Nicolas Lampert Interview

Nicolas Lampert presented at Creating Justice in 2014. This was shortly after the publication of his books, A People’s Art History of the United States. In October 2017, Nicolas Lampert spoke to Mohamed Mehdi at his studio at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Prints Nicolas had made for the recent campaigns of Voces de la Frontera were hanging along with older prints in the studio. Our conversation focused on some of the chapters from his book, and what the historical examples they contain can teach organizers today. We spoke about learning history as a way of developing tactics for political organizing, and the need for a variety of tactics to be understood and deployed for us to achieve meaningful change. In speaking about these historical cases and about his own experience, we returned often to the question of what it means for an artist to be an ally to a movement.

Mohamed Mehdi: There is an aspect of your work that we see in your book A People's Art History of the United States and also in other projects and prints, which is the celebration of movements from history. There's a print that with an image of a panther that says “Learn Black Panther Party History” and another one that says “Learn About Labor History,” and you have prints of socialist and anarchist leaders of the early twentieth century and more recent leaders like Grace Lee Boggs. There is a project commemorating the Commandos in Milwaukee, the NAACP youth wing in the sixties.

These movements have been marginalized in the popular telling of American history, sometimes totally forgotten or misrepresented in terms of what they stood for, can you speak about the importance that you see in calling attention to some of these movements from the past in your work? 

Nicolas Lampert: I think it's important for activists today to be knowledgeable about past movements, to study what worked and what didn't. It is important to pay tribute to the courage that these people had and what they stood for. When I try to describe what I do, what my practice is, it's not rooted in a discipline, in art or art history, it’s rooted in social justice and activism and so these are the people to study and to look up to. My primary visual language is print making and artists can visualize these histories tointroduce them to a larger audience. You mentioned the Commandos history. We did a series of murals that's now rooted in the Harambee neighborhood in Milwaukee where a lot of this organizing happened. The murals are without text, they’re an invitation for people to say, “Who are these people, what did they do and why is it relevant today?” And a lot of this also came out my network of the Just Seeds artists.

Josh MacPhee curated the Celebrate People’s History poster series that many of us got our start with, really designing for that, trying to figure out how to visualize and celebrate people’s history as a key part of our visual language.

MM: When you're saying to people, “learn about” this movement, what they did including their mistakes, as an artist do you see your relationship to those movements primarily in terms of honoring them and inspiring others based on that example, or is it as someone saying that we need to learn more about this, the good and the bad? Is there a tension between those goals? 

NL: Well I mean when I was younger it was fascinating to learn about these histories and these people because it wasn’t what I was taught growing up. It wasn’t in my high school textbooks, I wasn’t even taught about these histories in college. It was being exposed to presses like AK Press and a lot of the anarchist presses. I was introduced to Howard Zinn's work and Noam Chomsky and others. Of course it was all there, you just had to find it. All of this scholarship opened up a whole new door for me to learn labor history, to learn the history of struggle and organizing, but today I teach those histories as a tool, to understand the tactics of how to organize. The book I wrote, A People's Art History of the United States is a collection of histories, but it is also a collection of tactics, and I think the best compliment I ever get for my book is when people say, “that chapter that I read, it really spoke to me and we've used a certain art tactic in today’s movement.” Some of us started an art affinity group in Milwaukee that was directly influenced by Gran Fury and the AIDS activist movement, ACT UP. Each chapter I wrote in the People’s Art History book I wound up doing three to five thousand pages of research and digging through numerous archives and, you know, you don't see that in a fifteen page essay, but reading all the interviews with Gran Fury members I was just struck. I mean there's certain things that were different in their struggle, but I was also struck by the similar conversations that I have with artists and organizers. Gran Fury started an art affinity group within a movement that had the autonomy and the trust of the movement to do what they wanted and I think that's just a really powerful structure that every grassroots group should have. And so we've been trying to mimic Gran Fury art affinity group structure in Milwaukee. That's one example of how studying the historical past becomes so relevant to today.

MM: I was really interested also in the way that you phrase it so directly in some of your prints, “learn about such and such,” you give an imperative to the viewer that they should take the initiative to learn this. Is that formulation something you drew from somewhere or was it just the most direct way that you could say it?

NL: I have a series of prints that basically says learn about such and such history. It started it with The Black Panther poster and it started because there was a show in Chicago that I believe the Co-Prosperity folks organized. They wanted artists to do riffs on WPA posters‍ ‍(Works Progress Administration), and I remember looking through a book of WPA posters and seeing a Brookfield Zoo poster, in the Chicago area, that had a panther in it – one that looked nearly exactly like the Black Panther Party logo. So, I change the text of the poster to one that encouraged others to learn about the history of the Black Panther Party. It seemed like the obvious thing to do the second I saw the original image. And the thing about these histories is they’re complicated. The text “learn about it” is an invitation to learn about the positives and the negatives of these histories. It asserts that there is power in being informed. It's also an invitation to people of all political backgrounds to study this without me framing it right away in the image. The “learn about” text is a narrative device to bring people in. 

