Mickey Mouse and George W. Bush are on a five-year tour around the country. But it's a different interpretation of the American figures than you're familiar with.

They are only a few of the subjects displayed in the thought-provoking, "Drawing Resistance," a traveling political art show at Moxie's Café and Gallery. The collection will be on display through April 24.

The 31 pieces touch on topics such as anti-globalization, corporate control, working-class rights, destruction of the environment and police brutality. They all hang in the form of comics, prints, collages, caricatures, paintings and embroidery.

The artists involved in the show are not amateurs. Many of their works have been included in High Times Magazine and the Museum of Modern Art. The artists come from all corners of the country and their ages range from 20 to 80.

The show began in Milwaukee, Wis., in September 2001 by Sue Simensky Bietila and Nicolas Lampert as a response to the separation of art and politics in United States culture.

It will travel for up to five years throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada, and the extent of its travels depends on its unique funding.

The entire show relies on each community to transport it to its next location. For example, its next stop is in San Francisco and Jan Bielfelt, owner of Moxie's, is responsible for getting it there.

In fact, all of its previous stops have been in large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago.

Bielfelt said the show wanted to go to a smaller city, and a friend of a friend thought Chico would be a good spot.

"Chico is lucky since it's the collection's first stop in a small town," Bielfelt said.

As far as the artwork goes, she said Chico is also fortunate to have art here for such a lengthy period of time.

"There's so much to look at and take in," she said. "It would take more than one day to really look at them all. They're incredibly strong and really make you think."

Inspiration is the purpose of the show, along with a hope of creating a community of political artists who work to break the stereotypes of this art form being propagandistic.

Cartoonist Andy Singer said that whether political art is a form of propaganda depends on the intent of the artist.

"If the artist is merely drawing or illustrating a political idea that someone else wants them to draw, then it's propaganda," he said. "If the artist genuinely believes in what they're drawing, then it's not."

Singer's piece in the show is a cartoon representation of corporate control using copyrighted images including Mickey Mouse, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Texaco.

Another artist in the show, Josh Macphee, said Singer's cartoon uses stylized versions of characters and humor to make the viewer think about how corporations and the government attempt to colonize the rest of the world.

"It's not trying to reinscribe Mickey Mouse with a permanent new meaning," Macphee said. "Pre-teen girls are not going to walk away convinced that 'Donald Duck equals empire' and throw away their 'Little Mermaid' video tapes."

Macphee's own work often critiques corporations but does so without using names or logos.

Some other pieces in the show include unflattering caricatures of the Bush administration, embroidery celebrating diverse communities and resistance, a cluttered collage detailing mass consumption and an eerie charcoal drawing/collage illustrating homelessness.

Unlike a lot of modern art, the pieces all speak very clearly with definite meaning.

"The mainstream of modern art has gone increasingly in this direction from the utilitarian to the meaningless," Singer said. "I believe this is a mistake. If we wish to survive as a species, everyone, including artists, is going to have to act in a much more socially responsible manner."

Helene Hogue can be reached at hhogue@orion-online.net

review from the Vancouver weekly www.staight.com (December 11th - December 17th 2003)

Resistance Art Can't Resist Political Controversy

At The InterUrban Gallery and Community Art Space

The show of political artworks by 31 North American artists, which has been travelling for two years and has at least three more ahead of it, embodies much of the same DIY energy that drives the indie-music scene. But its real roots were in the antiglobalization movement.

"We knew this international community was coming together," Sue Simensky Bietila explains on the phone from Wisconsin, where the artist launched the project with friend Nicolas Lampert. "Nicolas was in Seattle at the World Trade Organization protests [in 2001] and he came back totally excited about the ideas of the puppets and performances that were going on there--the way art is very integrated into the movement."

Since launching Drawing Resistance in Milwaukee in September, they've seen it take on a life of its own: the people who host it in each town or city across the continent are responsible for transporting the exhibit by van to their exhibition spot. In Vancouver, where it's just arrived from Victoria (via Denman Island), it's making a brief appearance at the InterUrban Gallery and Community Art Space (9 East Hastings) until Sunday (December 14). "It's like a relay race," Bietila says.

