in 2010. His research and teaching specializations are in history of photography, with an emphasis on twentieth century documentary practices, depictions of social space, and the photobook. Ongoing questions for Balaschak’s research lie in how photography constructs a sense of place, and how photographers’ use of books and print media informs political meanings of social documentary. Balaschak’s scholarship has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Photographies and Art Journal. Makeda Best (editor) is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts. She earned her PhD in Art History from Harvard University in 2010, and her research has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum



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Contributors

and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Her research interests include representations of race, class and conflict in photography and print culture. Her forthcoming book is on the Civil War-era photographer Alexander Gardner. Her work has also been published in Critical Military Studies and the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. John R. Blakinger is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University, where he studies the history, theory, and criticism of modern and contemporary art, with a historical focus on the 1940s through the 1970s. His research considers the intersection of art, science, and technology, and his dissertation, titled “Artist Under Technocracy: Gyorgy Kepes and the Cold War Avant-Garde,” explores the work of artist, designer, and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes. He is currently organizing an exhibition of Kepes’s work at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center. His writing has appeared in Design Issues and CAA.Reviews, among other publications. Jill Bugajski is the Andrew W. Mellon Academic Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research addresses war and politics in American art and cultural exchange between thecUS, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Kristen Gaylord is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, after earning the MA in art history there. She studies modern and contemporary art, and is working on a dissertation about Sister Corita’s activist and pop art serigraphs from the 1960s. Other interests include Latin American modernism and the history of photography. Kristen has worked at the Willem de Kooning Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the City of New York. She has published exhibition catalogue essays on Robert Ryman, Sister Corita, and other artists, and presented papers on contemporary art and theory. Frances Jacobus-Parker is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Princeton University and a 2015-2016 predoctoral fellow at The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research addresses the history, theory and criticism of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on American art of the 1960s and 1970s. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.



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Tirza True Latimer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. Her published work reflects on modern and contemporary visual culture from queer feminist perspectives. She is co-editor, with Whitney Chadwick, of the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2003) and the author of Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She is co-author, with Wanda Corn, of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (University of California Press, 2011), companion book for an exhibition organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. Her book Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art will be released by UC Press in 2016. Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery is a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, with a dissertation focused on early 1970s performance in the Los Angeles area. She recently held a Museum Research Consortium fellowship in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where she developed a multi-media website exploring Jacob Lawrence's sixty-panel Migration Series (1941) and contributed to the catalogue Picasso Sculpture. Lowery has also been a research assistant for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she co-authored the catalogue for Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (2012). She has worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and has taught Western art history through NYU’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Rebecca Lowery is a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is working on a dissertation focused on early 1970s performance in the Los Angeles area. She recently held the Graduate Curatorial Assistantship at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, prior to which she was a research assistant for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she co-authored the catalogue for Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (2012). She has worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has taught Western art history through NYU’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Jo-Ann Morgan is the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ as Visual Culture (University of Missouri Press, 2007), winner of the 2008 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. Morgan is Associate Professor with the Department of African American Studies, in dual appointment with the



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Department of Art at Western Illinois University, where she hosts WIUTV programs 15 Minutes with Jo-Ann Morgan, and Illinois Artist Conversations, featuring interviews with such artists as the sculptor Richard Hunt, graphic artist Emory Douglas, and others. Morgan earned a PhD in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MFA in art studio from the University of Wyoming, and a BFA in art studio from the California College of the Arts. She is currently working on a book titled Picturing Black Power, Reproducing Revolution—the Black Panther Party in Visual Studies.





