- JUST SEEDS
In this week’s art section I strongly encourage readers to check out Signs of Change, the massive collection of counter-culture art on display at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The display of over 600 posters, t-shirts, video and audio from social movements over the past 60 years is delicious history nerd candy, ranging from illicitly-printed anti-apartheid posters to rare photos of American Indians occupying Alcatraz.
I talked with Just Seeds artist Dara Greenwald about the two years she spent putting together the display or rare work.
MERCURY: What was the most difficult poster, video or recording to get?
GREENWALD: There was a video that was documenting the actions of the Lesbians Organized for Video Experience, LOVE, in New York. They made this big purple dinosaur out of paper mache and wheeled it through the streets to the Museum of Natural History, to force them to hire feminists and include a non-patriarchal view of history. That shows an action that’s very funny and is interesting to me.
Why did you want to focus on the history of fringe groups, like the purple paper mache dinosaur groups, instead of the major groups that had more of an impact?
What has an impact is what’s written in history. The histories that we see are those of “great leaders” instead of the small groups of individuals, doing stuff at a moment when lots of small groups are doing lots of work at the same time. We had this opportunity and we wanted to tell these radical histories that hadn’t been told.
So the show is kind of overwhelming in the amount of material it includes, how did you decide what to put in?
We wanted material that came from a grassroots groups, not put out by a big NGO or the government. Another thing is that the show opened during the election of 2008 and it does not contain any electoral politics. We were trying to show all these ways people have been engaged throughout history that doesn’t revolve around elections.
Did any of the documents you found surprise you or make you become a little scared or disgusted with the groups you looked at?
In the women’s liberation section, there’s that one poster…
The one about abortion that says “Fuck the Fetus”?
Yeah, that one was very surprising. The debate around issues of choice has become in way so much more conservative than it once was that I was like, whoa. A lot of people really like that poster because it’s so shocking. •