Los Angeles:
MasterPeaces:
High Art for Higher Purpose

Through September 2009

A small selection of posters from MasterPeaces is on display at the Millard Sheets Library
Otis College of Art and Design
9045 Lincoln Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90045

From Dada to Punk, from anti-war movements to feminism and ecology, high art has been repeatedly incorporated into a visual language that ranges from the iconoclastic to overt protest. When Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and a goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in 1919, he was symbolically desecrating a masterpiece. By this act, he challenged the boundaries between high art and protest art. The very term “high art,” or “fine art,” implies a pejorative reference to other visual arts, including the protest poster. The more revered or well-known the art the more likely it is to be parodied, defaced, appropriated or altered.

Distinctions between the high arts and protest graphics once were clear. Where the high arts value authorship, originality, and uniqueness, most protest posters are anonymous, derivative, and produced in large quantities. When a fine art print is produced in multiples, it is generally signed, numbered, and printed in limited editions on high quality paper. Protest posters are often quickly produced, for a specific cause or event, and use whatever paper is available, including cheap high acid newsprint. Subtlety, often to the point of ambiguity is an important quality in high art. In contrast, if the message in a protest poster cannot be instantly understood, it is not effective.

Art by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Picasso are among the most frequently appropriated for political posters, and for a wide variety of issues. The Mona Lisa, arguably the most famous female portrait of all time, promotes abortion rights in a 1980s Spanish poster, and disabled rights in a 1990s German poster. The participants in Leonardo’s Last Supper are replaced with Chicano heroes in one poster, and feminist artists in another.

If a work was overtly political in its inception, contemporary appropriations build upon this meaning and give it contemporary significance. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, celebrating the French Revolution of 1830, is used in a 1989 poster to focus on the struggle for self-determination in North Ireland. Picasso’s Guernica, produced in 1937 to protest Nazi bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War, appears in posters opposing U.S. supported wars in Viet Nam, Central America, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq.

The posters in MasterPeaces use earlier art to focus on contemporary issues, including anti-war, ecology, women’s rights, anti-nuclear, disabled rights, HIV/AIDS, sexism and homophobia. The alteration can be simple, such as in a Brazilian “Safe Sex” poster which places a condom into God’s hand as he is about to touch Adam from Michelangelo’s Creation. A piece can also be completely reworked as in Evolve or Dissolve (1991) by “O”, where the single figure in Munch’s The Scream (1893), has been multiplied into countless terrified and ethnically diverse people, screaming as they run from burning oil wells during the first Gulf War.

Exhibition funded in part by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, The Andy Warhol Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation and individual donors.

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PRISON NATION
Posters on the Prison Industrial Complex

June 7 - 28, 2009

c.a.f.e. infoshop
935 F Street
Fresno, CA 93706
559-367-6020

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world-over 2.3 million inmates. Since the 1970s, the rate of most serious crimes has dropped, yet prisons have been filled at double capacity. People of color, the poor, the illiterate, the mentally ill, youth, and women are the primary occupants. This growth is due to mandatory drug sentencing laws, conspiracy provisions, a dysfunctional parole system, inadequate legal representation, and huge profits made by the multinational corporations servicing the prisons. The posters in Prison Nation cover issues surrounding the system of mass incarceration including: racial disparity in sentencing, the death penalty, the Three Strikes law, women's right to self defense, access to education and health care, the growing rate of incarceration, slave labor, divestment, privatization, torture, and re-entry into the community. They show the power of art to educate and inspire people to action.

For more information contact the California Prison Moratorium Project at www.calipmp.org or www.myspace.com/capmp

Posters from CSPG's Prison Nation are on display inconjunction with a June workshop series and statewide coalition march on June 15, 2009 sponsored by:

Prison Nation is available to travel and will soon be available as an online exhibition on CSPG’s website.

This exhibition is funded in part by the
Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles

America
Cedomir Kostovic, Digital
2004, Springfield, MO

Women in Prison
Scott Boylston, Savannah,
GA Silkscreen, 2006

Wilson Art Center Gallery, Ohio Northern University

September 1–November 30, 2009

Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas

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