The J20 Art Strike resonate with the approach of the May 22, 1970 New York Artists’ Strikeagainst Racism, Sexism, Repression and War, also commonly referred to as the Art Strike. The 1970 Art Strike responded to different circumstances than the upcoming one. It was called in the weeks after President Nixon announced he had expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Protesting students had been shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State universities.
Police in Augusta, Georgia had killed six black men and injured some 75 more protesting the death of a black prisoner. The strike memorialized these deaths and the three black students killed and 27 wounded by police two years earlier while demonstrating against racial segregation at the bowling alley at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg.
Responding to the death of protesters at the hands of the police and National Guard, the strike proclaimed itself an “expression of shame and outrage at our government’s policies of racism, war and repression.”
Art Strike poster, (1970), Lucy R. Lippard papers, 1930s–2010, bulk, 1960s–1990 (image courtesy the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
The Art Strike pickets the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 22, 1970 (photo by Jan van Raay.)
The Art Strike on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 22, 1970. Robert Morris and Poppy Johnson, strike co-chairs, at right, debate museum vice-director Joseph Noble, at left beside striking artist Art Coppedge (photo by Jan van Raay and used with permission.)