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by Kari Lydersen
03.26.01
about 180 state police troopers in riot gear surrounded a warehouse in Philadelphia 
. A police helicopter attempted to land on the roof. Police took a circular saw to the locked door. Once the armed brigade busted into the building, they arrested everyone inside. The arrestees were held on a bus for 10 hours without water or bathrooms; they were told to "piss on the floor" according to Dave Bailey, one of those arrested. Many of them, including Bailey, spent 12 days in detention.
Bailey’s bail was set at $10,000. For five days he was held in segregation, in a two-person cell where he was held for 23 hours a day.
His crime?
Making puppets for the protests during the 2000 Republican National Convention.
After arresting the puppet-makers in Philly, the police proceeded to seize and destroy hundreds of puppets and effigies, the collective fruits of weeks of work by hundreds of people. Only a handful of puppets which had been removed by protesters earlier were saved, including 138 skeletons representing all the people executed in Texas during Bush’s reign as governor.
According to the puppeteers, police initially refused to even tell them what they were being arrested for. Police eventually charged the puppeteers—or puppetistas, as some have humorously dubbed them—with "obstructing a highway" (though they were inside a warehouse), and "possession of instruments of crime"—in this case, puppets. In an even more surreal move, police claimed that the artists were planning to release venomous animals during the convention. A rare animal dealer with a truckload of poisonous animals was indeed passing through the city during the time of the convention, though the dealer was not a protester and had contacted the police in advance asking about the safety of traveling through the city.
"There were all sorts of wild reports the cops put out," said Bailey. "We had taken every pain to make our efforts transparent. Everyone knew about it. Obviously it was very dangerous in terms of ideas."
The charges against most of the puppeteers were finally dropped in December, largely because the undercover police who had posed as union stagehands to infiltrate the puppet-making operation couldn’t make identifications. Some of the artists are still facing serious felony assault charges, however.
The puppetistas currently have civil suits in the works. The American Civil Liberties Union has stated that the raid was one of the most egregious modern examples of preventive detention and First Amendment abuse.
Glimmers
s street demonstrations, particularly those against globalization, have grown over the past year and a half, starting with the massive 
anti-WTO protests in Seattle in late 1999, political protest art, including puppets, street theater, stencils, posters, murals and graffiti has enjoyed a resurgence. All were in ample evidence at the anti-IMF protests in Washington D.C. in April 2000, the Republican and Democratic Conventions during the summer, at the anti-IMF/World Bank protests in Prague in September 2000, and at the 2001 Presidential Inauguration, where, despite the authorities’ banning of puppets in the protest area, some creative protesters responded by smuggling puppets in as signs that could be reassembled in puppet form.
Looking Back:
A History of Ebbs and Flows
n the US, political street art flourished amid the revolt of the ‘60s. Murals, a staple of the Mexican Revolution and other international movements, gained prominence as a community-based art form in the U.S. in the late ‘60s and burgeoned over the next few years as funding and public support for them became available. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and other mainstream agencies started making significant funds available to muralists and public art projects in the mid ‘60s, making more projects possible but also putting constraints on the content of publicly-funded work. The Art Workers Coalition in New York and the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists were among the activist art groups formed in the ‘60s who used government funding for politically dissident projects. But pressure from city governments and mainstream community groups blunted the political edge of the mural movement by the mid ‘70s, spurring groups like Artmakers to form in the early ‘80s with rejuvenated radicalism.
Though progressive politics muted in the ‘80s, political public art scaled new heights of sophistication, participation and humor throughout the country. Many attribute this to the wealth of artists who came of age in the ‘60s and to the teaching of political and public techniques in mainstream art schools throughout the ‘70s.
