ART FRONTS: VISUAL CULTURE AND RACE POLITICS IN THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES Erin Park Cohn Supervisor: Kathy Peiss Art Fronts argues that visual culture played a central and understudied role in the African American freedom struggle in the middle part of the twentieth century. In particular, it traces the political lives and cultural productions of a generation of visual artists, both black and white, who seized on the Depression-era ethos of art as a weapon to forge a particular form of visual activism that agitated for social, political, and economic equality for African Americans. Participating in the proliferation of visual culture that characterized early twentieth-century America, the activist artists of this generation took advantage of opportunities to reproduce images widely and thus convey political messages in powerful and immediate ways. Art Fronts traces the careers of these artists from the early days of the Depression, when artists affiliated with the Communist Party first created images in service of African American civil rights, through the Cold War, which limited but did not destroy the links they forged between art and activism. By highlighting changes and continuities in African American cultural politics over the course of four decades, it offers fresh perspectives on the contours of the long civil rights movement. Art Fronts thus participates in recent efforts to challenge the classic narrative of the history of the civil rights movement, yet draws that scholarship in a new direction, pointing to the importance of culture, and particularly visual culture, in all phases of the movement. Indeed, visual artists were highly active in the long civil rights movement, while the images they created and circulated in service of the cause served as a necessary visual forum for a range of competing ideas about the politics of race and civil rights. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Kathy Peiss Second Advisor Thomas J. Sugrue Third Advisor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156

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Art fronts: Visual culture and race politics in the mid-twentieth-century United States

Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912-1948 [ex. cat.]. Ed. Harry L. Katz with essays by Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., and Garnett McCoy. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999. 119 pages, $19.95 (paper). Web exhibit, Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912-1948: http://lcweb.loc.gov/

Art of the People

This article examines the activist method and motivation of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), an art-political collective formed on the Lower East Side in the late 1960s. Exploring a series of actions, organizational alliances and community-orientated programs, it argues that the group’s project was informed by a critique of the social and political disengagement of postwar American art practice. In examining these themes within their neighborhood context, the paper makes an ancillary argument for addressing the local within histories of the radical American 1960s. While 1968 stands as a symbolic moment of political and social upheaval, the actions of UAW/MF – and its forbearer, Black Mask – illustrate the local dimensions of the so-called “protest era,” and highlight anxieties and concerns that promoted social revolt at the grassroots level.

“We have our own struggle”: Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and the avant-garde of community action, the Lower East Side, 1968

The aim of this essay is to explore similarities between Whitehead's stages of education and two of the "ultimate notions" he discusses in Modes of Thought . I hope this exploration will shed light on what Whitehead means when he opens the Epilogue of that book by saying: "The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue" (171).

Creating the Future

Community murals in US inner city neighborhoods offer popular, grassroots representations of local identities and their relation to urban space and community culture. They are powerful tools in building neighborhood solidarity across ethnic groups, generations, and defended gang territories. Designed primarily for local consumption, murals circulate dramatic, alternative representations of local identity, heritage and history, contesting attributions of stigma and danger promulgated in mainstream media. In Boston’s Dudley Street corridor that crosscuts its Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, both low-income communities of color, these themes are evident in the presence of a vibrant series of community murals lining the one-mile long street. Designed and painted by local youth under the sponsorship of grassroots communitybased organizations, the murals give voice to urban youth’s hopes, struggles, and aspirations for their individual and collective futures, from their positions in disadvantaged, multi-ethnic neighborhoods in a city sharply divided by race and class. Murals, public art, urban ethnography, youth.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ciso.12000

John Weber

Papers

Toward a People's Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement