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
Nicolas Lampert Print Box Set Lampert, Nicolas, 1969- [artist] New York : Booklyn, Inc., 2018. 1 box : prints, ephemera ; 65 x 50 x 6 cm + 1 poster tube (70 cm) + 1 text Boxed set of color screen prints, with a selection of ephemera, by Nicolas Lampert English| Set includes a copy of A People's Art History of the United States, by Nicolas Lambert; published in New York by the New Press, 2013. Artists' books. Justseeds Artists' Cooperative People's Art History of the United States. Nicolas Lampert : A Decade of Activist Art. 2018 HOLLIS number: 99153715606103941
