Poster workshops, London & UK 1968-98
Active from1968 and 71, and strongly influenced by the graphic style of Atelier Populaire, Paris 68, a book about The Poster Workshop is published by Four Corners Books
Active throughout the 70s and 80’s, the Poster Film Collective collaborated with trades unions, community, women’s and international organisations creating posters to support campaigns and a series of educational posters challenging dominant views of history.
See Red Women’s Workshop 1974 – 86, established to combat the negative portrayal of women in advertising and the media, adopted a collective approach to poster production. a book about See Red is published by Four Corners Books
Democratising Print? The Field and Practices of Radical and Community Printshops in Britain 1968-98, by Jessica Baines
PhD thesis that explores the relationships between printstudios and the communities and political cultures in which they operated. The study includes printstudios in London and other cities.
Online searchable archives
The V&A searchable archive includes many examples of community and political posters from London and the UK including work from: Action Factory, Basement Community Arts Workshop, Bradford Community Printshop, Deptford Community Printshop, Docklands Community Poster Project, Interchange Community Printshop, Lenthall Road Workshop, Red Dragon, Telford Community Arts, Union Place Community Resource Centre, U-Print Collective, Walsworth and Aylesbury Community Arts Trust and artists and designers Bernadette Brittain, Brian Barnes, David King, Loraine Leeson, Martin Walker, Peter Dunn, Peter Kennard and Rick Walker.
CSPG Centre for the Study of Political Graphics
An educational and research archive that preserves documents relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change. Includes over 90,000 posters and prints.
IISH International Institute of Social History
IISH supports research into the origins and consequences of social inequality. It houses over 4,000 archives, 1 million books, 100,000 posters, 550,000 photos, and over 6 million digital objects and datasets
Poster Movements and Schools
Russian Constructivist Posters
A Russian Avant-Garde art and design movement of the early twentieth century, Constructivism embraced the productive capacities of the machine and, for a brief period, was embraced by the revolutionary communist state. In constructivist philosophy, publicly displayed mechanically produced posters were the revolutionary alternative to the privately owned, hand crafted painting. The movement profoundly influenced twentieth century art, architecture and design in the west, but during the 1930s, was suppressed in regions under Soviet domination.
Cuban Posters
The ‘Agitpop’ style associated with Cuban political and cultural graphics post 1959 presented a vibrant contrast to the school of socialist realism that dominated much official culture under Soviet influence into the 1980s. There are numerous digital of archives of Cuban posters including: Calisphere, Linsey Webster Collection, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Christies, Dulwich Gallery
With its origins in 60s social justice campaigns, political poster culture within the Chicano community has retained its vitality and commitment for over half a century.
Polish Poster School
Polish artists, working within the constrains of Soviet censorship from the end of WWII until 1991, developed a distinctive approach to poster design, that combined highly individualistic, autographic styles with a poetic synthesis of words and images. Digital archives include: The Polish Poster Gallery , Culture.Pl, Norman Rockwell Museum
As six million French workers joined a general strike May 1968 students in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris turned their printmaking department into Atelier Populaire, a poster workshop whose collective creations came to symbolise the revolt. Similar workshops formed in others cities, and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs a second Parisian workshop was established by students who had trained in the Polish school. Members of this group subsequently established the important design group Grapus.
A comprehensive book of Atelier Populaire posters Beauty is in the Street : A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising by Johan Kugelberg and Philippe Vermès is published by Four Corners Books