MM: A People’s Art History of the United States is an unusual art history book in a lot of different ways. It’s a history book that focuses on these key moments, events and actors and looks at the role that art played in those movements in those moments. And looking at a variety of different kinds of art, not just visual art but also performance, and things that don’t even exist now, like the moving panorama. But you’re not looking at art in general, you're looking specifically at art as it's used in political movements. So the title could be read in different ways. It could be read as “A People's History of Art” or it could be read as “A History of People's Art”. And because it's an unusual type of approach to writing about art, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the impetus behind this work, what led you to do it.

NL: The book specifically looks at movement culture. It looks at the art that's produced by people's struggles and people's movements. I could have written an entire book that looked at the art world's response to social movements. Obviously there’s a deep history of that, if you think of the Vietnam War era, but I wanted to look outside the art world and I wanted to look at the culture that everyday people create inside these movements and when artists join movements or when artists are in solidarity with them. I didn't see a book that put all those histories into one that was accessible to general audience. In the early 2000s I started writing essays and conducting interviews. I worked as a co-editor for a book called Peace Signs: the Anti-war Movement Illustrated that looked at the graphics in the global protest against the Iraq War. At that time, I had just started my college teaching career and as a very young ambitious teacher I tried to go one hundred and ten percent for the students. I assigned Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States as a textbook with the idea that the students would read his book and I would discuss the art that was created during the various time periods. And on a whim I emailed Howard Zinn and asked him if he would come and speak to my class in Milwaukee. I knew that he was speaking often in Madison for at that time in his life he was a columnist for The Progressive. I figured that he was probably flying out of Milwaukee when he traveled to Madison. So, I sent out the invitation and he responded by saying, “I'll be in Wisconsin in two months, I'd love to come to your class.” He said the only hitch is “you have to pick me up in Madison and drive me to Milwaukee and get me to the airport after I give a talk.” And so I picked him up in Madison and we drove the hour and a half drive to Milwaukee. Throughout the drive he didn't want to talk about himself. He wanted to hear about my life and what my interests were and immediately the conversation turned to art. And he told me that his wife was an artist and he was fascinated by the role that arts played in movements, so I started explaining the history of what artists were doing now in the anti-war movement and the research that I'd done about photographers in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). He was of course involved in SNCC and he said, “Well, tell you what I'm the editor of a new book series for The New Press. It's spin-off books on my People's History. Why don’t you send me a two-page proposal and I’ll pass it on to the editor.” I emailed it to him and two months later I was asked by The New Press to write the book. So the whole origin of this book came out of an opportunity that Howard Zinn gifted. And, you know, I certainly wouldn't let down one of my heroes so my primary focus for ten years was researching and writing the book. My main editor was from the New Press, but from time to time I’d send drafts to Howard Zinn and get his feedback. In the early research process of this book I quickly concluded that I really wanted to focus on artists outside of the art world, artists that were part of movements. I also made an early decision on the prose. I teach at a working class university. It was really important to me thatI did not write towards a PhD crowd, or even a reader who had taken an art history class or had read an art history book before. I wrote with the assumption that students won’t know these histories. Ask a student today if they know about SNCC and you’ll likely get blank stares. So, part of my role wasinforming a general audience of these histories. The other role was to inform the reader why art and why artists were so important to the tactics of these movements. But the book itself all comes back to Howard Zinn, his influence, and the opportunity that he granted me. 

MM: But I guess you deserve some of the credit in the sense that you reached out to someone who was a hero of yours and said, “Why don't you come talk to my class?” without knowing whether he’d accept or not. You found that he gave you this opportunity but I think the first step of reaching out to people who you look up to is also an important part of it. 

NL: I mean it's a good life lesson to try to collaborate with those you admire and you share a common interest with. You're always disappointed when you meet someone you admire and they don't live up to your expectations, but that was not the case with Professor Zinn. He was such an incredible person. Years later I was on a panel with his son Jeff Zinn, who’s a playwright, and I told him that story, thinking that his son would be impressed by it. And he's like, “Nicolas I don’t want to burst your bubble but my dad was trying to get everyone to do people’s history.” He said his father wanted as many people as possible to focus their specific discipline towards working for justice. That was part of his legacy. 

MM: You mentioned this one main focus of yours which was looking at movement art as opposed to the art world response to politics and activism, but even within that focus there must have been difficult decisions in terms of what to include and what to leave out. How did you make some of those decisions and were there things that, let's say someone said let’s do a brand new edition, was there anything that you had to leave out the first time around that you would now want to include?

