CURATOR'S STATEMENT  by Professor Ken Reker,  art  + design

A TRADITION OF ACTIVIST ART by Professor Gretchen Sinnett, art + design

We are delighted to show a selection of work by printmaker Sue Coe and art historian Stephen Eisenman, part of a vibrant tradition of activist art and writing in the United States.  Prints, in particular, have long been marshaled for activist art.  Comparatively affordable, readily reproducible, and easily transportable, they enable artists to reach larger audiences.  

As with any activist art, we recognize that some visitors may not agree with the creators’ viewpoints or their approaches.  And the views, opinions, and content expressed in this exhibition are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Salem State University.  

Artwork in this exhibition addresses racism, antisemitism, and violence, including sexual assault and animal cruelty, but also celebrates compassion, advocacy, and artistry.

One could argue that freely engaging with activist art, particularly visually or emotionally challenging works, is a privilege of representative societies in which freedom of speech and expression are valued.  Some writers believe that activist art was born during the Age of Revolutions (1775-1848) when many people in Europe and the burgeoning United States argued for more representative forms of government and began to feel greater agency to seek social change.  But even before that era, some artists expressed social critiques through their work, for example printmaker Jacques Callot (1592-1635) who issued a devastating series on The Miseries and Misfortunes of War in 1633.  

In the United States, art and politics have been intertwined since our nation’s founding.   Colonists engaged with art as a form of political speech, erecting statues, tearing them down, circulating broadsides (single printed sheets), exhibiting transparencies, and even bayoneting portraits of members of the opposition.  Since then, artists have regularly advocated for social change (and sometimes the status quo), with spikes during periods of heightened social debate and disruption, including the Abolitionist movement beginning in the 1830s, the Great Depression a century later, the turbulent 1960s, the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s (A subject Coe has addressed.), and the Black Lives Matter movement in our current century.

Coe’s and Eisenman’s work is deeply grounded in and participates in this American tradition as well as a larger, international body of work.  Artists have long used scathing satire, emotive content, and visual distortion to make their points, sometimes creating intentionally unsettling imagery to challenge viewers’ beliefs and defenses.  Masters of satire include French artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose Gargantua (1831) attacked government corruption while highlighting the plight of the lower classes.  A century later, German artist John Heartfield (1891-1968), part of the Dada movement, used the then new technique of photomontage to create absurdist juxtapositions attacking the Nazi party in works like Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932).  

Coe’s and Eisenman’s empathy for the victims of injustice resonate with the searing images of another German artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), like Coe a master printmaker.  Earlier, Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’ (1746-1828) horrific Disasters of War portfolio (1810-20), and his perhaps better known painting The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid (1814), evoked empathy for the victimized while forcing viewers to reckon with our species’ capacity for inhumanity, across political lines.

Twentieth-century artists sought new visual styles to draw the viewer in, most famously perhaps in Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Guernica (1937), with its expressive distortion and jumbled composition.  American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) created powerful abstracted depictions of the African American experience paired with text in his The Migration series (1940-41) and other works.  Meanwhile, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) believed that traditional representational techniques best conveyed the message in his famous Four Freedoms series (1943).  Activist artists have since expanded their range of media, using the earth, their bodies, video projections, melting ice, billboards, and even bloody bundles of meat to address the environment, xenophobia, poverty, fascism, and more.  Others, including Sue Coe, continue to work with traditional media, balancing sometimes challenging imagery with beautiful technique and sophisticated compositions. 

Picasso’s Guernica is also a reminder of artists’ and scholars’ frequent references to earlier examples of politically engaged art, a means of deepening the content and calling attention to continuities and change over time.  In Guernica, the woman with raised arms, on the right, evokes the central figure in Goya’s 3rd of May, and it is no coincidence that artists staging an anti-Vietnam War protest in 1970 chose to do so in front of Picasso’s epic work, then on display at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.  Coe references a tapestry after the painting, which hangs in the United Nations, in her UN Security Council, which is on view in this exhibition.  Coe and other activist artists sometimes visually connect specific instances of injustice with examples of suffering or protest from other places and times, highlighting patterns of oppression and resistance.

We hope this exhibition will prompt visitors to consider art’s role in activism and democracy and pique their curiosity about the rich tradition of activist art of which Sue Coe and Stephen Eisenman are a part.