From the art capital of New York City to the nation's midsection, visual artists are participating in partisan politics with a vigor not seen since the 1960s.

Arts & Politics Part Four

The Partisan Project, a group of mostly local artists and designers, has been placing posters such as this in windows and doorways in and outside Pittsburgh to show its dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. Click photo for larger image. A series of articles on the convergence of art and politics in the 2004 presidential campaign. Previous coverage Sunday: Stars of every stripe stump for their candidate Monday: TV, radio reflect left, right, 'West' wings Tuesday: Election-year influence nothing new for Hollywood Tomorrow: Theater takes center stage in the final installment of this series.

The presence of the Republican National Convention in New York offered an opportunistic catalyst for an outpouring of opinion that had been brewing in many camps since the last presidential election.

While a majority of the activism appears to be directed toward unseating the present administration, there are supporters of President Bush and his administration to be found within the art community -- they're just a little harder to find.

In an Aug. 27 overview of art activity that was taking place in conjunction with the convention, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, "At the moment, President Bush and the GOP are the chief art world targets: No one seems to have a critical word to say about the failings of the Democrats."

She lists "protest efforts" that range from poster and T-shirt sales to an exhibition and film series at the Whitney Museum of American Art that "link the present situation in Iraq with the Vietnam era."

While finding activist art at venues in Brooklyn, the more affordable successor to SoHo as artist enclave, or in alternative spaces like The Kitchen wouldn't be unusual, apparently more mainstream locations also are becoming involved.

In a Sept. 16 article in The Independent of London correspondent David Usborne writes, "Even some well-heeled galleries in Manhattan, who might normally be concerned about alienating wealthy Republican clients, are choosing to wear their election hopes and fears on their sleeves."

One such place he cites is the Cheim & Reid gallery in trendy west Chelsea -- "one of the city's most prestigious spaces" -- that hosted a Democratic fund-raiser in July. Gallery owner John Cheim told TheArtNewspaper.com, Usborne reports, that "this is the most important election of my lifetime" and added that if his politics lost him business, so be it. "The gallery conceded that it had already lost one client, who had previously spent over $1 million with them," Usborne writes.

Artist and activist Paul Chan, with the collective Friends of William Blake, produced "The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention," a 33-by-22-inch full-color fold-up map of New York that listed more than 600 "points of information," including the locations of RNC events, protest sites, bathrooms and "legal pointers." The artist and his collaborators paid for the map's production out of pocket, and 25,000 were delivered to locations throughout the city for free distribution.

Chan, 31, a Hong Kong native who lives in New York, is one of the artists exhibiting in the 2004 Carnegie International, which opens Oct. 9 at Carnegie Museum of Art. His entry in the International is expected to be less politically specific (though it might be noted that what's considered political, particularly in contemporary art, may lie in the eye of the beholder).

"Go to War for My Lies," an artist book by Joan Iversen Goswell, was exhibited in the July Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual at Carnegie Mellon University. Click photo for larger image.

Randy Kennedy wrote in the Sept. 4 New York Times, "... It is safe to say that the New York art world has had little positive interaction recently with conservative politics" and summed up visual arts activity during the RNC week as generally anti-Bush.

But at The Anthem Gallery in SoHo, which Kennedy describes as a small gallery "owned by conservatives in a liberal town," Republicans found a place of refuge. The gallery threw a party that honored Zell Miller, the Democratic senator who gave the keynote speech at the RNC, drawing 400 people.

Steve Penley, a New York representational painter exhibiting at the gallery, told Kennedy he'd never met, in New York, "a conservative artist or gallery owner, or at least one who would admit to being so."

Another artist, Scott LoBaido of Staten Island, who was exhibiting at the Tribute Gallery on lower Broadway, told Kennedy, "I'm a Republican, and I wear it proudly." During convention week he sold "Have Faith," a painting of the president riding a horse with an American flag in one hand and the severed head of Osama bin Laden in the other, for $2,800.