INDEX

Adams, Robert, 144 aerial photography, 37 African Americans, xiv, xvi, 75-93, 79, 82-92, 106, 121, 132, AIDS, xviii-xix AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), xviii anthropomorphism, 65-66 Antin, Eleanor, 144 Army Corps of Engineers, 36 Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN), 157, 160-61, 165-66 Artist Protest Committee, xiv; Peace Tower (1966), xiv Artists for Victory, Inc., xiv art schools, 40-42, 46, 48 Art Workers’ Coalition, xv, 57; Q. And Babies? A. And Babies. (1970), xv, 57, 63 artistic collaboration, xvii-xviii, 125-29 Asco, 109, 131-32, 135; First Supper (After a Major Riot), 109; Stations of the Cross (1971), 132 Ashcan school, xii Atomic Energy Act (1954), 145 Axelrod, Beverly, 77-79, 83, 88, 90 Baca, Judith (Judy), xvi; The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976-83), xvi Baltimore, Maryland, 35 Baraka, Amiri, 85 Barney, Natalie, 6, 10 Barrio Mobile Art Studio (BMAS), 110 Barthes, Roland, 57, 122-23, 125 Bauhaus, see New Bauhaus, 44



Beach, Sylvia, 5 Bellows, George, xiii Benjamin, Walter, 69 Bereal, Ed, 132-33; Guerrilla Theater: Scenarios for Revolution (1973), 132 Berkeley Barb (newspaper), 84-88 Berkeley, CA, xxiii, 75, 82 Black Panther, (newspaper), 79, 8489 Black Panther Party, xvi, 76, 81, 8889 Le Blanc, Georgette, 8 Bland, Louis, 29 Boat People Memorial, 161, 168 Boccalero, Sister Karen, 100-101, 103-104, 108-16 Bodacious Buggerrilla, 132-33, 135 bombardier, 35, 37, 49 Breckenridge, Major Robert G., 3536, 42-52; Modern Camouflage (1942), 35-36, 46, 50, 52 British Ministry of Information, 29; “Keep Calm and Carry On,” 29 Bromley, William G., 15-17, 27-32 Brooks, Romaine, [pages]; Baroness Emile d’Erlanger (c. 1924), 10; Au Bord de la Mer (At the Seashore), 3, 7; Elisabeth de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre (c. 1924), 10; Elsie de Wolfe (c. 1914-15), 10; La France Croisée (1914); Ida Rubenstein (1917), 10; Miss Natalie Barney, “L’Amazonne,” (1920), 10; Muriel Draper (1938), 10; Regatta Borgatti au piano (c. 1920), 10; Una, Lady

178 Troubridge (1924), 10; White Azaleas (1910), 1 Brown, H. Rap, 92 Brown Berets, 109 Buchanan, Nancy, 121, 130, 135; The Nancy Buchanan Talk Show (1974), 130 Butler, Judith, 58, 70 Ca-Ca Roaches Have No Friends (1969), 122 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), xvi, 125-31 California State University, Los Angeles, 133 camouflage, see industrial camouflage Carmichael, Stokely, 88-89, 125 Caspary, Anita, 102-103 Catholicism, 100, 102, 106, 112-14, 116-17, 132; American Catholicism as distinct, 100, 103; activism, 101, 104-105, 114 Celmins, Vija, 58-59, 67-70; and “redescription” (process), 67; Flying Fortress (1966), 68-69; T.V. (1964), 67-69 cemetery, 159-61 Chávez, César, 108 Chicago, Judy, xvi-xvii, 125; Menstruation Bathroom (1974), xvii; Womanhouse (1974), xvixvii, 134-35 Chicano(s), 92, 104, 108, 113-14, 121, 131 Chicano Moratorium, 109 The China Syndrome (film; 1979), 141 Christie, Agatha, 5 civil rights movement, xiv, xvi, 59, 75-76, 78, 90, 105-106 Clausewitz, Carl von, 36 Cleaver, Eldridge, 76-90, 92; as Eldridge X, 77-80; Soul on Ice, 76