It's fitting that the work, whose subjects include working-class rights, homelessness, police brutality, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico, would appear outside of the traditional gallery circuit. From Pablo Picasso's Guernica to Edgar Dégas's Absinthe Drinker, art has always taken on passionate social issues, but these days the more overt pieces are often relegated to the radical underground, especially since the emergence of abstractionism and conceptualism. "Political art is so excluded from mainstream galleries in general: there's just a history of refusal and a stereotyping of political art, saying it's propaganda and shoddily put together," Bietila says. "So we wanted the art to be really excellent and very diverse, although it had to be two-dimensional for us to transport it."

The resulting collection ranges from the disturbing (Nicole Schuman's grim black-and-blue linoleum print, Ethnic Cleansing, in which industrial machinery forces frantic people into the water) to the humorous (Andy Singer's illustration of gun-toting Disney characters launching a military invasion). Sometimes the artists are semifamous: Winston Smith, best-known for his Dead Kennedys album art, has a collage here; Seth Tobocman's apocalyptic You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive poster has been the inspiration for tattoos and graffiti everywhere. Stylistically, artworks range from Mexican magic-realist watercolours to rough pen-and-ink art. (Many are at www.drawingresistance.org/.)

Political pieces still have the power to provoke controversy: a screen print called STOP U.S. AID TO ISRAEL was removed from a café where Drawing Resistance stopped in Chicago. And Lampert's own altered photo of a U.S. soldier with oil-company logos on the back of his uniform drew ire from at least one navy veteran in Michigan.

Bietila doesn't mind debate where the works are displayed. But she's also hoping the unfunded road show will spur action in other areas, too. "This project tells people that you don't have to spend all this time wheeling and dealing--just get it done. It can be a powerful thing when that happens."

review of the show in Victoria, BC: http://mondaymag.com/monday/editorial/43_2003/arts.htm

Confrontational Culture

Anarchist art, music and poetics surface in Mile Zero

"Washing Ones Hands," Ricardo Levins Morales (1992)

In 1880, the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin published “An Appeal to the Young” in a French journal called Le Révolté. “You poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, if you understand your true mission and the very interests of art itself, come with us!” Kropotkin declared. “Show the people how hideous is their actual life, and place your hand on the causes of its ugliness.” That cry inspired countless fin-de-siècle masterpieces, including Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Pissarro’s sympathetic portrayals of exploited labourers and prostitutes. And it’s scarcely lost its urgency or relevance today, judging by Drawing Resistance, a travelling show of contemporary anarchist art opening this week at the University of Victoria’s Maltwood gallery.

“This is more vital than the stuff you’ll encounter in any commercial gallery,” says Allan Antliff, UVic’s new Canada Research Chair in modern art. Drawing Resistance consists of more than 30 pieces from America’s radical underground, including posters, album covers, comic books, spray paintings and even quilts, tackling subjects from police brutality to environmental degradation. (The show’s limited to two-dimensional pieces so they can all fit, like a punk band, into one Econoline van.) The backgrounds of the artists are as varied as their work: Peter Kuper illustrates “Spy vs. Spy” for Mad magazine; collage artist Winston Smith nailed Jesus to a cross of dollar bills for the cover of the Dead Kennedys’ In God We Trust, Inc. album; Iris Pasic, whose etching of an anarchist march in Philadelphia anchors the show, moves from squat to squat across the United States. Drawing Resistance travels much the same way—until now it’s mainly been exhibited at such anarchist-owned centres as New York’s ABC NO RIO and Vermont’s radical Institute for Social Ecology.

Each of the works in Drawing Resistance has its own political points to score, but collectively the show attempts to prove that contemporary anarchism is a diverse, inventive subculture that has little to do with the occasional smashed McDonald’s window trumped up on the six o’clock news. “The brave thing about this art is that its creators don’t compromise it,” says Antliff. “It isn’t made to be bought and sold. It’s made to express politics, and to do so freely.” Anarchists, who’ve never been part of mainstream politics, have always used art to express their ideology, and that’s affirmed by Drawing Resistance. “It’s the current expression of a long tradition of radical, avant-garde experimentation.”