In Pittsburgh, as in New York, the major energy is pro-John Kerry; or, at least, anti-Bush.

Residents may have noticed the bright red, white and blue posters hanging in windows and doorways from East Liberty to the North Side that show, for example, a picture of the president wearing a McDonald's uniform and "ex-president" name tag under the words "Out of Office." Another, set against a background of the Stars and Stripes, bears the words, "Let's start over. Cast a smart vote for change."

They're the product of the Partisan Project, a group of artists and designers, many from Pittsburgh, who, realizing the importance of Pennsylvania as a "swing state" in the upcoming election, designed 15 posters to influence voters. "We believe that a vote for the current administration is far worse than no vote at all," they write. They printed 10,000 copes of each poster and bundled them in packets that, like Chan's "People's Guide," are being distributed free at locations like coffeehouses and bookstores, in the city and regionally.

A project of this year's Three Rivers Arts Festival was an invitational graffiti wall that included Ohio artist Craig Dransfield's repeated image of President Bush next to the words "Vote me out."

One of the most potent political works exhibited locally was an artist book, titled "Go to War for My Lies," by Joan Iversen Goswell in the July Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University......

Other artists have shown less blatant works in recent months -- referencing Sept. 11 or war in general but without a specific political stance -- that stand as silent commentary, by their presence urging people to be involved in the moment.

For example, Soldiers & Sailors National Military Museum & Memorial in Oakland is exhibiting portraits by Penn State DuBois art instructor Mary Vollero of every Pennsylvania soldier who "died in the line of service during Operation Iraqi Freedom." There are more than 50, and they're accompanied by their name, age, hometown, service and rank, date of death and cause ("[Rafael L.] Navea died in Al Fallujah, Iraq, after his vehicle hit an explosive device").

Large institutions such as museums and other nonprofit spaces tend to avoid partisan politics, in part because of their long-range commitment to their exhibition schedules, but also because they don't want to offend visitors and, pragmatically, one may assume, funders.

The Andy Warhol Museum, more fleet of foot than most institutions of its size and caliber, and sharing the gadfly cultural observer persona of its namesake, has co-organized an exhibition of the notorious Iraqi prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. While one may assume a partisan intent, the museum's publicity suggests a broader context within which to consider the images.

While such elaboration may at first seem disingenuous, it's actually not out of character for the arts.

In a June interview, Nick Rabkin, director of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago, told a reporter, "Part of the artistic enterprise involves developing a capacity to see things in a different way from yourself, so it tends to attract people on the liberal end of the political spectrum." Saying he sees few political conservatives in his work, Rabkin explains, "Someone like George Bush sees rights and wrongs, blacks and whites. Artists cannot view the world that way."

In his forthcoming book "Homegrown Democrat," author and "Prairie Home Companion" radio host Garrison Keillor muses upon why "95 percent of people" in the arts are Democrats. "An artistic gift is dropped on you by God, and if you attend to the gift and are true to it, you will sometimes be in serious need of a helping hand," Keillor writes. "Art is an imperative stronger than commerce. Republicans don't understand this."

Aside from disposition, there could also be an element of turf battle involved, one that conservative artists, scholars and critics feel they've lost.

The New Criterion addresses a New York Times review of the international exhibition SITE Santa Fe in its September Notes & Comments: "The Times wouldn't be the Times without a dollop of political correctness, which Mr. [Michael] Kimmelman duly supplies when he speaks of [exhibition organizer] Robert Storr's 'deeper purpose' in 'this convention season,' i.e. to exhibit the 'grotesque as a metaphor for constructive social change.' Right. Your compost heap might as well be regarded as 'a metaphor for constructive social change' (meaning, of course, an anti-Republican, anti-Bush crusade)."

Art is typically reflective and complex, qualities at odds with the kind of quickly turned soundbite creations necessitated and even fueled by something as immediate and fluid as a political campaign. While the work that will historically speak for the period has for the most part yet to be produced, the power of image in its most brazen, insistent forms is evident as our great national debate enters its last month.