Celebrate People’s History Poster Series, organized and curated by Josh MacPhee, installed by Aaron Hughes and Ryan Griffis (2024). Art in these Times, Chicago. Photo Courtesy Just Seeds Collective.
Resistance is a Visual Language – workshop with Josh MacPhee
Event · Workshop
For over 200 years, working class and oppressed people have been codifying their resistance and solidarity in iconographic form. Honoré Daumier painted The Uprising in 1848, featuring a young man with a raised fist, and this simple human gesture has been reproduced in millions of variations since. In this alternative world of signs and symbols, pink triangles become powerful icons of AIDS activism, red wedges defeat white supremacy, and houses raise their fists against rent increases.
This iconography makes up a language; putting the icons in different arrangements lead to new meanings. Like written languages, the “words” and “phrases” that can be built from these graphics are practically infinite. But unlike more traditional languages, there are not a finite number of characters, with new iconography always being created.
Join Josh MacPhee in Create’s brand new Reading Room space to learn more about “resistance as a language” and use it to create political posters during this workshop, which will examine key concepts including iteration as creative engine and political graphics as enduring design
Josh MacPhee is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements in New York. He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, and co-editor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He regularly works with community, social justice organizations, and unions building agit-prop and consulting on cultural strategy.
