Collectors Weekly has an article about the rise of Angela Davis posters. On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Davis’s name was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for kidnapping, murder, and interstate flight. Davis was already a darling of the left for her membership in the Communist Party and outspoken support for the… READ THE REST
Unsurprisingly, I used to have a huge collection of silk-screened revolutionary posters lining my walls. The Emiliano Zapata one was probably the most beautiful, but there was a terrifying one from the MIR in Chile. It was on a ~4 foot high, torn-off piece of newsprint, spray-painted through a stencil, and showing a stylized naked man in a stress position, hanging in mid-air with his hands tied behind his back.
Selling silk-screened posters was one of our primary means of fund-raising at speaking events and big demonstrations. Sadly, they all went into the dumpster years ago. The art form has proven to be sufficiently ephemeral that I can’t even find images of any of the posters that I used to own.
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Angela Davis’ niece, Aisa Davis, was in a great play called Passing Strange which was a musing on race in America by the musician Stew. It was filmed by Spike Lee and featured on Great Performances on PBS. Well worth a watch…Yeah, kind of off topic but seeing Angela Davis’ name reminded me of this.
Mostly unrelated, but I was totally unaware that I take the same yoga class as Angela Davis twice a week until recently someone showed me a photo of her.
When she was on the run, so to speak, many hundreds if not thousands of windows in the SF bay area displayed homemade signs reading “Angela Davis You Are Welcome In this House.” Many were mass printed by a local underground newspaper. She was sort of a community project for radicals.
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