Anarchy isn’t just hanging on the walls this week. On Saturday night, the 50/50 Arts Collective will be taken over by an all-ages punk show that promises to be a raucous coming-out party for Victoria activists. (The event was originally booked for Friday at UVic’s Vertigo, but campus security nixed it.) “We’re opening the door to the entire community,” says Wolf Edwards, an MA student in music composition who’s put together a lineup of radical poets and bands for the night, including veteran CFUV commentator Max Sloan, local “crust” artists Bury What’s Dead, a post-Joy Division noise band called Sylo from Denman Island, and Edwards’ own punk-metal outfit, Iskra (Russian for “The Spark”). A few years ago it would’ve been hard to find any political punk scene left in Victoria, says Edwards. “But it’s starting to build again.”

On top of all this, Victoria’s also being visited by an anarchist celebrity of sorts: Ron Sakolsky, a former professor of public affairs at the University of Illinois, the co-founder of Black Liberation Radio, and co-author of Seizing the Airwaves, the bible of micro-power radio stations. Sakolsky’s latest book (Surrealist Subversions, Autonomedia) is about the relationship between anarchism and surrealism—a subject he plans to speak about at the official opening of the Maltwood show on Friday night. The movements may seem incongruous, but Sakolsky says they share the ideal of creative expression, unhindered by social conventions—or police. “With surrealism, the idea is to erase the arbitrary boundaries between the dream and reality. That’s the way things move forward,” he says. “Surrealism moves beyond the cranky, limited idea of what is ‘realistically’ possible, into what can be reimagined.”

Sakolsky’s putting theory into local practice. A year ago he went into “voluntary exile” from Bush’s America, and now he lives with a growing anarchist collective on 35 acres of Denman Island, where he’s working on a surrealist map of British Columbia and the collective’s own zine, Minus Tides. “People are beginning to find others who are doing these things,” he says. “It’s a very exciting time for the future of anarchy in this part of the world.”

Communal anarcho-surrealism on the B.C. coast? As activists like to say, anything’s possible.

—Ross Crockford

Drawing Resistance Until November 28, UVic’s Maltwood Gallery Free 721-8298

Anarchist Punk Night 7:30 pm Saturday, October 25 50/50 Arts Collective, 416 Craigflower Free thefifty_fifty@hotmail.com

Below review from: www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2002/091902/visual.html

Activating activism

>> Drawing Resistance showcases political art
from around the continent

by MARK SLUTSKY

Seems like thousands of art shows pass through Montreal’s galleries every year, but it’s somewhat of a rarity when they deal with explicitly political subject matter. Sure, there’s a lot of politicized art, or art dealing abstractly with political issues, but honest-to-goodness, fist-shaking activist stuff is uncommon.

It’s refreshing, in a way, to see Drawing Resistance, a travelling exhibit showing at Elle Corazon this month that wears its heart on its sleeve. Composed of “two dimensional” work by around three dozen artists from all over North America, the show’s been on the road for over a year now—since September 6, 2001, five days before aggressively lefty discourse went out of style in the U.S.

Originally organized by Wisconsin natives Sue Simensky Bietila and Nicolas Lampert, Drawing Resistance opened in Milwaukee, displayed for a month and then packed up for Chicago. Since then it’s repeated that pattern, travelling to cities all over the continent, and without accompaniment—organizers in each city pass it along from place to place in a process meant to last five years.

Classics and collages
The art, in style and sometimes in quality, is as diverse as the range of activist causes and opinions the show represents. Some are classics of political art, like Seth Tobocman’s “You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive,” or (at the other end of the design spectrum) Winston Smith’s apocalyptic collages, the gruesome style of which you may recognize from seeing one too many Dead Kennedys album covers.

