Red Bass Magazine, No. 7
Art, Culture and Politics
Red Bass Magazine was published in Tallahassee, Florida, and provided an art and culture lens of critique on media and politics during there 1980s. The magazine includes essays, interviews, poetry and art. Contributors to this issue include Jean Michel Basquiat, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Stephen Bradley, Frank Brown, Rick Campbell, Greg Carter, Ramsey Clark, Jayne Cortez, Roque Dalton, Kenneth Falana, Robert Fitchter, Brad Freeman, Mark Hinson, David Kirby, Jim Loser, Jay Murphy, Eugenie Nable, Claudia Perry, Zilphia Rawson, Joseph A. Roache, Paul Rutkovsky, Mary Jane Ryals, Burke Sauls, Vanessa Wilkerson and Ray Wonder, as well as interviews with Maya Angelou and Allen Ginsburg.
Red Bass Magazine
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1984
magazine
El Caso Contra Lincoln Center (The Case Against Lincoln Center)
Urban Redevelopment
"To keep the well-to-do from continuing to flee the city and depleting its tax base, city, state, and federal government, and the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Mellons finance the prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was built in the middle of a Puerto Rican ghetto, displacing thousands of families and a lively street culture. Upper-income families move into high-rise apartment houses and gourmandise the "humanities," financially inaccessible and culturally irrelevant to the lives of the former residents." (Roz Payne Archives) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u7NjO8dl8v8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Prelinger Archives - YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
Revolutionary Poetry Insert from Black Panther Party Newspaper
Black Panther Party
A page from the April 6, 1970, issue of The Black Panther Party Newspaper that features poetry.
Black Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
April 6, 1970
underground press
FNL de Vietnam del Sur
Cuban Revolution
According to a 2015 article in Slate Magazine by Rebecca Onion, this poster was one of a set created by Cuban artist Felix René Mederos Pazos, "the product of a trip Mederos took to Vietnam in 1969, on assignment from the Cuban government's Department of Revolutionary Orientation.
Cuban artists often addressed international subjects, in alignment with the Cuban Revolution's political focus. (Other posters produced around this time expressed solidarity with anti-colonial guerrillas in Angola, Black Panthers in Watts, California, and the people of Hiroshima, Japan.) These Mederos posters repeated the slogan 'Como en Vietnam,' which was meant to encourage Cubans to emulate the resourcefulness of the North Vietnamese in their daily lives." Roz Payne travelled to Cuban during the 1960s-era as a part of the Venceremos Brigade.
To read Onion's full article, click here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/01/history_of_cuba_and_vietnam_posters_by_rene_mederos.html
Cuban artist Felix René Mederos Pazos
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
poster
Whitney Museum Presents "Newsreel: Ten Years of Political Documentaries"
Underground Press
This poster promotes an exhibition of films by Newsreel Films at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
During the mid-2000s, Roz Payne wrote a brief essay on the early history of Newsreel Films:
"In 1967 a group of independent filmmakers, photographers, and media workers formed a collective to make political relevant films sharing our resources, skills, and equipment. As individuals we had been covering many of the events that we considered news, demonstrations, acts of resistance, and countless inequities and abuses. Sometimes films were made and some times not. Most often they were made too late and did not go to the people who could use them best.
We met in a basement in the lower eastside of New York and later at the alternate U, then more basements until we got an office. The only news we saw was on TV and we knew who owned the stations. We decided to make films that would show another side to the news. It was clear to us that the established forms of media were not going to approach those subjects which threaten their very existence.
I was a school teacher in New Jersey who shot photos. My marriage with Arnold Payne, Mr. Muscle Beach Jr. had broken up, I left a little house on the Palisades, overlooking the boats on the Hudson River right over the Spry sign across from 96th Street. I would sit looking at the burning windows of the NYC skyline as the sun set. That fire and the fire from a GI's Zippo lighter on the straw of a Vietnamese hut helped ignite me. I moved to New York City.
Walking down Second Ave and 10th Street with my camera one afternoon Melvin Margolis, a wild looking hippie stopped me and said, 'Hey, your a photographer and there's a meeting tonight of all the political film people. You have to go. It is very important. Make sure that you go. I'm not kidding.' I showed up that night, to the first meeting of Newsreel.
About 30 people met weekly to talk about films, equipment, and politics. I think we were great because we came from various political backgrounds and had different interests. We never all agreed on a political line. We broke down into smaller groups to work on the films. The working groups included anti-Vietnam-war, anti-imperialist, high school, students, women, workers, Yippies, Third World, and the infamous sex, drugs and party committee.
We wanted to make two films a month and get 12 prints of each film out to groups across the country. We wanted to spark the creation of similar news-film groups in other major cities of the United States so that they would distribute our films and would cover and shoot the events in their area.
