In conjunction with the Labor Notes conference in Chicago, Art In These Times is hosting a new exhibition of Celebrate People’s History posters.

The exhibition opens Sunday, April 21st alongside a book talk by Hamilton Nolan about his new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Nolan will be in conversation with UFCW 3000 President Faye Guenther and UAW Local 551 member and organizer Marcie Pedraza, moderated by In These Times Senior Editor Miles Kampf-Lassin. (The event is Sunday, April 21st at 5PM at the In These Times office. More information here.)

Celebrate People’s History Poster Series

The Celebrate People’s History poster series is organized and curated by Josh MacPhee. The posters are rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history. It’s rare today that a political poster is celebratory, and when it is, it almost always focuses on a small canon of male individuals: MLK, Ghandi, Che, or Mandela. Rather than create another exclusive set of heroes, MacPhee generated a diverse set of posters that bring to life successful moments in the history of social justice struggles. To that end, he asked artists and designers to find events, groups, and people who have moved forward the collective struggle of humanity to create a more equitable and just world. The posters tell stories from the subjective position of the artists, and are often the stories of underdogs, those written out of history.

The goal of this project is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.

Celebrate People’s History at In These Times installed by Aaron Hughes and Ryan Griffis.