Posters for the People Online Workshop
During the summer of 2021 Dignidad Rebelde and the Center for Political education teamed up to teach an online course on political graphics and screen printing. Our goal was to help grass roots organizations increase their artistic capacity by teaching them about the history of political graphics on an international scale and giving them the tools to take that knowledge and create their own posters. Over ten weeks the organizations participated in drawing, design and printing workshops, all of which were done over zoom. By the end of the project, each organization was able to design and print at least two posters reflecting the work they do.
The workshop focused on art history and praxis, it was crucial for us to provide a context of the poster movements from a local and international perspective of poster making to provide students with the grounding to create their own political graphics. This included studying the work of the Taller de Grafica Popular in Mexico, Cuban poster makers, Third World Strike poster artists, South African posters and many more. Through hands on skills workshops students took what they learned and designed their own posters through a series of workshops that provided them with the basic skill to make their own work. These workshops included learning the basics of using the Cricut for screen printing, a drawing and illustration class, layout and design using Illustrator and others. Through this process each organization created two posters in the class, their first design was a simple one-color print and their second design was a two/three color print that reflected the organizations work. It was amazing to see this work come together and at the same time to witness the growth of the printmaking community in the Bay Area.
This project was amazing! We hope that through this workshop the participating organizations are able to continue making posters for their campaigns, find ways of working together with other participating organizations to expand their capacity and collaborate with other organizations to help them create posters for their campaigns.