The first film I worked on was the 1968 student take over of Columbia University. The students had taken over 5 buildings. We had a film team in each building. We were shooting from the inside while the rest of the press were outside. We participated in the political negotiations and discussions. Our cameras were used as weapons as well as recording the events. Melvin had a W.W.II cast iron steel Bell and Howell camera that could take the shock of breaking plate glass windows.
Newsreel worked to expand the awareness of events and situations relevant to shaping the movement. Our films tried to analyze, not just cover; they explored the realities that the media, as part of the system, always ignores.
In the 67 the FBI started the Counter-intelligence program to try to destroy African Americans, especially the Black Panther Party and the New Left. We worked with Third World groups. We produced various films that these groups could use to tell their stories and to use in organizing in their own communities and workplaces, hopefully serving as catalysis for social change.
Newsreel not only made films but we were among the first to distribute films made in Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and the Middle East.
As Newsreel grew we spread out, opened offices and distribution centers across the country. We had offices in San Francisco, Detroit, Boston, Kansas, Los Angeles, Vermont, and Atlanta. We made films and distributed our films in the hope that the audiences who saw them would respond to the issues they raised. We wanted people to work with our films as catalysis for political discussions about social change in America and to relate the questions in the films to issues in their own communities.
We had many struggles in Newsreel around class, women, political education, cultural and worker politics, the haves and have nots. It was hard to hold to the correct political line. Little by little the groups changed from film-maker control to worker control, to women control, to third world control. Today, Third World Newsreel is in New York, California Newsreel is in San Francisco, and there is a Vermont Newsreel Archives.
In l972, myself and others moved to Vermont. We continue to distribute Newsreel films, shoot videos, use computer graphics, and maintain a film, photo, and document archive. With the easy accessibility of video cameras thousands of people are making their own documents to tell the stories of what is happening around them. I am shooting history of retired FBI agents that worked on Cointelpro against Don Cox, an exiled Black Panther and the white women who helped him. I teach History of the Sixties, Civil Rights Movement, Women, and Mycology at Burlington College."
Whitney Museum
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1977
poster
"Theater and Culture," by Enrique Buenaventura
Radical Theater
This essay was written by Colombian playwright and director, Enrique Buenaventura and explains his effort to answer the question, "What kind of theater should we do?" from a Latin American perspective. Buenaventura views theater as the primary means by which a “man of culture” is capable of communicating with the masses, thus raising their consciousness and paving the way for development.
written by Enrique Buenaventura, published by Julian theater
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
pamphlet
Abbie! Toronto Crew ‘98
Yippies
Written, produced, and starring Bern Cohen, the play Abbie! commemorates the life of Youth International Party founder and 60s icon, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman’s long history in social and political activism is most well-known for his role in the 1968 police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Hoffman and his fellow Yippies practiced a kind of absurdist, anarchic and often theatrical approach to social critique and activism. For example, at the 1968 convention, the Yippies nominated a pig, "Pigasus," for U.S. President.
Abbie Production Team
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1998
Button
Physical Object
Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America
U.S. Interventionism in Central America
In 1984, a group of artists in New York joined forces to use their creative talents to challenge U.S. intervention in Latin America under the Reagan Administration. This poster was a call for artists to join the effort and was created by American sculptor, Claes Oldenburg. The final version of the poster differed from the one here, listing 1,087 participants, from individual visual artists and collaborative teams, performance artists, poets, filmmakers, curators, art critics and writers, as well as 80 events, including 29 exhibitions, 20 film showings, 7 dance and performance festivals, 6 poetry brigades, 6 video and TV installations, 6 reading series, 2 street actions, 2 window installations, and 2 panel discussions. According to artist, Doug Ashford, "Artists’ Call Against US Intervention in Central America was a nationwide mobilization of writers, artists, activists, artists organizations, and solidarity groups that began in New York in 1983. Quickly mobilizing artists and their organizations across the country, Artists Call collectively produced over 200 exhibitions, concerts and other public events over a period of 12 months. These events increased awareness of our government’s involvement in state terrorism across the hemisphere, linked the notion of aesthetic emancipation to revolutionary politics and provided concrete resources for the cultural workers and public intellectuals in the region and in exile."
Claes Oldenburg
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1984
poster
Fuck the Rich
Anti-Capitalism
This anti-capitalist poster features the comic book character, Richie Rich.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown [ca. mid-1980s]
poster
Anti-WW3 Internationalist Art Show
Anti-War Movement
The Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Festival was organized by the San Francisco Poster Brigade in 1981-1982 as a travelling exhibit of roughly 2000 works of contemporary art and poetry that dealt with themes related to peace and social justice. Stops included San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson and New York. This poster was designed by artist, Rachael Romero.
Rachael Romero
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1981-1982
poster
Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Show
Anti-War Movement
The Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Festival was organized by the San Francisco Poster Brigade in 1981-1982 as a travelling exhibit of roughly 2000 works of contemporary art and poetry that dealt with themes related to peace and social justice. Stops included San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson and New York. This poster was designed by artist, Rachael Romero.
Rachael Romero
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1981-1982
poster