10:15am | Henry Klein is one of the artists featured in the University Art Museum’s exhibition, PEACE PRESS GRAPHICS 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, which closes on December 11th. The exhibition, part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative funded by the Getty Foundation, features posters created by a Los Angeles based printing collective called the Peace Press.
In addition to continuing his work as a fine artist, he’s also served as an educator, curator, and scholar in a variety of contexts. I asked him about his life prior to joining the Peace Press.
Henry: I came to L.A. in 1976 from back East. I had grown up in Left radical circles and had been active in the anti Viet Nam war community as early as 1963 and through graduate school, but had begun to be more engaged in the academic community after that. When I came to Peace Press at the end of August 1976, it reconnected me to that radical community.
Sander: Did you feel that the radical efforts you witnessed, and were involved in, were effective in producing the changes that were desired?
Henry: With respect to ending the Viet Nam War, absolutely. After the war ended, the issues became less sharply defined and the population as a whole became less interested in a radical agenda. When I arrived at Peace Press, they were in a process of evolving as well. In their case, to a more global approach that connected the dots between many radical issues.
Sander: How did you get connected to the Peace Press?
Henry: Peace Press had placed an add in the L.A. Times looking for someone with pre-press skills. I had looked into a number of jobs already, but I was intrigued by their self-description as a “collective.”
Sander: How long did it take long for them to figure out that, in addition to your pre-press skills, you were also able to bring your creative talents as well?
Henry: They knew that I was an artist from the beginning. There were a number of artists already there, as well. But the bulk of what the Press did was already designed when it came to us and, for many of the clients, design was a minor consideration. So we often did not have the opportunity to put our creative skills to work. In my case, I had acquired professional pre-press skills in paste-up, process camera work, lithographic stripping and plate making. That was what the Press was primarily looking for.
Sometimes we had clients who had no designers and needed those skills. Sometimes they would arrive with a piece of black and white artwork, and ask us to turn it into something colorful – usually with little lead time in order to get it printed and out the door. This applied, not only to posters, but sometimes book covers and other printed work. On more rare occasions, when we at the Press decided to support a project, e.g., the Skyhorse Mowhawk Campaign, we might start from scratch and take the project from design through printing. We were given the artwork for the first Skyhorse Mohawk poster we did, but I designed the second, and the Press printed pro-bono.
Sander: There was a unique culture to the company. It was a regular printing business, doing all kinds of work, but it was run as a collective. What did that mean in practical terms?
Henry: Well, at it’s inception, it was not a business. Forged in the anti-Viet Nam War movement, it was simply trying to get out the word in the face of being shut out by printers who were not sympathetic or, if they were, had been intimidated by police and fire harassment and threats. The printers were learning on the job, and unpaid, and worked at other jobs to survive. By 1974, the members of the collective had decided to become a commercial business in order to support the causes to which they were committed, and provide enough of a wage that they would not have to hold down other jobs. Their training had been on the job, but they needed to bring people into the collective with real professional skils in order to be competitive in the commercial printing business. I was one of those hires.
We had weekly staff meetings at which we decided which jobs to accept, which to reject, which to give discounts or to absorb some or all of the costs. We would not accept a job that we felt to be sexist, racist or otherwise would compromise our political, social or moral values. That is what really made us different. We did not hang up our ethics before coming into work.
Sander: What lessons from the activists of the 60s and 70s can today’s Occupy movement learn?
Henry: For people like myself, 41 years teaching college students before I retired, it is that community of young people to whom this exhibition and related events are really addressed. We’d like to empower them by example. Although the technology has changed – we were working in the age of mechanical reproduction and they are living in the digital age – we can show them that a small group of dedicated individuals can take on the overwhelming power of governments, media and corporations and still defeat them.
In my estimation, young technologically savvy and unencumbered flexible minds can turn faster then the more ponderous machinery of established power, no matter how much money it is backed by. That’s empowering. It is why I continue to be an optimist.