By Linda Lutton
Olbrisch and Rose belong to a local group that’s adding a new tool to the arsenal of Chicago activists: art. “Visual images are a very quick, easy, attention-grabbing way to get your message across,” says Kim Feicke, a founding member of Art and Revolution Chicago. “It’s a way of bringing culture into the movement that we’re creating. We consider culture and art to be a very important part of our lives, and it needs to be an important part of the world that we’re trying to change.”
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Feicke and others knew they were onto something in 1996, when artists built a 30-foot-high papier-mache “corporate tower of greed” for a counterconvention staged here during the Democratic National Convention. “It had its own head at the top of it, and in each hand it had a puppet–one was Dole, the other was Clinton,” says Feicke. Counterconventioneers hauled the tower and ten-foot-tall Clinton and Dole puppets to the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen. “The whole tower was being pulled by welfare mothers and different folks who were being affected by the corporate powers,” says Feicke. “And then they pulled it down. And then there was a whole utopia on the inside.” Actually, there were multiple utopias, all painted on cardboard: the workers’ cooperative utopia, the bikers’ utopia, lots of flowers…
Art and Revolution Chicago has about ten core members, but they’ve worked with dozens of Chicagoans who are trying to get a particular point across to help them win media attention. “Are you an organization that works to create change for your community?” reads an Art and Revolution flyer. “Well, you don’t have to plan another action/press event with the same old placards and chants.”
“We really stretched it pretty far,” says Ford. “We made a shell, and we put a Herman the Hermit Crab in there, and that was supposed to be her, since she would never meet with us.” NPA members took turns inside the shell. A sign attached to the crab read, “Come out, come out, come out of your shell, Alexis Herman.” In a skit watched by dozens of bystanders and plenty of Herman’s neighbors, the huge Herman puppet swung her arms at protesters wearing oversize masks and representing “the people,” shooing them into low-paying jobs just to get them off welfare. The crowd cheered as “the people” organized and the Herman puppet agreed to heed NPA’s call for job training and education programs.
But Feicke, who was also in Seattle, says that when police crack down, puppets don’t get a break. “In Seattle and D.C. the first people to be arrested have been puppets at both events,” she says. “I think they realize how strong of an image they present, and the corporate powers that be do whatever they can to stop us from using those images.” She says the National Lawyers Guild is on line to represent any puppets who might get arrested on May Day.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
