Printmaking and Social Movements
Cases where the speed and cheapness of printing became a weapon, ranging from a press room inside an occupied art school to a style that a state made official.
Dictionary entry
- OSPAAAL Poster 1966–1990s / Style
Carries transnational solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements through flat color, photography, iconography and short multilingual text.
- ROSTA Windows 1919–1921 / Style
During the civil war the ROSTA news agency pasted stencil-replicated poster serials in the windows of empty shops. Mayakovsky and others turned the news into comic-strip panels of simple shapes and rhymed verse, inventing the prototype of rapid-response graphics.
- Atelier Populaire May–June 1968 / Style
In the Paris uprising of May '68 students occupied the art school and ran its print workshop. One-color silkscreens, simple figures and declarative slogans came off the press nightly under rules of anonymity, no sale and street posting, which became the prototype of protest graphics.
- ACT UP Graphics 1987–1990s / Style
The visual strategy of the AIDS-crisis direct-action movement. The pink triangle of SILENCE=DEATH, a clarity seized from advertising's own grammar and the principle of free reproduction forged activist graphics as strong as the ads they stood against.
- Socialist Realism 1932–1988 / Style
A realism codified as the state's official style in 1934, depicting workers and leaders in idealised form. It rejected avant-garde experiment in favour of imagery legible to everyone, repeating the regime's narrative through low viewpoints, forward-striding crowds and the light of a bright future. Important as a rare case in which a state decreed a style.
- Situationist Graphics 1957–1972 / Layout
The practice of détournement: hijacking existing images from advertising, comics and film, and swapping only the speech-balloon text to invert their meaning. Its knack for betraying dominant imagery from the inside, at no production cost, runs in a straight line to later culture jamming and internet memes.
- Chicano Art 1965– / Style
An expression born out of the Mexican American civil rights movement. Murals, silkscreened posters, lowriders and lettering form one continuous vocabulary, and Aztec imagery, Catholic devotional figures and mixed English-Spanish lettering share a single surface. A case in which a movement produced a style.
- Social Realism 1920s–1940s / Style
Social Realism used legible figures, public art, print and photography to expose contemporary labor, poverty, racism, migration and urban conditions. It is distinct from state-prescribed Socialist Realism.
- Minjung Art 1980s–early 1990s / Style
Art of South Korea's democratization era that joined labor, rural life, division, and collective action to woodcuts, banners, murals, hanging pictures, and comic-like public imagery made to circulate beyond the museum.