Art Workers' Coalition

The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was founded as a diverse and horizontal coalition which united different struggles, coming together in the desire for profound change in the field of art. Conceived in 1969, the Coalition grew out of an action led by Greek artist Takis, who removed one of his sculptures — part of the Museum of Modern Art collection — from the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age to protest about it being included without his permission. The incident let to a group of artists submitting specific demands to the museum to defend the rights of artists and the public. The group formed gradually, with different offshoots stemming from it, for instance the Guerrilla Art Action Group, and it engaged with other collectives — feminist groups and anti-war movements — giving rise to other demands such as the non-racial discrimination of artists, particularly of Puerto Rican and Afro-American artists.

The AWC emerged in a climate of political turbulence: in Europe, the student and workers’ movements were taking place, for instance the May ’68 movement in Paris and events in Prague that same year, as were strikes and demonstrations in different cities around England in 1969. On the US political landscape there were most notably the civil rights struggles of Afro-Americans, demonstrations for homosexuals’ rights and the feminist movement. The AWC, however, was a movement which splintered into numerous networks, marking a watershed in the history of artistic activism — some of the group’s protests and achievements, such as free entry to museums once a week or a consideration of artists’ rights, form the basis of the current relationships between institutions, artists and the public.

The Coalition’s active stance against the Vietnam War became more fervent with its reaction to the My Lai Massacre in March of 1969, whereby US soldiers had killed hundreds of people and raped women and children. The AWC subsequently designed a poster, with the Museum of Modern Art defraying the copies. Yet upon seeing the work, the museum withdrew their support, claiming they could not take up a position on any non-art-related matter. The AWC reacted to this form of censorship by printing and distributing thousands of copies, leading to one of their hardest-hitting actions up until that point: members of the group protested in front of Guernica on 8 January 1970, showing the censored poster And Babies?. The action, photographed by Jan Van Raay, directly linked the Gernika crimes with those from the Vietnam War, underscoring the potential relationship between the painting and other episodes of war.

At this juncture, the AWC asked Picasso to remove Guernica from the museum in order to speak out against the war and to trigger the scope of the painting’s political potential and its huge media resonance. Faced with these demands for alignment, the historian Meyer Shapiro refused to sign the request to remove Guernica, while Alfred H. Barr Jr., Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Pablo Picasso also decided not to support the plea.