Index Cleaver, Kathleen (Neal), 84, 88, 90 Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS), 142-43, 146 collaboration, see artistic collaboration Collaborative Projects (Colab), xxvii Cold War, 145, 157, 165 communism, 17, 20, 24, 155-60, 163, 166-68 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 75 conscription, 124 Corita, see Kent, Sister Mary Corita Cyclona, 123, 131-32; The Marriage of Maria Conchita Theresa Con Chin-Gow (1970); see also Legorreta, Roberto Dada, 61 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 6-7 Davis, Angela, 92 Delacroix, Eugène, 2; Liberty Leading the People (1830), 2-3 Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, 5 Doan, Brian, 155; Thu Duc— Vietnam (2008), 155 domesticity, xxvii, 9, 31, 60-64, 79, 128, 147-48 Douglas, Emory, xvi, 85 East Los Angeles, see Los Angeles, CA Eastman, Max, xiii Ellul, Jacques, 16, 18 Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), 112 Dies, Martin, 17 Engineering, Science, and Management War Training program (ESMWT), 39 Fairey, Shepard, 15 Fanon, Frantz, 81, 124

Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art Federal Bureau of Investigation. 92, 157 feminism, 59-60, 64, 125 Feminist Art Program (FAP), 12526, 135; Womanhouse (1974), xvi-xvii, 134-35; Woman’s Building, 126, 131 F.O.B. II: Art Speaks (exhibition), 155 Forkscrew Graphics, xx Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 36, 41, 4546, 48-51 Foucault, Michel, 27, 121, 146 Frank, Robert, 144 freedom, 18-19; contested definitions of, 18 Freedom Summer, 75 Free Speech Movement (FSM), 75, 78, 81, 86, 88, 90 Friends Ambulance Movement, 8 Gamboa, Jr., Harry, 131 Garden Grove, CA, 155, 159 Garden of Peaceful Eternity, 15961, 165 gender, xvii-xix, 2, 9, 59, 128 Gilbert, Sharon, 142, 148-52; 3-Mile Island Reproductions (1-8) (1979), 148-52; A Nuclear Atlas (1982), 149-52 globalization, xx, 16, 150 Goez Art Studios and Gallery, 109 Golub, Leon, 64 Goodacre, Glenna, 164; Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1993), 164 Gottlieb, Harry, 24; The Strike is Won! (1937), 24 Gramont, Elisabeth de, 5 Gran Fury, xviii; Kissing Doesn’t Kill but Greed and Indifference Do (1989), xviii Grant, III, Ulysses S., 36, 50 Great Depression, 17 Grey, Eileen, 5 Gronk, 122, 131, 133 Grosz, George, 61



179

Group Material, xviii Gud, Marni, see Rahmani, Aviva Guerrilla Girls, xix Happenings, 127 Harmony Bridge, 162-65 Heartfield, John, xiv, 61 Heidegger, Martin, 37 Henri, Robert, xiii Herrón, III, Willie, 131 Hi-Tek TV and VCR Store, 158 Ho Chi Minh, 158-59 Horkheimer, Max, 124 House Beautiful (magazine), 60 House Special Committee for UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), 17, 78 Huerta, Dolores, 108 Hutton, Bobby, 82, 92 Immaculate Heart College (IHC), 100-102 Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), 101-104, 106, 112 industrial camouflage, 35-52 Jim Crow, 82 Jones, LeRoi, 85; see also Baraka, Amiri Kaprow, Allan, 127-28; Tracts (1970), 127 Kelly-Read and Company, Inc., 15, 20, 25 Kennedy, John F., 105, 145 Kennedy, Robert F., 105, 124 Kent, Rockwell, 23 Kent, Sister Mary Corita, 99-108, 110-11, 114-16; american sampler (1969), 105; manflowers (1969), 105; moonflowers (1969), 105; my people (1965), 105-107; people like us yes (1965), 106; stop the bombing (1967), 105 Kepes, Gyorgy, 43-44