The 1980s: A Heyday of Sorts
hen black graffiti artist Michael Stewart was arrested and strangled to death by New York police in 1985—and when all the (white) officers involved were acquitted—an army of his fellow political public artists rose to his defense. Political street art in New York City protesting his murder and the climate of police brutality mushroomed almost overnight. "The medical examiner removed his eyeballs so there wouldn’t be evidence of the strangulation," said Seth Tobocman, who created numerous posters and stencils protesting Stewart’s murder and the acquittal of the guilty cops the following year. When a diverse and highly politicized group of local artists called Artmakers Inc. launched the ambitious "La Lucha Continua" mural project at La Plaza Cultural in the quickly-gentrifying Lower East Side where Stewart had done much of his work, his slaying emerged as one of several interconnected themes engaged by the project, including apartheid, evictions, US intervention in Central America, the disappeared in Guatemala, homelessness and the power of grassroots community organizing
Political public art was almost synonymous with life for Stewart, Tobocman and their crowd on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1980s, which included activists and artists from virtually every economic, educational and ethnic background. One typical day found Tobocman with a group in Washington Square Park painting a mural of cuffed hands decorated with the stars and stripes of the American flag—an oblique statement on electoral politics.
"These Rastafarian drug dealers ran the park, so we used their system of lookouts. We had them watching our backs while we did this mural. Then these kids from New Jersey came in and we gave them some black spray paint and they painted all over the arch. It was this amazing moment of all these different people working together."
With Reagan in the White House and gentrification, police brutality, and landlord-induced arson rocking the city, the large and vibrant political artist community responded with anger and joy, putting their creativity to work in both legal and extralegal ways to thwart the system. Musicians, poets, eccentric orators and other creatively-inclined rabble-rousers formed a loose network with professionally-trained and self-taught visual artists, who blanketed the city with unauthorized political murals, stencils, fliers, tagged slogans, impromptu performances, speak-outs and jam sessions.
Tompkins Square Park was an unofficial political art gallery and performance space, with speeches, blues, reggae, drum circles or punk music echoing from the band shell. Stencils festooned the sidewalks and political fliers enveloped the lampposts for blocks around. Graffiti was at its height for much of the ‘80s, still more or less the domain of the ghettos where it was born, but blossoming into new and more sophisticated political and aesthetic styles. Stewart was just one of many graffiti artists working hand in hand with activist artists of other sorts—a synergy seen much less frequently today.
Much of the most powerful work of the '80s combined the efforts of both gallery and activist crowds. The homeless performance group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) put on street theater about the plight of the homeless, poor and mentally ill. They were hauled away by police to sanitize the city for the 1984 Olympics. Greenpeace activists attached banners to garbage barges, the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore, jumped from smokestacks, staged mock fashion shows and created other visual and guerrilla theatre works to protest nuclear power, pollution, and animal cruelty, among other issues.
Gran Fury and ACT UP launched biting and provocative AIDS-activism and anti-homophobia crusades in New York, sometimes utilizing corporate advertising methods as with the then-shocking "Kissing Doesn’t Kill" bus and billboard campaign. They also circulated stickers, T-shirts and placards with eye-catching images of penises and slogans like "Sexism Rears its Unprotected Head — AIDS Kills Women," and "The Government has blood on its hands— one AIDS death every half hour." To protest media coverage of AIDS, in 1989 Gran Fury printed a four-page New York Crimes parody of the Times and wrapped it around thousands of Times papers inside vending machines at 4 a.m. The AIDS quilt also made its rounds of the country in the late ‘80s.
Feminist groups were among the most active during the ‘80s: the Guerrilla Girls donned gorilla masks to protest male-dominance of the art world and larger feminist issues. Artist, writer and video producer Suzanne Lacy’s nationwide projects including "In Mourning and in Rage" (actually created in 1977) and "Immigrants and Survivors" placed costumed women in public places to whisper or scream about violence toward women and other feminist issues. In Chicago, New York, Houston, San Francisco and other cities the Women’s Action Coalition used visual and action-oriented art to protest physical and legislative violence against women.
Across the country countless shifting groups and collectives painted overtly political murals with and without official permission. These included an exploding number of Chicano murals in California; anarchist, labor and housing-rights murals along Haight Street and throughout the Mission District in San Francisco; and in New York the "La Lucha" project and Group Material’s excellent and broad-ranging poster and mural campaign.