Actually, those two are representative in some way of the visual polarity of the art on display. About half of the work falls into one of two camps: simple and iconic, or intensely concentrated and visually busy. For instance, there are posters modelled to resemble World War II-era propaganda, like John Yates’s illustration of a plane dropping bombs, with the slogan “Democracy: We Deliver,” or clever reworkings of familiar images, like organizer Lampert’s “Oil Soldier,” a doctored photo of a soldier decked out in patches bearing the names of oil companies. On the busy side of things is Nicole Schuman’s “Ethnic Cleansing,” where industrial apparatus force a crowd into the water, or Kehben Grifter and Juan Manchu’s “Free Trade of the Americas” poster, where the area in question is portrayed as a very bad, Bosch-like place to be.

Of course a lot of stuff is just its own thing. There are a few comics on display—Sabrina Jones’s “Bad News Day” is a day in the life of someone who works at the none-too-subtly-disguised “Peacock Network.” Andy Singer’s grimly hilarious “Invasion of New Markets” features Disney characters storming a beach while a battleship lobs soda cans and televisions at terrified natives.

As with many cities on the show’s tour, some local artists are also joining the bunch, with a few pieces from Montreal types adding to the main exhibition. There’s stuff from Jesse Purcell (who co-coordinated this leg of the exhibit with Aimee Darcel and Elle Corazon), Nadia Moss, Stephanie Heendrickxen, Julie Beauchamp and others.

In keeping with the co-operative vibe of the project, Elle Corazon will be hosting a series of workshops on creating your very own agitprop: there’ll be sessions on stencil-making, book-making and the like. For more info see the schedule at the gallery or check out www.ellecorazon.org. :

Drawing Resistance runs through Sept. 30 at Elle Corazon (176 Bernard W.)

Below review from: Journal ICI Montréal 26 octobre 2002

Drawing More Than Resistance
The Artist and His Voice

www.sf-frontlines.com

http://www.sf-frontlines.com/frontBAY.minkler.html

By Anne Bacon; May 2002

“My posters are a form of self-defense. . . The corporations want artists to glorify their wars, their products, and their philosophies. I make art for my own self-preservation. The prints displayed here are not inspired by rugged individualism, but by collective humor, defiance, and lust for life exhibited by those on the margins.” -Doug Minkler

On Saturday, a few weeks back, I walked towards Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from my Oakland home to meet with Doug Minkler. Mutual friends had arranged the meeting, and all that I knew of him was gray hair and political cartoons on the sidewalk outside of Cody's. What I found, as you'll guess, was something altogether different.

Lining the sidewalk, on easel edges, propped against chairs, and spread on tables were posters and screen prints that challenged my entire conception of political cartoons. The images on the posters shocked me from six feet away with their abstract boldness, their resistance to recognizable form and contour, and by the fearless messages printed explicitly on or below each image.

Visual images are among the most powerful of the arts in their ability to express a particular idea. However, most (especially those which venture into abstract realms) often risk misinterpretation of the intended message. This is especially true with political art, as it often deals with controversial and complex ideas, most of which are not a part of the collective conscience. Some artists accept this risk and leave each viewer to interact with the pieces in a manner appropriate to her/his experience.

This is not Doug Minkler’s approach. He is not interested in his images being represented as mere "self-expression of an internal landscape." For him, art is a natural means of expressing outrage and identifying injustice. This is why each image is accompanied by text explaining its meaning.

The images that Minkler chooses are informed by the experience of being raised in a working class family in Berkeley's university community, as well as the experience of coming of age during the Vietnam war. Minkler learned quickly about the nature of the class system, forming a class identification at a young age. In the 60's and 70's, he became a part of the culture of resistance, characterized by the "uniting force" (a conspicuously absent characteristic, Minkler suggests, of today's activists and intellectuals) of opposition to authority.

His early days found Minkler dodging induction into what he considered an unjust war by leaving the country, briefly studying sculpture, and raising, with his beautiful partner, seven children spanning almost four decades. It was here, finding himself working 50-60 hour weeks in the industrial world, and working to hold back the forces of republican conservatism by attending union meetings, that Minkler realized: It isn't enough.