NL: It's important to note that the book is not a survey. I wanted to do case studies, and I wanted to move through history chronologically where the reader is being guided through American history. I rejected the idea of a survey because a survey tries to be all encompassing and that's impossible. You're inevitably going to miss and leave out important key struggles and key movements even in that format. So, my focus was on concrete examples and what I tried to do is - I obviously miss a lot of examples - but what I tried to do is make sure that numerous visual art mediums were represented. I could have done the entire book on photographers. Not the entire book, obviously, but from the Civil War on. But I wanted to make sure that a broad range of visual mediums were addressed. For instance there is a chapter on the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World), and I could have easily focused on graphic artists. Even Joe Hill was a graphic artist and cartoonist. But the book already had a number of chapters that focused on graphic artists and printmakers, so my choice for the IWW chapter was to select an unexpected medium – performance and reenactments – and an example were the history was exceedingly complex, where things didn't work out as expected. That chapter was on the Patterson Pageant (1913) where workers in the strike, the Patterson silk workers, who’d been on strike for over half a year, reenacted their strike as a pageant in New York City during the strike itself. It was a case where the lines of art and life were completely blurred. Striking workers as actors and actresses, and the strike transported to New York City where the performance became part of the strike itself. The goal of the pageant was to raise funds for the families that were on strike and bring more media attention to their struggle. But it backfired. The pageant lost money, it hurt morale, and the art was blamed as one of the key reasons why the strike failed. I analyze in the chapter, and the scholars that I referenced argue, that that wasn’t the case, that industry leaders were not going to cave in to the strikers demands even if the pageant had raised significant funds, especially after the Lawrence textile strike the year prior. IWW organizers like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made the case that the artists blew it, that the focus on the pageant distracted the striking workers from doing the real work of the strike. That the middle-class artists had little business being involved in a working-class struggle where the lives of recent immigrants to the US were on the line. I, and many other scholars, disagree with that statement, so I made the case that solidarity remains vital today as it did back then. We need artists to be aligned in working-class struggles if they understand their role as allies and if the tactics are solid. The Paterson Pageant becomes a fascinating example of how artists - especially those who come from positions of privilege - collaborate with these movements. The majority of artists that were part of the pageant were based in Greenwich Village in New York City. It was led by John Reed, who was a Harvard graduate, and his task was organizing striking workers to act in the pageant that he wrote. This example from 1913 relates to today and to artists, including myself, who align themselves as allies with the immigrant rights movement and with the struggle of those facing deportation. These families have much more at stake than I ever will and so the question becomes how do you best work in a movement as an ally? How do you listen? How do you step back and check yourself? How do you share your resources and your talents, but do so in a way where you’re not speaking for the movement and you're not bringing harm to the movement? So, I felt that the chapter brought up all these questions and all the conundrums of these alliances and it becomes really relevant to today’s conversation. Had I done a book that was in the survey format I would not have had the page count to go into depth on the Paterson Pageant history. It would have had maybe two paragraphs instead of a fifteen-to-twenty page essay. I needed the space to lay out the history, along with the art. The only downside of the approach was that I had to leave out other histories as I focused on others. It was difficult to leave out the Young Lords or the graphics artists of the farmworkers movement in California. So I certainly missed a lot. But those histories are out there. I kept reminding myself that. 

MM: There's a couple things that you mentioned just now with the Patterson example that I wanted to follow up on. One of them was that divide between the Greenwich Village artists and the local workers in the textile industry. In the book you suggest that this divide between the bohemian artists and the working class people is a divide that is equally strong today. Are there ways in which that relationship is different now than it was a hundred years ago, because the nature of the working class has changed so much in the U.S. and also because art is something which has, because of digital media and all sorts of other ways, become a more organic part of people's everyday lives?

NL: Historical examples need to be seen in their context. The proximity of New York City to Patterson, New Jersey put those labor organizers in close proximity with the artists in Greenwich Village. Keep in mind also that the IWW organizers were also outsiders to Patterson. They were brought in mostly from the West, people like Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. They were brought in because of their organizing skills and the successes that the IWW had the year prior in Lawrence. Emma Goldman and the Mother Earth publication was also in Greenwich Village at the time and that also introduced artists to activists, along with gatherings hosted by Mabel Dodge. Artists today, and I’m generalizing, lean towards radical politics. But, not as many artists will be as quick to identify as working class, or even as workers. Most artists if you look at their income levels are working class poor, even if they come from middle class backgrounds. Yet, many of these same people don't identify as working-class people. That is a problem. One that reflects the reduced role that unions play not just in the workforce, but in our culture. Union membership is at a seventy-year low, much to the detriment of our society and our democracy. Ask visual artists today if they could ever imagine being unionized. Most would say they couldn’t. One of the key chapters in my book looks at the 1930’s when artists were organized in unions – the Artist’s Union - and when artists did work in solidarity with other union movements and truly identified themselves as organized labor. There werepositives and negatives to this, but it really forged class solidarity and put these artists in the serviceof struggle. So in a roundabout way, I think, if you look at today, the issues I'm addressing are part of artists being allies. It's multi-faceted because it could talk about race, gender and sexuality issues. How does an artist who is white support Black Lives Matter, or how does an artist who is a citizensupport the undocumented and the immigrant rights movement? To me it's all about understanding how to be an ally and how to listen, how to step back. I teach a class right now called “Multicultural America: Art” and the whole focus of the class is to raise the voices of color, artists of color, authors of color, students of color. I told students from day one in a very diverse class that the students of color lead, the rest of us listen, and I think that's a good mindset to go in with whether it is that class or if you’re an artist in a movement. In academia most visual artists get steered towards the art world where the vast majority will never make it. That is just reality. Most visual artists will not make a living, probably never get teaching jobs considering the supply and demand numbers in academia and the abysmal labor conditions in higher education. The design programs steer much of their students to the corporate world, so we're limiting the potential of art for struggle and art for radical change and revolution. We need to change that script. We need more artists to want to dedicate their time and energy to movements and we need more movements to commit themselves to artists. This includes movements finding ways to pay artists and to employ them.

