#nicholaslampert

For #WaterWednesday

Water is Life.

Today, we are posting these striking images of athletes in silent protest  for racial justice from the Nicolas Lampert Print Box Set. In the Summer Olympics that started in Tokyo, Japan this week, British women’s soccer team became the first athletes to take a knee before their match against Chile. Their opponents also joined the demonstration. Later the same day, players from the United States and Sweden also knelt before kickoff in their match.  

Olympic athletes’ ability to demonstrate such activism came only after the International Olympic Committee loosened their decades-long prohibition against athletes’ expressions of political, religious, or racial protest.

Nicolas Lampert is a Milwaukee-based interdisciplinary artist and author whose work focuses on themes of social justice and ecology. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Library of Congress, and over fifty-five archives and special collections across the US and Canada, including our Special Collections at the Fine Arts Library!

The print box set includes a copy of A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements, which was Lampert’s first book published in 2013. (Summarized from the website of “Justseeds,” Artists’ Cooperative that is committed to social, environmental, and political engagement.)

Image showing: John Carlos & Tommie Smith, screen print Take A Knee, screen print

“Learn About Black Panther Party History (2010)” with a quote from Alicia Garza from the Nicolas Lampert Print Box Set.

"Most people outside of the art world view art as something that is foreign to their experiences and everyday lives. A People's Art History of the United States places art history squarely in the rough-and-tumble of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day.

Author and radical artist Nicolas Lampert combines historical sweep with detailed examinations of individual artists and works in a politically charged narrative that spans the conquest of the Americas, the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, western expansion, the suffragette movement and feminism, civil rights movements, environmental movements, LGBT movements, anti-globalization movements, contemporary antiwar movements, and beyond. A People's Art History of the United States introduces us to key works of American radical art alongside dramatic retellings of the histories that inspired them."--Publisher information.