Nomination Form
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International Memory of the World Register Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters 2014-13 1.0 Summary Documentary Heritage Being Nominated The Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters (Liberation Graphics Collection) comprises approximately 1,700 posters plus related paper ephemera, created by Palestinian and international artists in solidarity with the quest for Palestinian self-determination. These documents cover a critical time period in Palestinian history— the second half of the twentieth century, when Palestinians organized and asserted themselves under conditions of exile and occupation. The Palestine poster genre is unique in world art and a much-overlooked feature of Palestinian cultural heritage. Furthermore, the posters themselves are important repositories of primary data on Palestinian political and social history. They provide a unique lens through which audiences can gain insight into the aspirations, attitudes, and perspectives of the people involved in the events of contemporary Palestinian history, recorded as those events occurred. The Liberation Graphics Collection represents the core of the Palestine Poster Project Archives, http://www.palestineposterproject.org, which holds paper and/or digital images of more than 9,100 posters by some 1,800 artists from more than 50 countries. Inscription of the Liberation Graphics Collection is sought so that the posters can be conserved, organized, and prepared for acquisition by a Palestinian institution capable of maintaining them in perpetuity, ideally, in Palestine. 2.0 Nominators 2.1 Name of nominators (persons or organization) Dr. Salim Tamari; Dr. Rochelle Davis; Amer Shomali, M.A.; Dan Walsh, M.A.; Catherine Baker, M.Ed. 2.2 Relationship to the nominated documentary heritage Dr. Tamari is a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) and the former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute of Jerusalem Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. Dr. Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He is a member of the Palestine Poster Project Archives Advisory Board. Dr. Davis is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and she is also the Academic Director of the Arab Studies Program. MOW Nomination/Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters 1 She is a member of the Palestine Poster Project Archives Advisory Board. Mr. Shomali is a Ramallah-based artist active in the production, promotion, and preservation of a wide range of media including film, posters, and painting. He holds an M.A. in animation from Bournemouth University, UK, and a B.A. in architecture from Birzeit University, Palestine. Mr. Shomali received the Said Foundation Award (United Kingdom) in 2011 and the Young Artists Award (Egypt) in 2013. He is a member of the Palestine Poster Project Archives Advisory Board. Dan Walsh first began studying Palestine posters in the mid-1970s during his Peace Corps Morocco Arabic language training. He has an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University (2012) and he is the curator of the Palestine Poster Project Archives. Catherine Baker is a writer who has published on a variety of topics, including a 2013 article on Land Day posters for the Mondoweiss news blog. She has an M.Ed. from the University of Virginia and contributes to strategic planning and the development of written products related to the Palestine Poster Project Archives. She is a member of the Palestine Poster Project Archives Advisory Board. 2.3 Contact person(s) Dan Walsh, owner and curator, Palestine Poster Project Archives 2.4 Contact details Name Address Dan Walsh N/A Telephone Facsimile Email N/A N/A [email protected] 3.0 Identity and description of the documentary heritage 3.1 Name and identification details of the items being nominated If inscribed, the exact title and institution(s) to appear on the certificate should be given. The Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters Private Individual Compendium Silver Spring, MD This documentary heritage comprises approximately 1,700 works on paper—posters plus related materials (e.g., books about posters, exhibit catalogs, newspaper articles on the posters, posters-as-postcards) that cover an approximately 30-year timeframe (1967 to late 1990s) and comprise an encyclopedic, aesthetically MOW Nomination/Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters 2 presented record of contemporary Palestinian life. 3.4 History/provenance “Looking at these posters is like reading a diary of the Palestinian nationalist movement,” reporter Ori Nir wrote in an article published in 2003 in the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz (see Bibliography). Mr. Nir was describing his reaction to a collection started almost by accident by Dan Walsh while living in Morocco in the 1970s, and which now forms the core of the largest archives of its kind in the world. From 1974–1976, Mr. Walsh served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Marrakech, Morocco. Incidental to his study of the Arabic language, Mr. Walsh began collecting Palestine posters with Arabic captions. (A description of this early collecting is provided in his master’s thesis, pp. 1-2. See Bibliography.) Mr. Walsh initially became interested in these posters owing to their graphic content and began sharing them with others through lecture presentations to college classes and community groups. In 1982, the American-Palestine Education Foundation, with the support of the late Edward Said, awarded Mr. Walsh a small grant to cover the costs of having approximately 300 Palestine posters professionally photographed for display in a portable slide show, which Mr. Walsh used in subsequent presentations. In 1983 Mr. Walsh founded a new business, Liberation Graphics, through which he assisted nonprofit and activist groups in creating and disseminating posters and other graphic resources. In the process of running Liberation Graphics he art-directed posters in solidarity with Palestinian groups and activities and he continued to collect Palestine posters, display them, and speak to audiences about the story they told. As word of Mr. Walsh’s presentations spread, he began to receive unsolicited posters directly from artists and from individuals who wanted the posters they owned to be preserved as part of a larger collection. In 1999, the Ruth Mott Foundation awarded Mr. Walsh a Community Arts grant to underwrite the costs of electronically conserving all the Palestine posters that he had acquired since 1974. Some 1,700 posters and related paper miscellanea were then digitally scanned. Low-resolution and high-resolution images of all the items were prepared and stored on a total of 18 archival-quality CDs. Mr. Walsh continued to acquire posters, and his efforts eventually resulted in the Palestine Poster Project Archives, which holds both paper and digital images of more than 9,100 posters by some 1,800 artists from more than 50 countries. New posters, artists, and collections are added continuously. The main intellectual product of Mr. Walsh's graduate thesis was to discover that when Palestine posters historically dispersed in a variety of physical settings and catalogued under a wide number of rubrics (e.g., Muslim, Arab, Middle East, Jewish, Israeli, Holy Land, Levant) are consolidated under a single heading, an entirely new and pedagogically innovative genre emerged: the Palestine poster. The material electronically conserved under the Ruth Mott Foundation project are collectively identified, within the Archives, as the Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters; it is this subset of posters which is proposed for inscription in the Memory of the World Register. In a review of these posters published in a 2003 article in the Washington Post, arts editor Philip Kennicott wrote, “it is an impressive and dogged bit of collecting, a comprehensive catalog of the iconography of Mideast MOW Nomination/Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters 3 politics, and a compendium of political art, some of it mediocre, some of it brilliant.” The posters in the Liberation Graphics Collection were created by Palestinian and international artists in solidarity with the goal of Palestinian self-determination. All these posters are pre-digital; that is, they were created prior to the emergence of the Internet and so were originally produced exclusively for printing and for circulation in hard copy. Posters are “graphic ephemera”—printed in small quantities, often on cheap paper, for immediate posting on walls or plastering on fences and buildings. The Palestine posters in the Liberation Graphics Collection would not now be accessible if Mr. Walsh had not obtained them while they were still available, sought out publishers and artists, tracked down individuals rumored to be holding onto private collections, and built up relationships over the years with artists and organizations around the world who have helped him in his search. Through Mr. Walsh’s salvage anthropology effort, a unique cultural narrative told in a unique medium has been preserved. 4.0 Legal information 4.1 Owner of the documentary heritage (name and contact details) Name Address Dan Walsh Telephone Facsimile Email N/A N/A [email protected] 4.2 Custodian of the documentary heritage (name and contact details if different from the owner) Same as above