Poster of the Week

Amerika Is Devouring Its Children

Jay Belloli

Silkscreen, 1970

Berkeley, CA

18120

CSPG’s Poster of the Week commemorates the tragic death of Aaron Swartz.  It epitomizes the complicity of the state in destroying one of the most creative and productive of our youth.  Aaron’s commitment to democracy and open access to information was threatening to an increasingly authoritarian state. On January 11, 2013, 26 year old Aaron committed suicide, unable to face the prison sentence he was threatened with by overzealous prosecutors.  Aaron was being charged with allegedly illegally hacking into a network at MIT to download scholarly articles only accessible through an expensive subscription service. He had previously said the knowledge belonged to the world.

Although Congressional criticism is mounting against the Federal prosecutors, and both Democrats and Republicans are questioning whether he had been inappropriately targeted, it’s too late for Aaron. 

The title, Amerika is Devouring Its Children, speaks directly to the U.S. Justice Department treating the best of its youth as enemies to be destroyed.

Aaron Swartz

PRESENTE!           

Background to Poster:
In April 1970, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia, a neutral country during the Viet Nam War, college campuses throughout the US erupted in protest, and one-third of them shut down.  At Kent State University in Ohio, four students were killed by national guardsmen deployed to repress the protests. Two days later, two students were killed at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Outraged by the escalating violence abroad and at home, students at the University of California, Berkeley walked out of their classes.  They silkscreened over 100 designs such as this onto reams of used computer paper, transforming the Goya into an anti-Viet Nam War statement.

Sources:

http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2013/1/14/freedom_to_connect_aaron_swartz_1986

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-aaron-swartz-congressional-scrutiny-20130118,0,640020.story

Poster of the Week

Dan Berrigan, Catonsville 9
Photo by Bob Fitch
Offset, 1968
Oakland, California

CSPG’s Poster-of-the-Week honors Father Daniel Berrigan who celebrated his 90^th birthday May 9^th. A poet, peace activist and Jesuit priest, Fr. Berrigan, along with his brother Fr. Philip Berrigan, were repeatedly arrested for protesting the Viet Nam War, and other causes. Philip, a Josephite priest, was the first priest in the U.S. to be arrested for an act of civil disobedience. In his lifetime, Philip he had spent about 11 years in jails and prisons for civil disobedience. Both brothers were for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for committing acts of vandalism, including destroying government property, and in 1970 Daniel spent four months living underground as a fugitive from the FBI.

In 1968, Daniel Berrigan traveled to North Viet Nam with Howard Zinn to bring home three U.S. prisoners of war. On May 17, 1968, Daniel again made national headlines when he manufactured home-made napalm and, with his brother and seven other Catholic protesters, used it to destroy 378 draft files in the presence of reporters and onlookers in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. This group came to be known as the Catonsville Nine, and is commemorated in the Poster-of-the-Week.

After their arrest, convictions and sentencing to prison, Daniel wrote in a "meditation":

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning Of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the frontparlour of the charnel house...The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense.

On September 9, 1980, Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others began the Plowshares Movement. They illegally trespassed onto the General Electric Nuclear Missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they hammered on nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files. Known as the "Plowshares Eight," they were arrested and charged with over ten different felony and misdemeanor counts.

Daniel Berrigan has maintained a high level of social activism around a number of causes, including protests against American intervention in Central America, the 1991 Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He speaks out against capital punishment, supports LGBT rights, and is a contributing editor of Sojourners Magazine. On April 2, 2010, Good Friday, Daniel Berrigan and 11 others were arrested attempting to dissuade tourists from going on board the Intrepid, an aircraft carried moored in the Hudson River. The Intrepid is now a floating museum, but for peace activists, it exists as a symbol of war’s destructiveness.

Sources:

http://www.newhumanistforum.org/speakers.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan

http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2010/06/dan-berrigan-arrested-again.html

Poster of the Week

In light of the escalating attacks against immigrants and workers, from Arizona to Wisconsin, CSPG’s Poster-of-the-Week shows how these issues were combined over 35 years ago. After years of keeping their demands and demonstrations separate, May 1, 2011 will see the joining of immigrant rights and labor rights groups in demonstrations from Los Angeles to New York.

International Workers Day
Peace Press
Offset, 1975
Los Angeles, California

By demanding Jobs For All, End Deportations, U.S. Out Of Indochina & Puerto Rico this 36 year old poster links the same issues facing us today: lack of jobs, scapegoating immigrants and foreign wars. And Puerto Rico continues to be the last remaining U.S. colony.

The poster was printed at Peace Press, an anti-war Los Angeles print collective which will be the subject of an exhibition premiering September 2011 at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. Peace Press Graphics 1967 – 1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change is part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. The exhibition and catalogue are a collaboration between the Center for the Study of Political Graphics and the University Art Museum at CSULB.

