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FIGURE 17 “Save Lives, Not Face.” March on Washington against the war in Vietnam, October 21–22, 1967. Photograph by the author.

      The psychedelic posters, especially in the Bay Area, helped stimulate a poster culture in the 1960s, which was amplified by the establishment of commercial poster production for private use. College dormitory walls were commonly decorated with locally purchased, mass-produced posters that were in national circulation. Also in the 1960s, some fine artists, turning away from the dominant abstract and pop styles, were creating visual art with strong social content.⁶⁴ No later than 1965, antiwar posters and paintings were in wide circulation. For the catalogue of an exhibition of protest posters at the New School in New York, in October–December 1971, David Kunzle wrote, “The Poster of Protest was triggered by the sudden, unexpected and massive escalation of the war in Vietnam 1965–66. By 1968 enough antiwar posters had appeared to form an exhibition (mounted in Italy) containing about seventy items. Two years later this number had more than doubled, but there are signs that the wave of the ‘commercial’ poster of protest, with which we are concerned here, is beginning to break, or to move in a new direction: the non-commercial, utilitarian ‘action’ poster, modeled on the famous French student affiches de mai.”⁶⁵

      At Berkeley in May 1970, posters were simply laid out in stacks on tables in the lobby of the College of Environmental Design. Every day, it seemed, there was a fresh supply.⁶⁶ Lincoln Cushing says that at Berkeley the “short-lived workshop . . . created an estimated fifty thousand copies of hundreds of works.”⁶⁷ The posters were made with the approval and assistance of the University Art Museum and the faculty of the College of Environmental Design. According to Cushing, “UC Berkeley art history professor Herschel B. Chipp was a faculty advocate for the workshop artists, and he threw his support behind a student-curated exhibition at the then-new University Art Museum. It included work from the University of California, the California College of Arts and Crafts, the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford, and other schools, as well as posters from Mexico and Paris from May 1968.”⁶⁸

      In his Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, Peter Selz, former director of the University Art Museum, recalls,

      Many antiwar posters were produced in the University Art Museum on the Berkeley campus during this time. In response to the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970, there was an outcry against the war among students, faculty, and staff at Berkeley, as at many universities in America. As director of the University Art Museum at the time, I was approached by students who wanted to turn the gallery into “campus central” for the printing of posters and the mimeographing (since this was before the time of the photocopier) of position papers. I felt that this action was called for, even though the gallery was just then the venue for two major sculpture exhibitions. . . . I placed the sculptures behind a screen to make room for silkscreen presses and mimeograph machines, feeling that, just as art is often political, politics is sometimes art.⁶⁹

      At the time, of course, these posters were not presented in any particular groupings, though perhaps the recurrence of themes would have helped some of them become recognizable while framing the others. The posters are primarily antiwar, at least by context if not by direct reference; a few refer to civil rights or the larger political process. In any case, the political themes raised in the posters do not divide neatly into mutually exclusive categories; instead, they overlap and intertwine along a variety of dimensions. Our groupings here should thus be regarded with some reservations, to avoid political or rhetorical reductionism. In any case, though the “arguments” of the posters are crucial to their meanings, the posters are not, taken one at a time or together, reducible to any single proposition.

      Most of the posters are original art on silk screen; some are based on photographs, and some are produced by photo offset. Some of the art is purely typographic. The color palette is typically limited, giving the posters a simplicity, directness, immediacy, vividness, and in some cases a beauty that is striking. All of it provides symbolic dimensions through pure design by creating tone and stance.

One cluster shows a variety of Vietnamese or more broadly Asian themes, with strong appeals for identification. In “This Is Life—This Cuts It Short” (see fig. 18), a mother and child (life) are juxtaposed against a rifle (this cuts it short) gripped in an unknown hand. The mother and child are clearly Asian but are also familiar, in a pose that might suggest a Madonna and child. The child directs its gaze at the viewer, with a look that, in context, must suggest alarm, even fear. The theme of

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