Abstract
The main goal for this project was to learn as much as I could about propaganda art and how posters were able to capture the masses. When I started teaching myself graphic design in 2015 so I could create posters for music festivals, I realized I was uncovering an important art form for me. I knew I wanted to further my knowledge of protest art and see how it can be utilized today. While I was spending my last summer living in Minneapolis in 2020, it was difficult to make sense of all the things going on around me, and it wasn't until I was able to enroll at PNCA and take art history and language arts classes that I was able to really start piecing reality all together.
Artist Statement
Prior to attending college for graphic design, I was creating digital art posters for music festivals with the intention of reflecting time and space through a constructed vision. I wanted to design the festival posters so that people would have something to look back on after the event to remember their shared experience. Since attending PNCA, my interest in art history has grown, and my research has had a positive impact on my connection to graphic design. I've learned that since the 1500s, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of expressing social and political discontent. I didn't want this to be a one-to-one relationship with a single issue, poster, or time or place. A direct message like that is more effective for the types of propaganda aimed at by these posters of the past, but not for understanding the complex issues they were discussing. This is where my research and design for how protest posters from the past can be used today began. Throughout history, the poster has been a severly divisive medium. They are so effective because they must be simple and easily understood, which can often be misleading, all while being mass produced. This project evolved into a meditation on the perils of oversimplification. By deconstructing these posters and the issues they represent. I've started to notice how these oversimplifications distort people's understanding, not just visually, but also by convincing them that there are simple answers to complex questions, which there aren't. I decided to double down on the "Reduction" that the poster was aiming for by NOw being too much. I thought that using collage as a method to embody the volume of the world's concerns and reflect on how they are perceived, as well as using posters from all over the world, would demonstrate that this is not a uniquely American issue, but one that has been present in many conflicts. This would call into question the poster's original intent, past art movements, and society's current issues from the past, as many of the same issues exist today. The main goal of this project was to teach me everything I could about visual communication, and it did just that. I feel like I'm just getting started in terms of understanding how we can all feel at ease with nuance and complexity in the future.
