Part five of GRAPHIC LIBERATION: PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGE MAKING AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

A critical conservation between Jamaa al-Yad’s Daniel Drennan ElAwar and Josh MacPhee, engaging questions about the history of political graphics, the tension within aesthetics and social movements, collectivism, and who owns images. To register for this zoom discussion, click HERE.

Jamaa al-Yad is an artists’ collective. The idea for this collective has been around for many years, if not decades. We describe ourselves in our bylaws and charter in the following way: Jamaa al-Yad is a cultural association the aim of which is the research, implementation, dissemination, and re-establishment of various cultural manifestations including but not limited to craft, design, and art, by focusing on the local, vernacular, indigenous, and popular, using methodologies and means that ideologically reflect models of collaboration, co-operation, and communality, in the belief that such works and such actions are historically shown to, and continue to be likely to, bring about beneficial social change and a betterment of the commonweal.

Graphic Liberation: Jamaa al-Yad is the 5th in a series of live conversations between Josh MacPhee, Colgate students, and distinguished political graphics producers, exploring the role of culture in social movements and the history and evolutionary usage of political graphics. MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a decentralized group of political artists from the US, Canada, and Mexico, and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements, based in Brooklyn, NY. 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.

Presented by the Art and Art History Department and the Christian A. Johnson Foundation. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence was established in 1986 as a challenge grant in support of the arts at Colgate. The residency program permits one or more artists or scholars in each of the areas of fine arts, music, and theater to become part of the Colgate community every academic year.

image: Jamaa al-Yad, The Uprooting of the Olive Tree, relief print/illustration, 2010.