This exhibition at The Centre For the Study of Political Graphics focuses on feminism throughout the years. The center advances the power of art to educate and inspire people to action. It is a US educational and research archive that collects, preserves and documents political posters for social change.This exhibition acknowledges and honours the diversity of international women’s movements documenting women's struggles, leadership and activism throughout the world. It emphasises how posters are central to challenging oppression.The range of posters through out explore class, race and gender standing up to discrimination against women. Focusing on areas such as women’s roles in war, abortion rights etc.
By expanding the definition of feminism this exhibition aims for all men and women to be proud to call themselves feminists. I have chosen this source as it shows various ways activist movements like feminism can be portrayed creatively. I wanted to look at stereotypes and how they affect different people as seen through out this source. By looking at women in different topics like the family unit, childcare, labor, trafficking and violence it shows key areas of how stereotypes still today are playing huge roles in everyday life and also poses many threats.
By looking at the Suffragette movement to the 1970s activism to today poster design is a powerful way to depict a message and can definitely be used to inform my future work.
Overall the exhibition represented feminism as a ‘defining and unifying issue’ showing how it brings people together to bring about change. It also stated how the exhibition represents ‘global feminism’ suggesting that it holds more value over other world issues. The variation of views towards feminism is also a key area which could inform future outcomes showing the importance of feminism to different people.
One of the posters that caught my eye the most was the ‘Women of the World Unite’ stereotypically pink poster. The poster is effective as it appropriates ‘Liberty Leading the People’ which is a Romanticism painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the French Revolution in 1830. This is powerful as especially in the nineteenth century women were seen as less inferior so this painting representing a women - ‘Liberty’- leading the men in battle would have been controversial and would have possibly provoked key thoughts on why women were viewed as less inferior. This poster also includes the slogan ‘Women of the World Unite’ which mimics the famous political slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite’ which was used by German socialist Karl Max. It was used to encourage members of the working classes throughout the world to cooperate to defeat Capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict which saw quality of life seriously altered by class however at the time this slogan was mainly aimed at men. This is again powerful and a key point to look at as it supports my subject area of feminism and destroying stereotypes for an equal and just society. It combines important and significant areas of the past to show how this is not a new issue and to therefore strengthen it's meaning.