Arts in the Progressive Movement

(March 2002)

Jane Alper, issue editor, writes:

For this issue we approached local and not so local artists who are also activists and solicited articles from them that would give us some information and understanding how the arts have been used in the progressive movement.
The first article is by Mike Alewitz, a mural painter, who works closely with Mexican unions on cross-border art projects and has exhibited his work internationally. (His 1997 poster celebrating the Frente Autentico de Trabajo, Mexico’s only independent trade union, hangs on my office door.) Mr. Alewitz is the artistic director of the Labor Art & Mural Project, and teaches mural painting at Central Connecticut State University.
His article is entitled “Artists after 9/11“ and it powerfully exposes the complicity of artists in the post-9/11 debacle and presents an alternative vision of the artist’s role.
The second article is by another radical artist, Laura Beretsky, which describes her local guerrilla theater troupe, Class Acts, the only truly class conscience theater group in the area.
And finally there is an interview I did with Peter Schumann, founder and Artistic Director of the Bread & Puppet Theatre, currently based in northern Vermont, whose enormous, expressive puppets gave voice to the full range of issues confronting progressives from nuclear proliferation in the early 1960s to globalization and the war in Afghanistan today.

To read the complete newsletter, join the Guild or order a subscription today.