Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Clemente Padin, Art Against Apartheid, photocopy, 1986


As I was rooting around my archive the other day I was a little surprised to come across this cool work by the important Uruguyan artist and activist Clemente Padin. This was a piece that Padin submitted to a mail art exhibition that I organized with Nathan Yrizarry and Bill Washburn in San Francisco in 1986 titled "Images from South Africa." As the anti-apartheid struggle intensified in South Africa the government banned the circulation of images of the struggle. This show was conceived to compensate for this lack and to offer some images of the struggle, and to show our solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle in S. Africa. 

The show opened at Media Gallery (director, Patti Davidson) in San Francisco and then travelled to a number of venues across the country including: Zellerbach Auditorium, University of California, Berkeley, CA; Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco, CA; Survival Graphics, Madison, WI; and 320 Gallery, Santa Cruz, CA, & Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA.

Four years later the apartheid regime in South Africa had fallen, and in June 1990 I had the incredible good fortune to see Mandela and Winnie at the Oakland Coliseum where he gave an impassioned speech — this was one of the most wonderful days of my life!

12 pages, individual pages 11" (h) x 8.5" (w), single-sided and when opened 8' 6".





    The crowd during Mandela's speech at the Oakland Coliseum, June 30, 1990