The artist has to also see themselves as one cog in the larger wheel of a movement. It has to be collaborative. At times artists need to recognize that you're there for support. I got hands on experience for this going out to Standing Rock. Support was simply to bring art materials to the Art Tent, and to listen, and to do whatever the Indigenous leadership requested. This is similar to artists who work with the Immokalee Workers, artists like David Solnit who's brought a lot to that movement in terms of the art created, but the primary goal is always to listen, to take directions, and to be part of a collaborative team of many.

MM: When an artist makes that connection with movements is there already an artistic strand within the movement that you are connecting are you the artistic communicators of the work? A lot of movements seem to already have internal artistic practices.

NL: I think it is always specific to each struggle and each movement. The general answer is that these movements already have incredible artists and cultural producers within them and that certainly was the case at Standing Rock. That's the case with the struggles that Honor the Earth, is leading against the pipelines in Minnesota. It's the non-Native artists who need educating that Native artists and designers exist and have long since been working on these struggles. One should also question if a non-Native artist is the best person to design for a Native movement. They do not have the same lived experiences. That said, some movements really value artists of any-and-all backgrounds helping out and view the solidarity between Native and non-Native people as a key tactic. 

This took place in aspects of the No DAPL movement and it is taking place also in the No Back 40 campaign on the Michigan-Wisconsin border that's being led by the Menominee. This movement has not garnered national, so everyone who takes part helps to amplify public knowledge. Also, the Menominee Nation has made it clear to non-Native people that they are welcome to support the movement as allies. Community outreach leaders from the Menominee came to Milwaukee, Madison, and other cities and said they needed people to help with the struggle. They reached out to artists and said we need art. The Menominee chose the slogans that they wanted designs for but the feedback I got was that many were appreciative that those from afar were helping out and sending in graphics.

In Milwaukee, myself and a number of my closest collaborators, dedicate a lot of our time to working with Voces de la Frontera and have so for the last decade. Voces is the key immigrant rights group in Milwaukee with nine chapters across the state. The Milwaukee office has a staff of around a dozen people and they are working around the clock on organizing, raising funds to keep the struggles together, helping people who are facing deportation, running citizenship classes, organizing marches, and responding to issues at a moment's notice. That group really values the fact that artists and designers in the city are volunteering their time to help out considering how busy they are with other facets of their work. They value that artists can design the banners, the fliers, and provide other visuals for the movement.

We should never loose site that artists and designers have important skills to offer, skills that some do not have. Not everyone knows how to screenprint for example. Not everyone can quickly shoot and edit a video. As artists we take our direction from the Voces staff. We have a point person in Voces who says “this is what we need, these are the phrases we really want to amplify, these are the type of images…” We run every draft by them, but we have a lot of autonomy because they trust us now. Now we have a greater understanding of what is needed - not as well as the staff does - but since we've been involved for many years, we know what types of images and styles that tend to resonate with Voces and with the community. Now we have an art affinity group within Voces that has over forty artists. A large percent of the group is Latinx artists and part of the tactics right now, or at least my organizing approach, is to make sure that many artistic voices within the group are amplified. In today’s climate there is no shortage of places for artists to get involved, but they need to do so in a way that's smart and well thought out. And that's where history is an important resource to study and to learn from.

MM: Let’s take a couple of other examples from the book of these complicated histories, and you can draw out some of the lessons as you did with the Patterson case. One is the Crow photographer Richard Throssel whose approach you contrast with that of Edward S. Curtis who worked around the same period. You critique Curtis’ representation of Native life, but you also said that in some ways Throssel embraced or encouraged assimilation and criticized traditional ways of life because they might be unhygienic or might lead to other kinds of problems. Another is the case of Henry Box Brown, an enslaved person who mailed himself to freedom in a box, and then used his platform to advocate for abolition. Some people saw his presentations as sensationalist, and he had a rupture with the abolitionist movement in England. Third, Jacob Riis, a photographer for the tenement rights movement ,where you suggest an exploitative relationship with the subjects of his photographs, with these nighttime surprise shoots, flashes going off in people's eyes. Those were all cases of work that has had an impact on future artists and on the causes that they were connected with. And there are very complicated ways in which their work was judged even at the time. It's not even just with hindsight, even at the time people raised these critiques of the work.