Screen-printing proved itself to be the most natural way to use his art to address social injustices and the issues of his class. He determined that sculpture required too great a time investment, and the finished product would either occupy a private space in a wealthy patron's garden or vie for a single censored public space along with two hundred other sculptures. The prints were an obvious means of mass producing an illustration while maintaining ownership of the means of production, thus guaranteeing control of content and assuring that his work was seen by the broadest possible audience. Minkler began printing out of his garage in 1979, and continues to do so. Gathering his supplies from industrial discard piles, he also traded labor for supplies at a silk-screen supply house.

Minkler's images combine the most shocking aspects of abstraction, an absurd cartoonishness and obvious fearlessness, comparable in their shock value to the work of Seth Tobocman, comic book artist and author of You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. Because of his commitment to conveying this political message exactly as intended, the text makes each poster humbling and almost always controversial.

Minkler's images are shaping and reshaping. They speak well enough for themselves. Go see them outside of Cody's where Minkler has displayed them almost every weekend for the past six years. He does have grayish hair, as it turns out, so look for him there, and bring time enough to spend with the images to absorb their fearlessness and their truth. Bring your wallet too, (the artist must eat).

Drawing Resistance

The Drawing Resistance political art show is drawing more than resistance. It is drawing crowds, drawing communities of artists together, and it is drawing a curious, yet familiar controversy.

The 2-dimensional art show began its five-year tour around North America in September of 2001, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home to one of the shows two curators, Sue Simensky Bietila. Bietila and co-curator Nicolas Lampert gathered the artwork from friends and fellow artists across the country. As the tour has no funding, it relies solely upon communities, traveling like a d.i.y. punk band from city to city in vans and trucks.

The only consistent characteristic is the artwork itself, covering every topic from the Zapatista liberation movement to corporate hegemony, and homelessness. Bietila and Lampert remark that "the need for a show of this nature arose out of the separation of art and politics in US culture. . . . Political art has historically been stereotyped as technically substandard or dogmatic propaganda. The show works to negate these myths and present a visually exciting show . . . (It also works) to build a community of political artists and be a source of inspiration."

And this is exactly what the show has done. In Milwaukee, as well as the subsequent tour cities of Chicago and New York City, the show attracted large and diverse crowds. In each of these cities, as anticipated in those to come, local artist communities have arranged other events to coincide with the showing: slide shows, music, festivals, readings, etc.

The artwork reflects the lives, politics and experiences of 31 artists ranging in age from their early 20's to their 80's. Among the local artists whose work is displayed is Doug Minkler, the screen print artist from Berkeley. From Oakland, local artist Emily Abendroth's work can be seen. And from San Francisco Eric Drooker, who works with scratchboard; Freddie Baer, a collage artist; and Winston Smith and John Yates, who designed album cover art for the Dead Kennedys. Other artists such as Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, (World War 3 Illustrated), from NYC and Carlos Cortez, best known for his posters for the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) are also on display.

For the most part, the Drawing Resistance show has created a safe space for these artists. In Chicago, unfortunately, the show drew some controversy when Mike James, co-owner of the Heartland Cafe took down Doug Minkler's "Stop US Aid to Israel" screen print.

The poster was replaced within a week, but the social and political implications of the censorship of one print amongst an entire show of radical political art are enormous. One is left to wonder whether certain mechanisms need to be implemented in the future to prevent such censorship. But, due to the nature of the show, Bietila and Lampert have decided to leave this responsibility in the hands of individual communities.
Galleries showing solo shows of Minkler’s work have previously objected to the same piece. Minkler refuses to be censored. If a venue asks him to take down this print, the entire show comes down. And the entire show has come down several times. After all, "Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." [Bertolt Brecht]

It will be in San Francisco and the Bay Area in April and May of 2004, but don't worry about marking your calendars now, you'll hear it coming. If Minkler’s piece is not there, be sure you let the owners of the venue and the curators of the show know what you think of censorship. In the meantime, check out www.drawingresistance.org to find out more about the artists and the journey of their art across North America. And tell your friends. The show will be in their city too.

