REVIEW
HOPE: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints

When Obama campaign media coordinator, Corey Ealons (now a White House media coordinator), visited Ebony’s offices before the election, he noticed the sampling of random and odd Obama posters pasted and taped on doors and whiteboards. Many of them he had not seen before, but he noted that the campaign had been actively trying to grab as many variations of posters, buttons and t-shirts as they could. Now we know why.

A new book sanctioned by the Obama team, “Hope: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints” hits bookstores this month and features editor Hal Elliot Wert’s amazing collection of the poster work done by artists around the country, many of which have only been seen by pockets of local organizers and downtown galleries.

It’s been noted before that the now iconic “Progress” and “Hope” posters designed by artist Shephard Fairey launched an artistic movement of sorts, spawning at first copycats, then a virtual barrage of design enthusiasts who saw in Obama not just a new American president but a new American aesthetic.

If you ask the birthers and other segments of the fringe right, those artistic interpretations were the beginnings of a Mussolini/Lenin/Hitler-like propaganda campaign designed to install a foreign agent who right now is taking their rights and confirming their fears of Big Brother and a New World Order.

People with good sense, however, took it exactly for what it was –proof that American has become (and in many ways always was) a society extraordinarily overly influenced by the visual. Barack Obama certainly captured the hopes and dreams of millions of voters, but more importantly he won the visual battle hands-down.

Beautiful and historic that the many campaign retrospective books have been, it is this book that captures the real spirit of the movement. Art is, after all, a very personal reflection of the people who create it. That people were inspired to take action in their own form of expression is powerful to see.