Right On!: Posters from the San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-69

From November 1968 to March 1969 at San Francisco State College, many student organizations joined by faculty and staff mobilized around inequality of the higher educational system. Led by the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front, the strike was met by ferocious repression. Immersed in the protests, a group of art students and faculty (like Dennis Beall, Rupert García, and Peggy Levine) created posters visualizing issues of better education, racism, and police brutality, among others. The art student-faculty collective took a stand on the strike demands, and thus could no longer make art merely for its own sake. Abandoning neutrality in their work, they were eager to raise consciousness and build solidarities. This medium responded to the sense of urgency to transform both art and society. Its formal qualities as well as its ability to be quickly produced and in multiples made it a meaningful way to relate to the political situation, and to imagine fundamental changes. Aimed at being used in demonstrations or sold to raise money to get people out on bail, these silkscreens challenged the function of art as commodity, and turned the techniques of commercial art to a social purpose. They were pivotal both to the political poster and liberation movements in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, they were connected to the global student uprisings and decolonization movements. Considering the consequences of neoliberalism on higher education, this collision between art and activism still inspires social change.