In the antique shop, these shabby but compelling vintage posters were labelled simply “WWI.” There was no provenance to prove it, but little reason to doubt it, and I took them home. Online research turned up another copy of the print, which maintained a printer’s mark and a date of 1917, so the posters do indeed date from the early days of U.S. involvement in the war. The words “GIVE!” and “LEND!” were often used in the various campaigns to fund the war effort: a propaganda appeal to a shared commitment. 

The simple one-word exhortations on these prints immediately reminded me of 21st-century social media, although the comparison was not flattering. Scanning an Instagram feed of an artist’s labors, it’s common to see tossed-off comments like “LOVE!” or “FIRE!”, “WANT!” or “NEED!” Especially taken in bulk, such effusive praise strikes me as a distressingly superficial kind of engagement. I suppose shallow art criticism is largely harmless. But this frantic model of connection is not unique to the cultural sphere. In the realm of electoral politics, social justice, or international warfare, the media we use to connect seem to offer us so much, but require so little.

This project re-interprets protest placards produced for the 1963 March on Washington, important artifacts that have not been well-preserved. Documentary photographs show that after the march, the signs were left in tattered remnants. Only a few people seem to have considered the placards themselves to be of any intrinsic value. ”Ghost Signs” pokes at this lost legacy, revisiting the original documents as limp, sagging traces of historical memory, soft and sad.

Pathetic echoes of a movement whose accomplishments we began to take for granted, these wilting placards evoke the sorry current state of American civil society, the tragedy of contemporary discourse, and the intransigence of our social problems. What we have learned (or more often failed to learn) from history includes the fact that rights hard-won are precarious. 

Inspired by a True Story: the double meaning of the phrase “Big Deal” struck me while driving past a local mattress store, where of late the signage in the windows had seemed increasingly desperate, even tragic. It seemed that the store had turned into its own worst critic, making its own advertisements into trollish, self-loathing comments. These straightforward posters are installed in an over-enthusiastic grid, with a singular crumpled, sad example allowed to point out the futility of the pleading text.  
 

Fancy feet, filthy feet, seems all the same to me. 

A selection of prints and  printed ephemera