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Call for Art: Reproduce and Revolt!

April 25, 2005

Josh MacPhee — author of Stencil Pirates, curator of the Celebrate People History posters, organizer for the Street Art Workers project, and all-around nice guy — is one of our favorite people.
A few weeks back he sent us an announcement for an ambitious and urgently necessary project: a collection of new, relevant radical graphics to be published by Soft Skull Press. We’re reproducing the call in full below:

Reproduce and Revolt!: Radical Graphics for the 21st Century
Edited by Josh MacPhee
Soft Skull Press
Reproduce and Revolt! is a graphic toolbox to be launched into the hands of political activists. The book will contain over 300 new and exciting high-quality illustrations and graphics about social justice and political activism for activists to use on flyers, posters, t-shirts, brochures, stencils or any other graphic aspects of political campaigns. All the graphics will be bold and easy to reproduce, in addition to being open source/anti-copyright. The book will come with clear instructions on how to best utilize the images so as to improve the graphic qualities of political campaigns. It will also contain a short history of political graphics, an archive of political flyers and posters throughout history, as well as information about and a bibliography of further reading for all of the social justice issues the art will cover.
I am now collecting submissions of graphics, illustrations and art for the book, which will be published by Soft Skull Press in late 2006. I will chose for the book according quality of the image, reproducibility, and how well they convey the issues. Not everyone’s submissions will be included. I will also be attempting to craft the book to represent the output of as diverse a group of artists as possible, across gender, race, nationality, sexuality, ability, etc. Reproduce & Revolt! is not intended to be a who’s who of well known and successful political artists, this call is open to all levels of artists.

This is my second book with Soft Skull Press. My first, Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of Street Stenciling, was released in July 2004. Stencil Pirates has gotten great reviews and is currently in it’s third printing.
Here are the specifications for the images:
— Black and White/Greyscale.
— High Resolution: either original artwork on paper or high res digital images, minimum 600 dpi for greyscale, 1200 dpi for line art.
— A minimum of 6 inches x 6 inches.
— All mediums are accepted (various forms of printmaking, drawing,
digital design, collages, etc.). The main factor is reproducibility.
Here are the catagories the images should be about (there will inevitably be overlap between the categories, these are simply guidelines and suggestions to help clarify and spark inspiration). In addition, the book will contain graphics in support of positive activities and graphics in opposition to negative aspects of the world, these are both included below (in alphabetical order, not order of importance!):
Anti-Authoritarianism (including anarchism, hierarchy, direct action, mutual aid and more)
Anti-Racism (including racial equality, institutional racism, attacks on youth of color, white privilege and more)
Counter-Globalization (including corporate control, IMF, World Bank, WTO, capitalism, austerity, world debt, alternative economies and more)
Education (including privatization, self-education, free schools, liberatory pedagogy, urban inequalities, military recruitment and more)
Environment (including environmental justice, environmental racism, endangered species, animal rights, earth liberation, deforestation, strip mining, water rights, bio-tech, organics, community gardens and more)
Feminism (including women’s struggles, wages for housework, equal pay for equal work, equal rights, gender discrimination, women’s liberation movement, sexual assault, men against sexism and more)
Government (including bureaucracy, taxes, anti-cop, police brutality, elections and more)
Health Care (including disability, mental health, AIDS, access, abortion, aging and more)
Housing (including public housing, gentrification, private ownership, abandonment, homelessness and more)
International Solidarity (including connections with movements around the world, borders, mutual aid, national liberation, Zapatista support, indigenous solidarity and more)
Labor (including unions, work slowdowns/stoppages/sabotage, strikes, bosses, anti-work, economics, maquiladoras, sweatshops and more)
Media (including media control, media consolidation, independent media, pirate radio and more)
Prisons (including prison reform, prison abolition, racism in the criminal justice system, the death penalty, political prisoners, stopping the construction of prisons, torture, sentencing discrepancies and more)
Protest (including marches, protests, direct action, pickets, plowshares, armed actions and more)
Queer Liberation (including gay, lesbian, trans, intersex, and bisexual struggle, gender binaries, queer bashing, sexual liberation and more)
War (including anti-war, imperialism, militarism, state terrorism, war tax resistance, nuclear weapons, “collateral damage” and more)
I will craft about a dozen chapters out of these categories, and each chapters will be filled with 30-40 new and exciting illustrations and graphics created by dozens of political artists, hopefully including you.
A website of high resolution copies of a large number of the images in the book will also be created, and ideally I will include some of the graphics that don’t make the cut into the published volume. People will be able to either photocopy the images or pull them directly into digital files via the website.
I hope this project will both help radical activist projects, but also help boost radical artists by getting our work further out into the world.
I hope to be able to pay a nominal fee for each piece published as well as give each artist access to books at 50% off the cover price.
All material must be submitted by October 31st, 2005. THIS IS THE FINAL DEADLINE. There is no limit to the number of images you can submit.
All images need to be emailed to “reproduce [at] justseeds [dot] org”
or mailed to:
Josh MacPhee/R&R
POBox 476971
Chicago, IL 60647
If you have any additional questions, feel free to write or email the
above addresses.
Thanks,
Josh MacPhee
www.justseeds.org
www.stencilpirates.org

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