the streets, we’re inundated with an endless barrage of brightly colored advertisements, street signs, and commercial window displays that evolve and change daily. So much of what we see are directives of some kind. “Buy this!” or “Be this!” Living in this ever transforming and saturated visual landscape, how do we understand the past of the spaces we move through? Where do we learn history? Physical spaces where important events happen are abandoned, bought, sold, torn down, or made into monolithic historical monuments. The creation of these monuments, whether statues of guys on horses or the preserved homes of Founding Fathers, is intended to acknowledge history, but more often than not it ensures that history is ossified. It becomes lifeless, a thing of the past.
CPH posters on the streets of Brooklyn.
Street art can be something else altogether, by navigating the narrow space between the pillars of past monuments and present advertisements. The CPH project has clarified for me a series of questions about history and public space: Can our streets become active galleries of ideas and information we can use to understand who we are and where we come from? Can these galleries evolve and change, instead of calcifying, fading, and cracking, and make room for new ideas, images, and conversations? Since that first night in Chicago, CPH posters have been pasted up in Philadelphia, Nashville, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Portland, and in over a dozen other cities. Each time they go up, I receive emails from people wanting to know more. Our streets can be a venue for asking these questions, and the CPH posters can play a role in answering them.
At the same time that my friend Liz was helping me develop this project, she was studying to become a teacher. She told me about the serious lack of radical political materials for educators. Indeed, soon after the first posters were printed, teachers began coming to me to ask for posters for their classrooms. The reasons they are interested in the posters generally fall into two categories: “I need these in my classroom as direct teaching tools,” or “I want to hang these in my class in order to piss off my principal.” The former seems the more important of the two, but I have to admit I also love the latter. There are clearly ideological battles that need to happen in schools, and it’s nice to know that the posters play a role in those struggles.
It’s been great to see the posters become part of curriculums, and to see lessons built around them. I’ve gone into many schools and presented CPH as a kick-start for kids to make their own posters. Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) has had high school students make posters as part of a printmaking class, with amazing results. Several undergraduate color theory classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) have used the CPH posters for exploring the uses of duo-tones and controlled color usage in design work.
CPH posters in use at the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago.
When giving a talk about the poster series a couple years back, I was approached by a graduate school student in training to become a teacher. It turned out that she was first introduced to the posters when they hung in one of her grade school classrooms, almost a decade earlier. She had encountered them throughout her life, and now she intends to use them in her future classes. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives told in schools, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.
To initially fund this project, I saved up money from my day job to pay for printing. Offset printing is relatively inexpensive—about two thousand posters can be printed for six hundred dollars. Over ten years into the project, I’ve been able to sell thousands of posters, so now they more or less pay for themselves. The idea has always been to make the posters inexpensive and accessible to most people: they sell from two to five dollars each, and you can get them online (justseeds.org) or at one of the dozen events, conferences, festivals, and fairs that I attend every year. Today CPH posters to grace the walls of dorm rooms, apartments, community centers, classrooms, and city streets. Over sixty different designs have been printed in the past twelve years, adding up to over 150,000 total posters.
Although I’ve organized and funded these posters myself, they have always been a collective project. Almost one hundred artists have designed posters. Multiple print shops have run the presses they have been printed on.2 Dozens of people have run around at night pasting them on city electrical boxes and construction sites, and thousands have helped distribute them around the world.
Printing CPH posters at Stumptown Printers.
As individual works, these posters pay tribute to each artist, each poster subject, and to the idea of a people’s history. With the posters collected for the first time in this book, we can assess how they function in an entirely new way. It is important, for example, that as a whole they don’t simply speak to individual moments, but to broader sweeps of the past. They attest to the evolution and movement of over five hundred years of struggle for social justice, and yet speak to how much more there is to tell.
History is not simply something that has passed. It is the culmination of all that has come before us—something that is still alive, moving, evolving, and changing. It affects the way we see and interpret the present. I hope this book, and all the posters within it, will reinvigorate our collective desire not only to learn from yesterday, but to keep history alive today.
—Josh MacPhee
May 2010
The Diggers
In 1649, to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will. They defied the landlords, they defied the laws, they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs. We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow, we come to work the land in common, and to make the wasteland grow. This earth divided, we will make whole, so it can be a common treasury for all. The sin of property we do disdain, no one has the right to buy and sell the earth for private gain. We work, we eat together, we need no swords. We will not bow to masters, or pay rent to lords. We are free men, though we are poor. You diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now. From men of property, the orders came. They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers’ claim. Tear down their cottages—destroy their corn. They are dispersed—only the vision lingers on. You poor take courage. You rich take care. The earth is a common treasury for everyone to share.
ARTWORK: ERIK RUIN
The Pueblo Revolt
“One leader perhaps said to another that the man from Oke Owinge has ‘the cunning of the fox and the heart of the bear’ ... according to tradition, it was said that Popé was not arrogant but instead was always willing to learn, consider advice and to explain his decisions.”—Joe Sando, Pueblo Profiles
Po’pay was a Tewa spiritual leader
