The people have spoken. They have put it in writing. They have created manifestos.
Pitzer College Art Galleries has collected these works and put them on display in Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal, an exhibition of the ideas, wishes and demands of scores of citizens with something to say and a need to be heard. It is our current climate of discord that created Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal. It was conceived to give these citizens a soapbox and to amplify their voices.
These voices are many. These voices belong to inmates at sun-baked correctional facilities in Southern California and to cloistered scholars at elite colleges. These voices express the ideas of professional writers, self-taught artists and developmentally disabled students. Their broad variety of concerns were harvested by a team of varied volunteers—Andrea Bowers, Olga Koumoundouros, Việt Lê, Ultra Red, Carlin Wing and Jenny Yurshansky—who collected manifestos that are printed on paper, painted on canvas, formed in neon, shot on video and carved in wood. MANIFESTO: A Moderate Proposal is a multitude of opinions hung densely, floor-to-ceiling, in sections that reflect the numerous themes that include immigration, ableism, race, resistance, religion and gentrification.
MANIFESTO: A Moderate Proposal opens on January 20, 2018, and runs through March 29, 2018, at the Pitzer College Art Galleries in Claremont, CA. Pitzer College is one of the highly ranked and nationally admired Claremont Colleges that share contiguous campuses in eastern Los Angeles County. A symposium discussing many of the issues raised by the exhibition will take place on March 23, 2018.
Funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, MANIFESTO: A Moderate Proposal was conceived as an outlet for ideas and proposals for the healing of discord in our society and improvement of conditions for all citizens. With the public sphere embroiled in a seemingly intractable contest of us-versus-them so virulent that it has filtered down to a neighbor-vs-neighbor antagonism, it is essential that we reexamine just who we are and what we stand for. MANIFESTO: A Moderate Proposal has joined the conversation.