NL: The word complicated is key because all these histories are complicated, and that's what makes them fascinating. They're fascinating because you can see, in the case of Riis, two sides of the coin. He did bring a lot of good to a movement. He helped reform abysmal tenant housing conditions. But his tactics were also extremely problematic and that's what makes these histories really important to study. The key is the power dynamics at play – the power dynamics between the artist and the subject. In the case of Jacob Riis, he took photographs of the poor living in crowded and dilapidated tenant housing buildings in New York City. But, he never showed his subjects in positions of power. They were always shown as powerless. Their voice was never amplified. He always took the photographs and framed them around his opinions of what he thought these people needed and he never, for instance, handed the camera over to them and said “What would you photograph?” And that was also akin to the chapter I wrote looking at the photography of the early reservation period. Edward S. Curtis pretty much created the indelible record of that period and Edward S. Curtis refused to show any images that showed native people as happy, content, or as people who are struggling with the forced acculturation and the industrialization of the west. You see no signs of that. No signs of modernization. Basically Curtis showed what he wished to see, which was Native communities untouched by white society. And Richard Throssel – a Cree photographer - becomes really complicated because he presented very similar photographic record in a series that he sold largely to a white audience. He also realized that these were the types of photographs that sold. All artists to a certain extent are shaped by the market pressures that they live by. Throssel took the photographs that he thought the public would want to see, but he also worked for Indian Health Services and took photographs that encouraged Native people to acculturate, to live in essentially European American style houses, to reject Native customs and ceremonies. And of course the great irony of this was he working in concert with colonization. I make the case that he’s also working for survival, that he was looking at health issues, that he was trying to help his community the best way that he could, the best way that he thought he could. He later became a politician in Montana and fought to organize to help Native communities and get more resources. He fought against the big mining interests, so he definitely worked in the realm of an activist. But I think his tactics and his works are open to critique as well. But we have to really understand the time period that he lived in and what he was up against. 

I think the encouraging sign today is not necessarily the work of individual artists, but the work of art collectives and artists working in communities, and artists who create platforms that amplify the voices of many. I find the most interesting contemporary art projects are those that allow the platform for others to speak. I like when artists do work that is bigger than themselves. When the individual artist becomes less pronounced. Projects by Hank Willis Thomas and Swoon come to mind. I admire their individual work, but I am much more interested in their collective work. Hank Willis Thomas is part of the Question Bridge project where he and the organizers simply provide a platform for African-American men of multiple generations ask and answer questions through video interviews. Question Bridge has been shown all over the country in places where you don’t expect to see contemporary art – in high school auditoriums, in community centers. The work Swoon did in Haiti with the Konbit Shelter Project is equally transformation. She used herresources and her network to rebuild a community center with sustainable architecture. That is impressive and is arguably her greatest work. 

Both of these projects were collective and they reject the lone individual artist narrative. We live in such a capitalistic and individualist society that many artists get so sidetracked that they think what matters is their name and how they market themselves and the opportunities they get for themselves. I think we have to think much more of the collective. How do we empower communities, how do we empower struggle, how do we empower movements, how do we prioritize and reach out in solidarity with those hardest hit in our society like the undocumented, the incarcerated? That's what inspires me. I just finished reading Brian Stevenson's book Just Mercy. He inspires me, that work inspires me, and I think artists could take a lesson from that: how do you empower others. It’s a roundabout answer from talking about Riis or Throssel but I think where they fell short, especially in the case of Riis, is that he didn't ask his subjects on how they wished to be portrayed. He didn't provide a platform to allow people to be portrayed as they wanted to be. 

MM: When you suggest that artists put themselves at the service of the community or of a movement and ask, “what do you need” and respond on that basis, what do you make of someone like Henry Box Brown who really did split from the movement and promoted himself and his experience maybe at the expense of others? You could compare him to one of the art stars who wants to make a name for himself, wants to make a lot of money, but you’re sympathetic towards him in the book.

NL: Well again it's such a specific case: Henry Box Brown was enslaved. He was famous for mailing himself to freedom, he mailed himself in a small box that no one ever thought a human could fit into from Richmond to Philadelphia. When he got to the North he found himself at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Act which meant he could be apprehended and sent back to the South so he escaped to England. There he toured a theatrical show about the horrors of slavery around the British Isles - a moving panorama which was essentially a movie, paintings on large canvas rolls that scrolled in front of the audience that he narrated. He was controversial for different reasons than I mentioned for Riis and Throssel. He was controversial because the abolitionist community thought that the way you presented the abolition struggle was in a straightforward lecture or presentation. There were also power dynamics at play. A lot of the white abolitionists wanted to be the spokespeople and leaders of the abolitionist movement and when you read, when you study the writings of Frederick Douglass, he made the same critique. He grew incredibly frustrated with those in the abolitionist movement, white allies, that they were trying to control the narrative and the movement and Frederick Douglass wanted to speak from his own platform. Henry Box Brown had the same concerns. He wanted to be the narrator for he knew it best. He also wanted to support himself financially while speaking out against the institution of slavery. But he was also an artist. He wanted to speak out it in a theatrical way and the abolitionist movement was more conservative in their approach. They preferred a lecture, not a theatrical performance. However, the greatest critique of him was lobbied at his character. He was purported to be a womanizer, someone who abused substances. People criticized him for allowing the fame to get to his head. He did a panorama that glorified Britain's occupation ofIndia which completely contradicted his commitment to social justice. He also seemed to forget about his family in the US and their whereabouts, so there's a lot of questions lobbied at his character and that he was in it for himself: that he was profiting off the movement. I would argue that his theatrical performances helped bring the anti-slavery message to a larger audience. It was a question of which medium to use. This is not unlike today when a Hollywood film adapts a civil rights movement story.Sometimes a director does the history justice, other times they don’t. I am actually surprised Hollywood has not made a film about Henry Box Brown, especially his story in the British Isles. Henry Box Brown felt that he could reach a larger audience through theatrical performances. He also wanted to chart his own path on his own terms. Artists are always struggling with issues of autonomy and artists want to have artistic license. He was also needed to economically survive. The abolitionist community was not providing enough income to support many of those on the lecture circuit and he wanted to make a living speaking out for what he believed, and all the power to him for making that decision.