180 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 105, 124 Kruger, Barbara, xviii; Your Body is a Battleground (1989), xviii Kubrick, Stanley, 65; Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (film; 1963), 65 Lacy, Suzanne, 125-26, 130-31; One Woman Shows (1975), 126 Ladies Home Journal (magazine), 60 LaGuardia, Mayor Fiorello, 50 Lam, Tony, 159-60 Le, Tram., 168-69 leftism, 17, 24, 32, 76, 78, 89, 92 Legorreta, Roberto, 122, 131-32; see Cyclona Lewenz, Lisa, 142, 147-48; 1984: A View from Three Mile Island (1983), 147 Lichtenstein, Roy, 67 Life (magazine), 60 Lin, Maya, xix, 156; Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), xix, 156 Lippard, Lucy, xiv-xv lithography, xv, xvi, 4, 15, 23, 26, 28-29, 57, 146 Little Saigon, 155-56, 161 Little Steel Strike, 17 Los Angeles, CA, xiv, xvi, xx, 45, 67, 99-116, 151 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 45, 101 Lynch, Kevin, 151; Image of the City (1960), 151 Maccoy, Guy, 22 Malcolm X, see X, Malcolm Marbury, Elizabeth, 5 Marcuse, Herbert, 124, 126 Marianne (allegorical figure), 2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (holiday), 158 Mary’s Day (holiday), 111-12



Index The Masses (journal), xiii-xiv Mather and Company (designers), 26 McAdams, Dona Ann, 142-47; The Nuclear Survival Kit (1981), 143-45 Mechicano Art Center, 109 Memorial Day Massacre, 17 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), xiii Meza, Mundo, 123, 133 Miller, Chester A., 15; America Leads in Inventions, number 207 (1943), PAGE; Dictatorship, number 147 (1942–43), 21; Free Workers, Free Industry, number 164 (c. 1942), 20, 24-25; Future U.S. Progress…, number 159 (1942); Under Private Enterprise… number 196 (1943) Security, number 205 (1943), 21 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 19 Moholy-Nagy, László, 41 Montesquiou, Robert de, 7 Museo del Barrio, xvi Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 50-52; “Camouflage for Civilian Defense” (1942), 50-52 My Lai massacre, xv, 57 National Archives and Records Administration, 36 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 77-78 National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), 108-109 National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (NUFL), 157 National War Labor Board (NWLB), 19 Nazism, 19, 21, 29 New Bauhaus, 44 New Deal, 17

Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art New Left, 76, 84, 87, 92, 124-25 New York City, xiii-xvi, xviii, xx, xxii, 22, 26, 38, 49, 101, 141 Newsweek (magazine), 101 Newton, Huey P., 76, 79-80 Nguyen, Khanh Ba, 163, Harmony Bridge, 162-65 Nguyen, Tuan, 161 Noriega, Chon, 132 North Oakland Neighborhood AntiPoverty Center, 81-82 nurses, 1, 3-6, 9-10 Oakland, CA, xvi, 75-76, 80-84, 8687, 89, 93, Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), 38-43, 45-51 Office of Facts and Figures, 28 Office of War Information, 28 Orange County, CA, 155-168 pacifism, 8-9 Parker-Holladay (graphic designers), 26 patriotism, 21, 50, 157, 166 Peace and Freedom Party (P&F), 88-91 Pearl Harbor, 17, 19, 35-36, 38, 49 performance art, 109, 121-29 Pfahl, John, 144; Power Places (1981-84), 144 Phan, Hieu, 160 photography, 69 photomontage, 60-64 Phrygian bonnet, 2 Picasso, Pablo, xiii; Guernica (1937), xiii Pippin, Horace, xiv; Mr. Prejudice (1943), xiv Plaza de la Raza, 109 police, 76, 80-87, 92-93, 109, 126, 132, 142, 157, 159 Polignac, Princess de, 5 Pop Art, xxi, xxlii, 60, 99, 105, 111 Port Huron Statement, 123-24 propaganda, 17



