Respect Life/Stop Reagan
Designer
Scott Newkirk
Publisher
Artists in Common
Date1984
Dimensions22 x 17 in. (55.9 x 43.2 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Object numberPH.9286
DescriptionThis poster was produced by Inkworks Press, a worker-owned offset printshop founded in Berkeley, California in 1974. By the time it closed in 2015, it had printed thousands of posters for the area’s numerous community and non-profit organizations, addressing domestic and international social-justice issues as well as concert posters for protest singers like Pete Seeger. Most of the posters it printed were designed and distributed by its huge base of activist clients, although some were designed in-house. This slightly scrappy design, incorporating news photographs of an antinuclear march and a distorted caricature of Republican president Ronald Reagan, was issued by Artists in Common during the election campaign of 1984, in which incumbent Reagan ultimately defeated Democrat Walter Mondale in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. election history. The poster refers to the fact that during his first presidential term, Reagan’s military-spending program was the largest in American peacetime history; this, combined with his rabid anticommunism and anti-Russian rhetoric, made many Americans and others around the world deeply fearful of the consequences of a second Reagan term.On View
Not on view
