16 May 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
“The Palestine Poster, a New Genre, a New Voice “
with
Dan Walsh
Founder of Palestine Poster Project Archives
What happens if all the posters that libraries and museums have historically cataloged under different headings such as Holy Land, State of Palestine, State of Israel, Eretz Israel, Promised Land, and Land of the Bible were organized under a single library heading, the Palestine poster?
According to Dan Walsh, founder and archivist of the Palestine Poster Project Archives (PPPA), what emerges is an entirely new genre, one that advances contemporary Middle East scholarship from the high school to the university levels.
“Poster art is historically outspoken and blunt,” says Walsh. “Defining the Palestine poster genre in inclusive terms clarifies not only how Zionist, Palestinian nationalist, and international artists and agencies speak publicly, but also how they speak inwardly, to their own audiences. In the process a great deal about their mythologies and political psychologies is revealed.”
The Archives’ inclusive approach to the term Palestine for cataloging purposes is not without controversy. Yet by presenting competing perspectives together, the Archives encourages comparative study and uncovers buried truths. The result is the most revealing and fascinating permanent art exhibit on Palestine ever curated.
Dan Walsh first began collecting Palestine posters when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. Over the ensuing decades, while running his design company, Liberation Graphics, he continued collecting and today the PPPA website features almost 8,700 Palestine posters from myriad sources. Walsh is a recent graduate of the Arab Studies program at Georgetown University and this presentation draws from his master’s thesis project.
