Political Art Documentation/ Distribution
1980 to 1988, and now, in 2023, as MoMA focuses on the PAD/D Archives
For eight years throughout the reactionary presidency of Ronald Reagan a multi-generational group of arts related Left-oriented individuals met on a regular basis as Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D for short). Generating a semi-annual newsletter, hosting public talks at Franklin Furnace and elsewhere, collaborating with the United Healthcare Workers union 1199, creating portable artworks for public demonstrations, organizing projects against the gentrification of the city’s Lower East Side (1983-1984), and certainly most enduringly, thanks to the meticulous cataloging labor of group members Mimi Smith and Barbara Moore, establishing the PAD/D Archive, which was gifted to the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1990s.
Our goal is to provide artists with an organized relationship to society, to demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making, and to provide a framework within which progressive artists can discuss and develop alternatives to the mainstream art system. [PAD/D’s mission statement from Feb. 1981]
Acknowledging the obvious contradictions of a project focusing on marginal, socially-engaged art practices winding-up housed within a pillar of the mainstream art world, it is nevertheless significant that starting this past month of May 2023, the Museum has made the content of the PAD/D Archive exceedingly more accessible online in three ways. First, you can find a spotlight feature about the archive written by Meagan Connolly that takes you on a “rare look inside the Political Art Documentation /Distribution archive.”
At the bottom of Connolly’s piece are two useful links that allow you to visit the PAD/D Archive remotely. Then there is an excellent Finding Aid which lists pretty much everything inside the collection with folder numbers should you wish to schedule a visit for directly researching the archive’s content. At present, the Museum only offers limited access to these and other holdings from Wed to Thurs. 1-5PM and only by appointment using this Online Visiting Form. But now, with this digital index available, at least one can hone-in on what specifically is of interest in advance of arriving at the MoMA.
The second recent development is a Research Guide that offers a compressed historical overview of the group’s activities, year-by-year, with tabs for the various major projects at the bottom. There are still some errors and omissions that we –Lucy R. Lippard, Mimi Smith, Barbara Moore, and myself– are asking the MoMA to correct, so if you find something amiss don’t hesitate to send me that information. But the profile MoMA has created for PAD/D is by-and-large accurate, and provides an entrée into a 1980s Left cultural organization that aimed to link artists with organized anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist activism, something that has receded significantly in the decades that followed, but may be about to have a revival (and I promise to elaborate on this proposition in a future Substack post when I discuss ongoing efforts to inaugurate a new online publication called Left Art Review (LAR) whose aim is to provide “a sober reconsideration of art’s relationship to institutions with the power to make change…such as labor unions, Left movements and parties.”)
It is our understanding that all of the hundreds of posters in the PAD/D Archive will also be digitized in the coming months, but most are already online here PAD/D POSTERS. The one drawback here is that the MoMA outsources the right to reproduce its digital content to a company that frankly charges way too much, especially for students and scholars with limited resources. We have pointed this out to the museum, including the fact that the PAD/D Archive was given freely to the institution with the goal of not only preserving its content, but importantly making it as widely accessible as possible, much as the remarkable project Interference Archive does in Brooklyn and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics manages to do in Los Angeles. The PAD/D Archive was initiated with the idea that it serve an activist function by demonstrating ways that artists might transform their practice into what PAD/D founding member Jerry Kearns described as,
A narrow hope that artists might still serve as cultural allies to those truly in a state of struggle, including especially anticolonial and anti-imperialist revolutionaries, as well as African Americans and other oppressed people of color trapped inside the “belly of the best.” [Kearns cited in the publication Group Work by Temporary Services, 2007.]
You can find all of PAD/D’s newsletters online here, and read my version of the group’s eight year program in the essay A Collectography of PAD/D, A 1980’s Activist Art Collective, And Its Legacy in Twenty-First Century Activist Art And Scholarship, originally written in 2016 and updated for The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century. Shipley, Lesley E. and Mey-Yen Moriuchi, (eds). New York: Routledge, (2023). pp 21-35.
The PAD/D membership and their affiliations at the time of its founding included: Lucy R. Lippard: the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) , Heresies, Ad Hoc Women Artists; Jerry Kearns, Elizabeth Kulas: Red-Herring and Amiri Brarakaʼs Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union; Barbara Moore: Fluxus; Janet Koenig, Julie Ault, Herb Perr and the late Irving Wexler: Artists Meeting for Cultural Change or AMCC; Mike Glier: Collaborative Projects (COLAB); Arlene Goldbard and Don Adams: Alliance for Cultural Democracy (ACD); Jim Murray: Cultural Correspondence ; Rudolph Baranik: Angry Arts; Jerri Allyn: The Womenʼs Building; Seth Tobocman: World War 3 Illustrated; Tim Rollins, Julie Ault and Doug Ashford: Group Material; muralists Eva Cockcroft and Keith Christensen; Anne Pitrone, Carnival Knowledge as well as artists Mimi Smith, Edward Eisenberg, Vanalyne Greene, Micki McGee, Nancy Linn, Sharon Gilbert, Richard Mayer, Margia Kramer, Charles Fredric, Rae Lange, Randy Wade, Joan Giannecchini, Stan Kaplan, and the recently graduated BFA from The Cooper Union, Gregory Sholette, among others.