Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art
as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the
earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs,
prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these
endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on
power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms.
Spanning continents and centuries, Protest! presents a major
new chronological look at protest graphics.
Beginning in the
Reformation, when printed visual matter was first produced in
multiples, Liz McQuiston follows the iconic images that have
accompanied movements and events around the world. She examines fine
art and propaganda, including William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, Thomas
Nast’s political caricatures, French and British comics, postcards
from the women’s suffrage movement, clothing of the 1960s
counterculture, the anti-apartheid illustrated book How to Commit
Suicide in South Africa, the “Silence=Death” emblem from the AIDS
crisis, murals created during the Arab Spring, electronic graphics
from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, and the front cover of the
magazine Charlie Hebdo. Providing a visual exploration both joyful
and brutal, McQuiston discusses how graphics have been used to
protest wars, call for the end to racial discrimination, demand
freedom from tyranny, and satirize authority figures and regimes.
From the French,
Mexican, and Sandinista revolutions to the American civil rights
movement, nuclear disarmament, and the Women’s March of 2017,
Protest! documents the integral role of the visual arts in
passionate efforts for change.