History of May Day as Worker’s Labor Day
May Day as a worker’s labor day, began in 1886, in Chicago, as a movement for the universal adoption of the eight-hour working day. (Workers had secured a limit of ten hours to the working day only a few decades earlier.) In Chicago, the center of the movement, workers had been agitating for an eight-hour day for months, and on the eve of May 1, 50,000 were already on strike. 30,000 more swelled their ranks the next day, bringing most of Chicago manufacturing to a standstill. In a notorious riot that followed (the Haymarket massacre) the 8-hour movement failed, but the Chicago events figured prominently in the founding congress of the Second International (Paris, 1889) to make May 1, 1890 a demonstration of the solidarity and power of the international working class movement. May Day has been marked ever since by parades, red flags, and an affirmation of union power and pride. Ironically, this Chicago-born holiday is celebrated more internationally than in the United States.

Poster of the Week

Wouldn't you go to jail if it would help end the War?
Sister Mary Corita Kent
Silkscreen, 1971

The Pentagon Papers, was a U.S. Defense Department authored top-secret history of U.S. political-military involvement in Viet Nam from 1945 to 1967. Concerned about the escalating war, Daniel Ellsberg, one of the contributors to the Pentagon Papers and a former State Department official, gave the documents to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1969. When the war continued to escalate, Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers in early 1971 to the New York Times, Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. The papers revealed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, and coastal raids on North Viet Nam, none of which had been reported by the U.S. media.

It took Ellsberg and Tony Russo, his co-worker at the RAND Corporation*, weeks to secretly photocopy the 7,000 pages at night. Russo and Ellsberg were later charged with espionage, theft, and conspiracy. After learning that Ellsberg's psychiatrist had been burglarized (ordered by the Nixon administration) and the F.B.I had been illegally taping telephone conversations, federal court Judge William M. Byrne, Jr. dismissed all charges against them on May 11, 1973, before it reached a jury. During the trial, the Nixon administration had also offered Judge Byrne the position of FBI director.

Ellsberg later said the documents "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates". He added that he leaked the papers to end what he perceived to be "a wrongful war". A 1996 article in the New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance."

The complete quotation is:

“But I was not wrong to hope that exposing secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told might have benefits for our democracy that were worthy of the risks. Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end the war?”

Pentagon Papers II

On Sunday, July 25, 2010, 92,000 classified documents were released by Wikileaks.org* to the New York Times, Guardian (UK) and Der Spiegel (Germany). Almost instantaneously referred to as “Pentagon Papers II”, these documents detail the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and December 2009, including “friendly fire” and civilian casualties. PFC Bradley Manning, A 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst, has been arrested after alleged chat logs were turned in to the authorities by a former hacker in whom he had confided.

On 5 April 2010, Wikileaks.org released classified U.S. military footage from a series of attacks on 12 July 2007 in Baghdad by a U.S. helicopter that killed 12 civilians, including two Reuters news staff, on a website called "Collateral Murder".

*RAND is a global policy think tank formed to offer research and analysis to the U.S. armed forces. Its Santa Monica headquarters is often referred to as “CIA West”.)

* Wikileaks.org is an international organization, based in Sweden. It publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website, launched in 2006, is a prime portal for unauthorized, accurate accounts, documents and video from distant battlefields. To see the recently released documents go to: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

Poster of the Week

Renew Our Common Struggle
Peg Averill; Art for People
Silkscreen, 1975
Washington, D.C.

40th Anniversary of Kent State: 4 Students Killed by US National Guard

In March 1969, President Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia, a country neighbouring Viet Nam. As this was an escalation and widening of an unpopular war, and because Cambodia was a neutral country, the Nixon administration tried to keep it a secret from the American people. An estimated 100,000 peasants died in the bombing, while 2 million people were left homeless.

In April 1970, Nixon ordered US troops into Cambodia. When the invasion was announced, US college campuses erupted in protest, and one-third of them shut down due to student walkouts. At Kent State University in Ohio, four students were killed by panicky national guardsmen who had been called up to prevent rioting. Two days later, two students were killed at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Poster of the Week

Amerika Is Devouring Its Children
Jay Belloli
Silkscreen, 1999 edition of 1970 silkscreen
Berkeley, California
One of three posters from CSPG's 10th Anniversary Portfolio
Limited edition of 100
Printed by Two Brothers Custom Silkscreen, El Monte, California

In April 1970, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia, a neutral country during the Viet Nam War, college campuses throughout the U.S. erupted in protest, with one-third of them shutting down. At Kent State University in Ohio, four students were killed by national guardsmen deployed to repress the protests. Two days later, two students were killed at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Outraged by the escalating violence abroad and at home, students all over the U.S. walked out of their classes. At the University of California, Berkeley, students silkscreened over 100 designs such as this onto reams of used computer paper. Jay Belloli, at the time a graduate student in Art History, transformed Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children (1819-1823) into an anti Viet Nam War statement. This was the only poster Belloli ever made, and many publications listed “anonymous” as the credit. CSPG was the first to credit Belloli with this work when it was reproduced for the organization’s 10th anniversary. Since 1970, Belloli has served as curator or director of seven contemporary art institutions throughout the country and is currently the Director of Gallery Programs at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California.