*Be sure to check for Minkler’s piece, STOP US AID TO ISRAEL, presented as a special pullout poster in issue #2 of Frontlines

Drawing Resistance

interview by Pete Yanke; Black Thorn; May 2002

PO Box 11046 Portland, Oregon 97211  blackthorncollective@yahoo.com   

The following interview is with Nicolas Lampert (n) and Sue Simensky Bietilla (s), co-organizers of Drawing Resistance.

What first inspired the show?

s-The way it sort of happened was I was looking for a political upsurge to happen. I've been doing political artwork since the late 60's, first with the Guardian (a political newspaper that was the main weekly against the Vietnam War) and then on the Rat (an underground newspaper.) When Seattle happened, I felt like things are coming together, things have reached a critical mass, people are doing really interesting artwork all over the place and this time around I really want to know who these people are. I don't want to feel like I am the only one working all by myself in this little place in Riverwest in Milwaukee, doing things that the people in my neighborhood only see. Instead I wanted all of us who are doing political artwork to have a network and feel support from one another.

Nicolas and I had collaborated before on a couple of block prints. Nicolas then wanted to do a book collecting some of the best political artwork from the current period and publish it together with some commentary. I thought we would have a real hard time doing that because we didn't have the right connections and it costs a lot of money to produce a book. Then we came up with the idea of an art show instead. With Nicolas' background traveling with the D.I.Y. music scene in Noisegate and being a part of a network of people who travel a lot, we both  knew complimentary groups of artists. Nicolas  knew a lot of younger artists and West Coast folks and I knew a lot of East Coast folks and people who have been doing stuff since the 80's. Between the two of us we came up with the idea for a traveling show. 

How does the D.I.Y. political art world differ from the standard art gallery world; how are they the same?

n-Mainstream galleries and museums are very much upper class institutions, so they naturally try not to represent viewpoints that would threaten their elite position. Some artists make it through the cracks, but the majority have to create their own scene....A standard art gallery position is very much based on individualism. An artists will be hyped up and hopefully will sell a lot of work where the gallery will take at least half the profits. Art is a product to sell. In D.I.Y, art is less of a commodity and their is more of an emphasis on artists working together collectively with the goals of self sufficiency in mind. The two opposing scenes can seem alike at times because subcultures unfortunately often mimic the dominant culture because that is what people have become accustomed too. Old habits die hard.

How does the show work?

n-Initially Sue and I organized the show. We chose artists who had a history of creating political art work. We gravitated towards artists who were activists and addressed themes of the anti-globalization movement. We also tried to make sure that the show wasn’t male dominated and had to reject many talented artists due to lack of space.

s-At first we thought that the lack of space in the van would limit how much art could fit in the show, but it has been the size of the places that has become the limiting factor. The average size place has been quite small, so we have sometimes had to hang the art stacked, one piece on top of the another. We have really encouraged local places to organize their own events to go along with Drawing Resistance.

n-The show was set up to work autonomously. Ideally, it was the only way to have a show of this nature travel throughout North America for five years. It would of been ridiculous to assume that one person could take five years off their life and drive the show from city to city. Also, it would of been naïve to assume that people would want to work on a show if it was just the vision of the two people who organized the show. By creating an autonomous structure, the show belongs to everyone involved. In agreeing to host the show, you also have to agree to transport the show to the next city. This way, the work is shared and many people can be involved. The idea of the traveling show is to find people and set up a structure where locally many artists can show their work. In Montreal for example, their will be a local show of 50 printmakers to coincide with the traveling show.

s-We have the show set up for the next year or so in terms of who is going to host it. Yeah, it's a crazy idea but it actually works because it is in a period in history where it could work. The factors were there to make it possible for it to happen. The upsurge in political activism of a certain kind that includes people who are much more open to creative ideas. At this point, there is theater, music, art, it's all just a very integrated movement..

