Dore Ashton and the New York Solidarity Movement with the Victims of the Chilean Dictatorship, 1972-1984.

On September 11, 1973 in Chile, a US-backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and his left-wing political coalition, inaugurating a seventeen-year dictatorship in which thousands were killed and millions were tortured or driven into exile. An important solidarity network arose immediately after the coup across the hemisphere and in the transatlantic world. In New York, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, left-leaning artists, activists, journalists, and intellectuals protested the Chilean dictatorship and the US role in that massacre through a variety of forms. In the realm of the visual arts, art critic Dore Ashton (1928-2017) was catalyst for both the organization and dissemination of these events, which ranged from art exhibitions to memorials and workshops, and from newsletters to the arrangement of faculty positions for Chilean political detainees in art schools in the U.S. Relying on archival research, this paper is about Ashton’s key role in the development of an important hemispheric solidarity network whose epicenter was New York and whose point of departure was the Chilean socialist revolution and the dictatorship that followed. It unearths Ashton’s activist and aesthetic work regarding Chile and Latin American anti-imperialist struggles more broadly from the year 1972, a year before the coup when Allende was still in office, to 1984, when the nation-wide exhibition Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, organized from New York by art workers such as Ashton, denounced Ronald Reagan’s disastrous policies in Central America and Latin America, including the Chilean case.