Political Recycling : A small study center with a big cause shares its wealth of posters collected from around the world

The propaganda of the poor rarely shows up on network newscasts or in metropolitan newspapers. The art of the oppressed isn’t always displayed in museums.

We most readily see these images in the form of political posters, often crude and sometimes beautiful, tacked up on street corners and fences.

Feed the hungry, one poster may cry. Another may call for an end to United States intervention in Nicaragua.

“These posters are produced by the people who don’t have power,” says Carol Wells, an art history professor at Cal State Fullerton. “Some are done by the best artists. Others are done by people who are barely literate.”

And these vox populi works are ephemeral, easily damaged by rain, torn by wind, carried away by street sweepers.

That’s where Wells comes in. For the past decade, she has collected 8,000 political posters from around the world. This endeavor began as a hobby, and in recent years it has become an institution--ironic considering the grass-roots medium that is documented by her Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Operating from a cubbyhole office in West Los Angeles, the center seeks out posters and preserves them. There are larger such archives. The Library of Congress, for instance, keeps 100,000 posters in its collection. But Wells’ center is probably the most generous when it comes to displaying its treasures at art galleries and university campuses throughout North America and Europe.

“They are one of the best sources for exhibit materials,” said Elena Millie, curator of the poster collection at the Library of Congress. “They’re alerting people to what’s going on in not only other parts of this country but certainly in other parts of the world.”

The center--which is funded by $35,000 in annual grants from several organizations, including the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department--has averaged about 10 shows a year since 1989. With seven shows already either mounted or planned for the first three months of 1992, Wells expects to increase her collection’s exposure.

“Our major goal is to constantly get out to the public,” Wells said. “It’s a form of political recycling.”

Last month, the center mounted the exhibit “500 Years Since Columbus: The Legacy Continues” at Cal State Northridge’s Main Gallery. This display of often angry posters presented a native people’s view of the European colonization of America.

Concurrently, the center had a show at El Camino College in Torrance--”Courageous Voices: An International Poster Exhibition On Racism, Sexism and Human Rights.” An earlier version of that exhibit, at Rancho Santiago College, drew praise from Times reviewer Cathy Curtis.

“The sheer moral force of all these images makes the show exceptional in our confused and callous times,” Curtis wrote.

Wells never intended to be involved in such rugged street aesthetics. Her background was largely academic. This tangent began in 1981, when she visited Nicaragua as part of her art history studies at UCLA.

“There were posters everywhere about everything from the fight for women’s rights to sanitation.” Such outcries appealed to this woman, who had been politically active during the civil-rights marches and the Vietnam War. “I got really excited.”

She collected a few posters, received a few more from friends, and the effort snowballed. Soon her apartment was filled with posters from all over the world.

By 1986, word of her collection had spread, and university galleries began asking Wells to mount exhibits.

“It’s good for the students to see political posters and how important they are for getting a message across, using the same graphics that might be used for advertising,” said Louis Lewis, the CSUN gallery director. “My students were expecting to see graphics for record albums or movies.” But they came out of the Columbus exhibit “ . . . blown away by the messages they had seen.”

The cost and effort of such displays required Wells to become more organized. The grant money and office soon followed.

“My husband was hoping I’d get all the posters out of the house,” she said. “But then we just got more posters. They’re in the living room and the bedroom.”

At the center, which has been open since 1989, Wells employs one full-time worker and uses more than a dozen volunteers. She splits her time between the posters and her job at Cal State Fullerton.

“I teach about the art of the powerful, art that is commissioned by the rich,” Wells said. “The other half of my life I’m doing the opposite.”

The works she collects vary in quality--from carefully designed to hand-scrawled--and in content.

* A map of Africa is superimposed on a facet of a diamond ring. “Some dream of diamonds. Others of equality,” the anti-apartheid text reads. “Boycott South Africa Diamonds.”

* A Vietnam-era poster shows a color photograph of a road strewn with dead civilians, including children. Blood-red letters spell out:

Q: And babies?

A: And babies.

* A pro-abortion rights poster includes a graphic of a coat hanger.

* “Whatever happened to . . .,” shows blank, white silhouettes in a school portrait, referring to government-sanctioned, CIA-supported eradication of unarmed Guatemalan civilians.

“We look at ourselves as others see us,” Wells said, commenting on the posters that have come from other countries. “It’s not always flattering.”

Many of the works produced in the United States are equally critical of American policy. Wells says her exhibits let opposition voices know they are not alone. She tries to mount shows in the midst of controversy.

Perhaps this is what distinguishes the center from other archives and from museums. Its anti-Gulf War show at Encino’s Installations One gallery served as an example.

“We started working on the exhibit after Bush set his deadline. We were hoping to convince people to oppose the war,” Wells recalled. “I was mounting the posters and someone came into the office and said that the bombing had started.

“I had to put down the posters and go to a demonstration,” she said. “Then I went back, finished the posters and opened the exhibit four days later.

“A museum just can’t do that.”