Part of the ‘02 IMF/World Bank festivities was a planned widespread, networked civil disobedience around the city of Washington, DC, which organizers hoped would include major highways and subway lines in and out of the city. In order to dramatize the organizers’ intent, this poster depicted the entire city of DC squeezed and choked at the various intersections of highways and rapid-transit lines — or, resembling some kind of weird alien bodily organ, depending on how much Star Trek you’ve watched.

Medium-res jpg image, 839k

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By this time, the approach of summer meant one thing: time to get going on the posters for the Fall World Bank/IMF Mobilization! A more militant local outfit, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, was taking a large part in this year’s mobe as many in the movement were becoming dissatisfied with the more “moderate” position of the large NGOs such as Global Exchange, and DC’s own Mobilization For Global Justice (originally formed to organize the A16 WB/IMF actions in 2000).

As was customary, my posters for the IMF/WB Mobe sought to be simple, easily-read portrayals of the issues our movement was addressing; in addition, this year I also added a series of images depicting our movement’s vision for a peaceful and just society, to shut up all those conservative wags out there predictably whining “we all know what you’re against, but what are you for?”

Complete set, Adobe pdf file, 3m

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The Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank mobilization was to be our blockbuster sequel to A16, rumored by many to be the biggest mass mobe in town since Vietnam — Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, barring any sudden freakish turn of events — such as, say, a large airliner or two or three diving into a few really large buildings.

Needless to say, the wheels pretty much came off The Movement’s™ wagon very soon after 9/11; the Mobilization for Global Justice and Ruckus Society practically tripped over each other while backing out, citing (as I recall) “respect for the victims” — even as the neocons and other right-wing freaks at the time were preparing for endless war overseas and endless abuse of the Constitution at home, also out of consideration for “the victims”. Luckily, there was ANSWER, which went on with its events, shifting to a pro-civil liberties, anti-war focus for what was previously an anti-globalization mobe, so at least the Left hadn’t been totally bullied off the streets by the Neocons and their brownshirt pals in Free Republic and Gathering Of Eagles.

Liberate Labor, high-res jpg image, 1.1mb
Demand Justice, high-res jpg image, 645k
Take Back Your Dignity, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Defend Democracy, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Restore Your Planet, high-res jpg image, 839k

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What’s especially ironic about this piece was that it was a piece with a World War II patriotic retro-kitsch motif based on the loud, kitschy, big-time phony WWII-era posters on the bus shelters and subway billboards being used to advertise a recent Disney special-effex blockbuster, the infamous Ben Affleck masterwork Pearl Harbor that came out early that summer… a good three months before the real, live, non-ironic, mindless patriotic kitsch seizure following 9/11.

On the purely non-issue-oriented side, a design and technical epic Win. The layout, pose and color came out a perfect match — I was able to find a high-res scan of the original WWII piece to point-sample my colors from — and it was also the first time I made serious use of top-highlight and middletone shadow hatching effects, drawn on a sheet of tracing paper with a dark graphite stick, scanned as a separate layer and dropped over the main drawing in Illustrator. I’d been kicking the idea around for a while, playing with it just a bit, but decided to try it whole hog after seeing Van Gogh’s La Meridienne at the Musèe d’Orsay a few months before.

High-res jpg image, 1.8mb

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