MM: Speaking of artistic autonomy, in some ways that gets challenged by putting yourself at the service of a movement, subsuming your own interest to that of this cause or this movement that you're working with, and it made me think about the chapter on W.E.B. Dubois and the anti-lynching movement. Some of the writers of his time like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay you said reacted to Dubois by saying that you're asking us to create propaganda and as artists we don't want to be depicting what we think people should see depicted for some political purpose, we want to depict what our art drives us to depict based on what we experience and see. The term “propaganda” always has a negative connotation. But do you have a more complicated view of what propaganda means in relation to political art?

NL: Well I’d actually like to backtrack and bring up what you brought up about Dubois’ work. Because I think again the point of a People’s Art History of the United States book is the larger questions that are raised from each chapter for how they speak to issues today. It is a history of tactics. We know that it is the multiplicity of tactics and the multiplicity of voices that win struggles. There's no one way of doing things. The civil rights movement had a nonviolent wing, a less radical wing and a very radical wing. It was the combination of all the tactics that made the difference. The suffrage movement had a radical wing and a very cautious wing and they were always at odds against each other. They always criticized each other's tactics, but it was the combination of tactics that worked and that's what we need today. Dubois was one of the great organizers of his time. He was the editor of The Crisis for a quarter of a century, he was an author and a cultural produce. He was also one of the great patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet he was also widely criticized by the same artists and authors that he supported. Dubois was criticized, and should be criticized, for promoting what he considered was the talented tenth: the African-American doctors, college graduates, what he said were the best and brightest. It was an elitist viewpoint, but one that was also tactical to combat white racism. Dubois did not want the public to see images of African-American debauchery or decadence for he felt that would give more ammunition for white America. His logic was don't feed into the stereotypes that they already have about us, and the artists and authors were against that. To them it was censorship. Many of the Harlem Renaissance artists and writers wanted to write and depict what they saw in everyday life. The good and the bad. So, I agree with the artists that Dubois was too rigid. But he felt that being rigid, or being disciplined, was needed. He was waging an all-out campaign against lynching in The Crisis, he was confronting racist laws and a racist system, so it was a question of tactics. Some of the artists were offended by his stance because they also felt that their tactics were equally effective in combating racism. But DuBois felt that artists weren’t harnessing their power for the struggle and were too individualistic in their approach, and you see that today. But you can also see how the artists and authors were also effective, so again it was the multiplicity of approaches that worked. 

MM: Looking at some of these tactics closer to the present time, you write about creating culture and art and the role that it plays in creating culture that represents what the change is we’re looking forward to. Like with the Black Panther Party, for example, and Emory Douglas. Some of his work tried to create images that may not reflect current reality of his time, but that reflects reality as he imagined it should be. So it helps to create a cultural grounding for the work that is to be done, it shifts our understanding of who we are and who we should be. And I am curious what you think about how the role of images in accomplishing that may be different now. What do you think is the effect of the ubiquity of images on the ability of an artist to make that type of impact with a particular vision? 