What are some of the reactions from outside the D.I.Y. activist world?

n-Reactions have been very positive to the show from all walks of life. Sue and I really did not want the show to fit into just one "scene" of people. So "D.I.Y." to us is anyone and everyone outside the corporate mainstream. A lot of people in the show come from the D.I.Y activist scene and it is important to be nourished by your own scene, but we really want the show to reach out to many audiences. Besides activist spaces, future shows are slated to be hosted by Colleges and Universities. 

s-The show opened up here in Milwaukee, a couple of days before September 11th. Initially we thought, well there's a lot of art work here that is critical of the US government, what's going to be  people's reaction to the situation? The show was really popular here, it ended up being really well attended and people felt really supported by it. People who are already really critical of US foreign policy and rich people running things for their own interests -those sort of folks would come to the show when there was all this flag waving going on and feel really supported that there were other people still thinking and not everybody is marching in lock step. That has been part of what the show meant to a lot of people.

What difficulties have come about?

n-In Chicago, we ran into problems when the owner of the Heartland Café removed Doug Minkler’s piece due to it’s content. His image is an anti war poster that reads, "End US Military Aid to Israel." The owner of the café felt it might upset his Jewish customers so he took it down without notifying anyone involved with the show. He also threatened to take down Rocky Tobey’s image because he felt his image looked too much like the World Trades Center! Mind you this is a so-called progressive café. It is quite scary when people on the left start censoring themselves and others. At any rate, once we found out about it, we threatened to take the entire show down and he put Minkler’s piece back up.

Seeing that you went into this not really knowing what to expect, what are your reflections on this and what have you learned?

n-I was worried that the US didn’t have the collective mentality to pull off a show that relied on a group effort. So far, my worries have been put to rest and people have really pulled through. We owe a lot to the folks at the Trumbleplex in Detroit who were the first to really grasp the meaning of the show and were instrumental in organizing other Midwest and East Coast shows. I have also learned the subtle differences between big city and small city people. Of course this is not true with all people, but in the large metropolises, people are more jaded and treat this show as just another night on their busy schedule. In the smaller cities like Detroit, Toledo, etc.. people are more appreciative and grasp the idea that a show of this nature can really have a radical impact on peoples lives. People in big cities forget the initial impact that the first punk show or political demonstration had on them. They become cynical and forget the important role of exposing others to the important ideas that they have learned. I tend to believe that the show will have more of a radical impact in the smaller towns.

s-I think I have gotten more experience, I know more about how to get things out into the world. The whole show helps to develop a network a network of political artists who help each other out.

n-I  learned from my past experience in the D.I.Y. punk community  just how well connected the underground punk circuit is. The scene reaches beyond borders and is a international community. As I got older, I felt that the D.I.Y. punk scene was too depended on music and youth culture and really needed to expand beyond it’s set boundaries that to me had made the scene somewhat conservative. I learned from many years of setting up music shows that a few phone calls and perseverance is all that is needed to set up a tour- which is what the drawing resistance show is. Instead of a punk band going on tour, art is getting in the van. Personally I am inspired by artists and musicians who are not afraid to be speak out, especially in today’s climate. When you hear others bash the system, it gives you courage to raise your own voice.

s-I think it comes down to the nature of art, it's part of a social discourse, it's part of history. Art should be real and immediate and respond to what is going on at the moment rather than being a product or a commodity.

Drawing Resistance: A Traveling Political Art Show

Reviewed by William Eisenstein; Urban Ecology; Spring 2002

www.urbanecology.org

As a teenager growing up in and around the small cities and college towns of the Midwest, I can well remember the intellectual and emotional impact of radical political and artistic expressions from the culture capitals that trickled into our bookstores and record shops. Underground music, comic books, political writings, and visual art found a waiting audience of over-educated and under-stimulated people who devoured it with a hunger often forgotten in the complacency of  latter life.

Drawing Resistance provides a welcome reminder that that spirit is still very much alive. A traveling political art show created by 31 artists and activists from throughout North America, it's aim is to be passed through the continent from city to city in a kind of organize-it-yourself relay. Eschewing external funding and institutional support, Drawing Resistance has already appeared in galleries and cafes in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and New York, and will bootstrap its way through the eastern seaboard, Canada, the Midwest, and then the Pacific Coast (and perhaps Mexico) over the next three years, hitting sites from Fargo to Winnipeg to Los Angeles along the way.

