In Graphic Liberation: Perspectives on Image Making and Political Movements, Josh MacPhee, the Christian A. Johnson Foundation Artist-In-Residence, continues to explore the terrain of political image making, expanding on his ongoing conversations series of the same name at Colgate University. Through a series of projects that invite the gallery audience to participate in various forms of printing, Graphic Liberation enlists the viewer to become producer, and engage in, and with, the visual language of international social movements developed and evolved across the globe for over 200 years. In this world of signs and symbols organized toward liberation, pink triangles become powerful symbols of AIDS activism, red wedges defeat white supremacy, and houses raise their fists against rent increases. By focusing on the ways images are reproduced, repurposed, and distributed, MacPhee turns our focus to iteration and copying as an engine of human progress, rather than our culture’s (and capitalism’s) fetish of the new and authorial individuality.
Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY (InterferenceArchive.org). MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People’s History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade (AntumbraDesign.org). His most recent book is An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production.
More information HERE.
October 20th, 2021 through November 19th, 2021
Hours: Monday through Friday, 10:30am – 4:30pm Saturday and Sunday, 1:00pm – 5:00pm
*Please note: Weekend hours are dependent on the availability of student monitors.If driving a distance, please contact the department (315-228-7633), during regular working hours, to ensure the gallery will be open.The gallery is not open during university breaks and holidays.