NL: I think it has a lot to do with your audience and how you disseminate images. There are multiple venues for images today and I think social media is changing the way artists design. A lot of artists are designing to reach people with extremely short attention spans or to get a message out that will be seen at the speed of light, basically, when people are scrolling through their social media feed. I even know artists who are saying they design their graphics hoping that people adopt it as their profile picture in social media and that's something that John Heartfield wasn’t thinking about he was doing his graphic campaign in the 1930s. So I think artists need to be smart about how they disseminate their work and there's multiple ways. I don't necessarily think it dilutes it. I mean obviously it's a deeper conversation about how we are inundated with images and technology and how that impacts us. Right now I would make the case that the Trump administration is trying to inundate us with a perpetual crisis, that they are bombarding us with one crisis after another, so that society’s overwhelmed and we can't organize and fight back effectively. I would also make the case that the decimation of the labor movement over the last forty years has played a great role in that. Regarding Emory Douglas, we can’t consider his work without considering the fact that it was in service to the Black Panther Party. When I look at all the artists I wrote about in the book, one that spans over 250 years, the one truly revolutionary artist that stands out is Douglas. As a revolutionary artist he put his art in the service of revolution. He was a Black Panther Party artist. He was a key member of the leadership of that party and his art was in service to the politics. I traced in the chapter how his art changed as the politics of the party changed. His art changed to really focus on the community support programs when the politics changed. But there's very few artists that join revolutionary organizations the way that Douglas did and put their art in service to them and so we can’t understand his art without understanding the politics and the history of the Black Panther Party at that time. It's even odd to see his art now in museums now. The work is still radical and revolutionary, but the focus for many viewers today is likely on the images themselves which removes it from the time period, the politics and the struggle of why the art was first created. The majority of his images were created for the publication The Black Panther Paper so we also have to understand his art as part of the Black Panther Party journalism and media campaign. Douglas still fights to this very moment. Much of his art is aligned with the Zapatistas. He works is solidarity with the Zapatistas. And it make sense. They were, they are, an armed struggle and the alliances and similarities are so obvious, but very few artists dedicate themselves in such a politically intense way as Douglas does. Very few artists commit themselves to revolutionary thinking and action. Think about the sacrifices most artists make and then look at that the sacrifices he made. He risked being killed, imprisoned, or seeking exile as most Panther leaders did. A lot of the Panthers leaders were killed by the government, by the police, by COINTELPRO. But that same system couldn't stop the culture as easily, and that's one lesson that Douglas teaches us. I also make the case that a lot of these images advocated for what the Panthers wished to see in the black community, that the Panthers wished to see the community be far more revolutionary and radical than they actually were. The Panthers were akin to other revolutionary movements taking place in the world - in Central America and Africa and Southeast Asia. They were trying to advocate that the black community adopt similar revolutionary tactics. Yet they were so much more radical than those around them, and Douglas was trying to visualize what a revolutionary urban black community would look like. A lot of the images were fictitious. They were showing the community in armed struggle where it was really a small number of the community, the Black Panthers, who were. I tried to make the case, is this real or imagined violence? In truth it was both. Some of the Panthers fought gun battles with the police much to their detriment because it led to their death, jail sentences, or having to exile the country, but at the same time who am I to critique Emory Douglas and the Black Panthers? Those are the tactics they felt they needed. They were responding to their time and place. It's easy to look back in hindsight to make a critique, but how did they know what was going to work and not work at the moment? They felt that that was a necessary tactic. They were also responding to the shortcomings of the mainstream civil rights movement and the lack of real change in the US. That was for me a really difficult chapter to write because it wasn't my place to outright critique what the Panthers felt needed to happen. And that goes back to what you said at the start of this interview about you highlighting that image that simply says Learn about Black Panther Party History. Learn about different viewpoints. 

MM: You've talked about your work with the Just Seeds Artists Cooperative and other organizations as a print maker. Can you tell us about Just Seeds as an organization, how it came about, and the importance of printmaking as a political artistic practice? 

NL: Well Just Seeds was formed by Josh MacPhee in Chicago in the mid 1990s, and this is pre-internet. It was basically a mail order catalog where he wanted to disseminate his art and the art of his friends through a larger network. He want to get social justice prints out to a larger audience. He also wanted to distribute the series that he curated, “Celebrate People’s History” but at the same time he was forming a network. So when Josh decided to turn it into a collective which happened in the mid 2000s he invited like-minded artists that he had come to know across the country and he invited us all to turn his project into a worker-run print cooperative. We now have thirty artists and we’re a decentralized print cooperative with artists all over North America, including Mexico and Canada. By being decentralized it allows us to really focus in on the regions of North America that we live in, but it also allows us to come together. Just Seeds has multiple platforms that we’re working on. First and foremost, people see us through the web, through our site, and they see the prints we put up and they see a blog on activist art. About once a year we do a large group project – often a print portfolio - where we essentially put ourselves in service to a movement. We have done past portfolio project on the prison abolitionist movement with Critical Resistance, we've done a number of projects with Veterans Against the War, largely due to our collaboration with Aaron Hughes. Now Aaron Hughes is part of Just Seeds. We’re doing a new print project for the Poor People's Campaign that will be released in early 2018. So Just Seeds is complicated in that manner, it threads the line of a lot of what we're talking about in this interview, it really honors the individual, yet we do a lot of projects that are in service of movements. For instance, there's no collective voice of Just Seeds. We've been asked before, will Just Seeds make a statement on this, or will Just Seeds sign a statement and stand behind this, or what does Just Seeds think about this, and our answer is always, “ask each individual.” It came to a head once when Favianna Rodriguez made a print celebrating Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court. She was celebrating that the Supreme Court nominee was Latina and this was, to many Latinos, extremely prideful to have a Latina woman as a Supreme Court justice. And some people criticized Just Seeds, saying, we thought you were anarchists, why are you celebrating this?And our response was, we don’t all think alike. We’re not all anarchists. There's no collective voice on this issue, ask Favi about her image. At the same time, I thought we should also be supportive ofFavi and her right to post any image of her choice. As a collective we should support one another.

