CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/15/2017

See Red Women's Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990 at CAA!

Printed in 1978, the silkscreen poster "Don't Let Racism Divide Us" is reproduced from See Red Women's Workshop, Four Corners Books' new compendium of the London feminist collective's posters, 1974–1990. "Ambitiously, See Red were not about selling a product or even getting over a party political message," British socialist feminist theorist Sheila Rowbotham writes in her foreword, "they were up to something far more complex and far more difficult. They aimed to convey ideas about a transformed society in which relations of gender, race and class would no longer be marked by inequality and subordination. Those messages, on the posters, ‘So long as women are not free, the people are not free’ and ‘Lesbians are everywhere’ contested the prevailing ‘common sense.’ See Red aimed to be clear and wanted to reorient perspectives. Making those posters appear so simple and self-evident must have been agonizingly hard to accomplish. It is not actually that difficult to perplex with layer upon layer of words; to clarify abstraction with just a few constitutes a rare skill."