181

Rahmani, Aviva, 126; Pocketbook Piece performances (19692005), 128; Smelling (1972), 127; Two Nice Jewish Girls, with Marni Gud (1972), 129 Ramparts (magazine), 76, 78, 83, 86, 88 Red cross (symbol), 1-2 Reinhardt, Ad, 58 Rickard, Greville, 38-42, 45, 47-51 Richter, Gerhard, 67 Rockwell, Norman, xiv Roman Catholic Church, see Catholicism Roosevelt, Franklin D., 17, 20 Rosler, Martha, 58, 60-64, 70; House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series (1967-72), 58, 60-64 The Rotarian (journal), 16-17, 27 Rubenstein, Ida, 8 Rubin, Jerry, 78 Sacramento, CA, 82-83, 85, 91-92, 109, 144 Saint-Gaudens, Homer, 38-39, 43, 52 San Francisco, CA, 76, 79 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), xiv, 91 Savio, Mario, 75, 81, 90-91 Schaefer-Ross (printers), 29 Schapiro, Miriam, xvi-xvii, xxiv Scherr, Max, 84 Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, 142 Seale, Bobby, 79-82 Second Vatican Council, 100-102 Self Help Graphics and Art (SHGA), 100, 103-104, 108-15 serigraphy, see silkscreen Serra, Richard Tilted Arc (1981) sexuality, 5, 66, 124, 133-34 Shabazz, Betty, 79

182 Shahn, Ben, 101 Sherman, Cindy, xviii silkscreen, 15-16, 22-26, 29-30, 32, 115 Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, see Zoot Suit Riots Smale, Stephen, 84 Smith, Barbara T., 122, 128-29, 135; Mass Meal (1969), 122; Ritual Meal (1969), 128 silkscreen, 15, 22 Sinclair, Upton The Jungle (1906) Sontag, Susan, 58 Spero, Nancy, 58-60, 64-66, 70; War Series (1966-70), 58, 64-66 Stein, Gertrude, 5 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 75, 88-89, 123, 125 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 92, 123; see also Port Huron Statement Temple of Friendship, 6 Think American Institute, 15 Three Mile Island, 141, 143, 145, 147-48, 149 Time (magazine), 67 Tran, Truong Van, 158-59 Twelve Pillar Pagoda, 160-61 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 19, 31 University of California, Berkeley, 43, 75, 78, 80-81, 87 University of California, Irvine, 122, 126, 130 University of California, Los Angeles, 67 University of California, San Diego, 124 Valdez, Patssi, 131 Vatican, see Second Vatican Council



Index Velonis, Anthony, 22, 24 Vi, Vi, 161 Vietnam, 156-58 Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), 78-79, 84, 86, 89 Vietnamese Americans, 155-68 Vietnam Monument to Freedom, 160 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, DC), xix, 164 Vietnam War, 57, 60, 64, 75, 78, 84, 88, 105, 109, 122, 124 Vietnam War Memorial, Westminster, CA, 156, 161 Volunteers in Service to America, 131 War Resisters League, 146; Nuclear America (1978-1979), 146, 150 Watts uprising, 67, 132 Westminster, CA, 155-58 Westminster Memorial Park, 160-61 Wolfe, Elsie de, 5, 10 “woman question,” 9-10 Woman’s Building, see Feminist Art Program (FAP) women artists, 59, 121 Women Artists in Revolution, xvi Women Concerned About Nuclear Power Plants, 146-47; Women Concerned About Nuclear Plants (1979), 146-47 Wood, Grant, xiv Works Progress Administration (WPA), 15, 22-23, 25 World War I, 1-11, 19, 22, 39, 61 World War II, xxiii-xiv, 15, 36-52, 67-69, 124, 166 Wyld, Evelyn, 5 X, Malcolm, 79, 81, 124 Xerography, 143, 149 Youth International Party (“Yippies”), 78 Zoot Suit Riots, 108