In truth, Just Seeds is not a collective, it is a cooperative – it is a cooperative of different artists andthe many networks that they work with. I think a good example of this is Chip Thomas. He organizes the Painted Desert Project on the Navajo Nation where he lives. He's part of a global street art network so he introduces his network to the Just Seeds network and vice versa. It is a case where the cooperative is a sum of all its parts and all the individual interests of its members. I think Just Seeds keeps on evolving but I think its history is really defined and written by what each of the thirty members are doing and I think it's a really interesting example of how a decentralized group of artists can operate. But it comes with a lot of inherent problems. We barely get a chance to all see each other so that can make some feel disconnected. Or when we did meet up it was in the context of long meetings on how to run a collective that really seemed to drain the energy of the group. And now when we do meet up, we do creative projects, things that we really enjoy, so that seemed to solve that issue, while likely creating others. Just Seeds also lacked diversity when it began. Josh immediately brought in fifteen people, many of whom were white artists. Now Just Seeds is more diverse, but it still has a long way to go. This is key because it underlies who feels welcome and who doesn’t. It just reinstates that collective work is difficult and ensuring the health of the cooperative is not easy. I think Just Seeds is in a pretty good place now and will be because it is important to many of the people in it. Also, we know that the work is important to our audience. The public persona of Just Seeds simply sees all these images coming out every other day. I keep reminding myself that we inspire people with our art. We amplify messages and that's why many of us gravitated to printmaking because of the way it's disseminated and how cost effective it is. We sell most of our prints for twenty to thirty dollars because we want to make our art affordable to working class people.And the medium itself has such a long history of being utilized for social justice and for organizing. 

MM: The material process of print making as you mentioned has these benefits in terms of distribution and cost. Because of these benefits it has been a part of political movements for a really long time. So when you inherit and you build on that material history does that also bring with it a kind of aesthetic history that's part of the work when you’re doing printmaking?

NL: Most definitely. The Tallerde Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art, TGP) in Mexico City has definitely influenced many in the group. Music has too. A lot of the artists in Just Seeds also came out of the DIY punk rock community, which really has the ethics of you do everything yourself, you organize, you tie your work to political struggles, you start your own cooperatives. A lot of us also have other jobs, barely any of us live as full-time artists, Chip Thomasis a doctor, Alec Dunn is a nurse, Bec Young is becoming a speech therapist. A number of us are teachers and so our first love, for many of us, is art, and it's great that we found each other and we have this network.

We amplify other artists and their voice on our platform, but many of us in the cooperative over extend ourselves with work and other projects. Many of us work on local campaigns in our cities, our home communities, and that's where the blog becomes so important. Much of what I do now is art builds, organize art builds, specifically for teachers' unions, or for Voces that’ll have four or five hundred people participating and it doesn't matter to me if even one of my images is used in it or not. In many cases I’m organizing the production of other peoples’ images. But I know those art builds have tremendous power and use for movements. And another example of local work is Shaun Slifer who helps run the Just Seeds store in Pittsburgh, but he also helped create a mining museum in West Virginia about the miners’ struggle, which is just one of the most incredible museums that exists anywhere in the world. That is the kind of the spirit that comes out of the cooperative. People are just fearless and do thesereally interesting projects, many of which you don't see when you just look at the prints. Just recently Thea Gahr and Chip Thomas were on the US Mexico border where they ran a printmaking workshop where people were handing prints back and forth between the border wall. There's a photo of a hand reaching through the border wall from the Mexican side passing over a print. To me that's what it's all about. It’s not just about the art that the artists make,but it's about the people behind it and what drives them to create this work. 

MM: Looking at some of the powerful prints you’ve created, it's almost like a compass in some ways. It provides you with the support for your values, for what you care about, and they can feed your political imagination with an image or a simple text. And there is also this level of playfulness that I want to end by having you say something about. For example, you use these American symbols like the milk carton with the missing notice to talk about you the missing people from communities who have been incarcerated, or the no smoking campaign to talk about coal generated power, the customs agent symbol with the Imagine No Borders text. Can you say something about the role of playfulness and humor in this kind of work?

NL: These are serious issues - life and death struggles – so you need to invite your audience into the conversation. Use recognizable symbols. Some of the prints have elements of humor. Graphics also have their own history, their own trajectory. I have made some designs that I had thought were going to be really powerful and useful to a struggle or a movement and the graphics never went anywhere.Just duds. And then other graphics just take off whether this is by happenstance, timing, or how others promote the image is hard to say. So over time one starts to reflect on which graphics work and which graphics do not. I tend to think the graphics that are positive make the greatest impact, the ones that people want to see, the ones that speak of affirmation, that speak of struggle and dignity. A lot of people for instance don't want to see an image of the horrors of war on their wall. Instead they want to see an image that celebrates a victory, or an image that speaks to their values. Images that are uplifting. I also noticed that the images that showcase people and celebrate people tend to be the ones that really resonate with our audience. And that has an influence on how one designs because you want to reach an audience and you want your work to be impactful. So, I think a lot of us in the group are conscious of this and our work starts to become influenced by our audience. That said, you never know who will see it and how it will impact them. You only hope that it is a positive force for change.

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