"Political" may be the only adjective that can fairly link the art featured here. Styles range from the colorful efflorescences of Berkeley's Doug Minkler to the refined expressionism of Lower East Side pen-and-ink magician Eric Drooker. Media ranges from the quilts of Emily Abendroth to the agitprop street posters of co-organizer Sue Simensky Bietilla; subjects range from the "advesary portraiture" of Robbie Conal to the fantastical dystopias of Nicole Schulman. Fully three generations of political art is represented. Chicago worker-artist is old enough to remember the glory days of Depression-era political art. Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman's comic magazine World War III Illustrated, founded in 1979, along with the legendary punk rock album cover art of John Yates and Winston Smith, provide a crucial bridge to the current generation.

Drawing Resistance is a bracing, enlivening panorama of radical humanism, stretched wide by the expansive hopes and traumas of our times. Long may it travel.

The art of interpreting reality
By David Sands  
Special to the Michigan Citizen
www.michigancitizen.com

The traveling art show Drawing Resistance, now showing at Detroit’s Trumbull Theater, doesn’t have a lot to do with curators, museums, or hard-to-figure-out splotches on the wall.

Instead, it has much to do with what’s missing from most of the me-me-me money-money-money world of contemporary art.

That is, a sense of urgency beyond one’s individual self; a feeling of anger-hope-responsibility for the world and the people around us; a bridging between creative and political realities that artists all too often choose to ignore.

At once funny, edgy, and elegant, Drawing Resistance achieves all of these things.
It features the work of 31 North American artists and activists whose stencils, drawings, and other creations break boundaries and challenge the stereotypes that put down political art as nothing more than lifeless propaganda.

“It shows that beautiful artists who are very technically strong can’t always be appropriated by corporations,” says Muhammad Ali of Dearborn who attended the show’s Nov. 18 opening. ”It shows what beautiful things people can create when they really free themselves and speak their minds.”

Mary Sharvazz, who also came to the show’s opening, says she’s amazed at the way the colors pop out of Diana Berek’s Mandela For Who We Are, a painting that swirls with different faces and symbols of life. She’s not bothered in the least either by the exhibit’s unapologetic social commentary.

“Its good to see the political nature coming through,” says Sharvazz. ”Its something I don’t see that much.”

Beyond the politics of the show’s images, however, lies the beauty of its organization.
Drawing Resistance is essentially a do-it-yourself-project put together by a loose underground cultural network.

There is no funding for the show and no centrally coordinated plan. Although initiated by Sue Simensky Bietila of Milwaukee and Nicolas Lampert of Minneapolis, local organizers from different cities call the shots and are ultimately responsible for how the show looks and how it gets to the next destination.

In Detroit, the Trumbullplex, a non-profit community space organized around anarchist principles, picked up the show.

John Clark, one of the show’s many local organizers, says the exhibit’s behind the scene dimensions are not as visible as the actual art, but are inspiring nonetheless.

“I think it’s cool to see people have lent this stuff out for this. There’s no insurance on the art. There’s no security other than your trust in this community. I don’t think a lot of people are going to get that from when they walk in.”

He admits that while the show’s topics may vary, whether speaking out against gentrification, war, or repression against women, the artists all share in a common spirit of truth and resistance to oppression.

“They can’t create art any other way than realizing what their surroundings are about and letting it live through their medium.”

Drawing Resistance is free and runs now through Dec. 26 at Trumbullplex on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8 p.m. throughout November. December dates are to be announced. Organizer Sue Simensky Bietila will be in town to host a slideshow on Nov. 27 at 7 p.m., and organizer Nicholas Lampert will close the show on Dec. 26 at 8 p.m.. Trumbullplex is located at the corner of Trumbull and Willis in Detroit a few blocks west of the Lodge Freeway.

Moral minority on the road

by Anita Schmaltz
11/28/2001

Detroit Metro Times

Hot & Bothered was written this week by Anita Schmaltz, and edited by George Tysh. E-mail them at gtysh@metrotimes.com.