AWC demonstration in front of the MoMa against Nelson Rockefeller, the Butcher of ATTICA (23 September 1971)

The photo shows two protestors with two posters at a gathering in front of the MoMa against governor Nelson Rockefeller who is being accused of being behind the massacre in Attica prison in New York. The female protestor is holding up a sign that reads: At Attica and at the Modern Rockefeller calls the shots. The male protestor is putting up a poster on the wall announcing Rockefeller as the Butcher of Attica.

The AWC refused a $17000 grant on the grounds that the same elite donors funding art initiatives also facilitate wars, and designed a flyer featuring a hand-drawn, fake dollar bill, the “One Blood Dollar”, that substituted an image of Rockefeller in the place of George Washington. This was a criticism of the collusion between the state and cultural power and emphasized on the AWC’s position against art museums with their exclusionary practices and corporate affiliations. The statements from the protest made this stance clear: “We demand that the butcher of Attica resign as a trustee from the Museum of Modern Art. It is a mockery that Rockefeller supports the arts. It is intolerable that Rockefeller uses the art of the 20th century to gild his prison.” Posters from the demonstration also echoed this distaste of the control of the powers that be over matters of state as well as art: “At Attica and at the Modern, Rockefeller calls the shots”. The black and white text on the poster was placed on a dark ground splattered with bloody red bullet wounds.

(Artists to Art Workers, in Julia Bryan Wilson’s Art Workers Radical Practice in Vietnam War Era, pp 22-23)