“Harriet Tubman lives!,” artist unknown, n.d. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” Pablo Picasso observed, drawing attention to the fundamental cycle of existence: from nothing, something; from something, nothing—ad infinitum.
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People, being creatures of habit as much as will, often find themselves leaning heavily towards one side or the other. We gravitate towards what is familiar, either to our character or to our experience, inclined to preserve that comforts of the known, trying to avoid the inevitable turn that must come. We may fight it within ourselves, longing to escape fate, or we may find ourselves in conflict with society and the power structure that initiates change.
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Invariably, we struggle with the nature of life, this eternal cycle of creation and destruction that causes so much misery and strife—until we can come to terms with this duality and make peace with it. For some, this peace comes with integrating opposition into the creative process: this is the art of protest.
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Artwork: Reproduction of a poster by Jose Gomez Fresquet, printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, 1967. Courtesy of the CWLU Herstory Project. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.