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Museum And Gallery

Sticking it to the man

STOP H BOMB TESTS Ben Shahn’s 1960 anti-nuke fundraising poster remains striking and fresh.

“Dissent!” is a fiery greatest hits of five centuries of such protest art. Here’s Édouard Manet’s circa 1871 lithograph of French soldiers firing into a Paris crowd. There’s a 16th-century Reformation woodcut complaining that the pope is playing us for suckers; we see a wolf wearing a pope hat seducing sheep away from Jesus. A 1770 knockoff of a Paul Revere broadside (who was knocking off somebody else) shows dastardly redcoats gunning down Bostonians in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The 62 prints and publications offer a who’s who of art rabble rousers: Honoré Daumier, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, José Guadalupe Posada, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys. It’s important that we see and study this stuff, but the challenge for institutional exhibits — a challenge curator Susan Dackerman doesn’t solve — is how to embrace protest art without neutralizing it.

The works that retain the most power to inspire are the Technicolor posters of Sister Corita, a Los Angeles Roman Catholic nun and college art teacher who left the sisterhood and moved to Boston in 1968 — where her legacy is most prominent as the designer of those rainbow stripes on the Boston Gas tank along Route 93 in Dorchester. The show offers six eye-popping hot-pink, blue, and yellow screenprints from 1969 that condemn the Vietnam War, poverty, and the oppression of African-Americans. Corita, who died in 1986, had a pop sensibility, often appropriating and rejiggering corporate logos, package designs, and advertising slogans. Here she incorporates images of a mourning Coretta Scott King, a smiling Eugene McCarthy, a black boy crying on the cover of Life magazine, a captured Vietcong fighter from the front of Newsweek. A Passion for the Possible takes a quote from Yale chaplain and activist William Sloane Coffin: “Realism demands pessimism, but hope demands that we take a dim view of the present because we hold a bright view of the future, and hope arouses as nothing else can arouse a passion for the possible.” Corita creates sparks by combining such subtle and moving texts — they often sound like something e.e. cummings might have written — with her crackerjack eye for color, typography, and composition, an eye that’s apparent here as she creates rhythm and emphasis by switching back and forth between mechanical typefaces and her handwritten script.