Armed By Design

Interference Archive is a community-supported archive of material from social movements around the world, created with a mission to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs including exhibitions, workshops, talks, and screenings, all of which encourage critical and creative engagement with the rich history of social movements. Lani Hanna is a PhD Candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. Her research looks at community archives as social movement infrastructure across several rapidly changing cities. She has taken part in organizing several exhibitions at Interference Archive, including Armed by Design. Her article Tricontinental’s International Solidarity: Emotion in OSPAAAL as Tactic to Catalyze Support of Revolution (Radical History Review 2020) was part of a special edition about gender and the Cuban Revolution.  Jen Hoyer is a librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and has volunteered on collections, exhibitions, and education projects at Interference Archive since 2013. Her writing about the intersections of education, archives, and social movement history is available in The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books, 2021) and What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (Libraries Unlimited, 2022). Josh MacPhee has been collaboratively making, researching, and collecting political art for over twenty years. In 2011, he cofounded the Interference Archive, a library, exhibition, event, and research space in Brooklyn dedicated to the exploration of social movement culture. He is also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, and the author/editor of multiple books including Celebrate People's History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution (Feminist Press, 2010 and 2020), An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), and Graphic Liberation: Perspectives on Image Making and Political Movements (Common Notions, 2023). His solo exhibition, We Want Everything, was hosted by the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022. Vero Ordaz is a collaborative focused community member.  She weaves her broad life and professional experiences to help bring people together. With a background in American Studies and Labor Studies, she is a higher education administrator and active rank-and-file member of the PSC-CUNY union. Sarah Seidman is an historian and curator. As the Puffin Foundation Curator of Social Activism at the Museum of the City of New York, she curates the ongoing exhibition Activist New York, which explores two centuries of activist histories in New York City. She has also curated the exhibitions Beyond Suffrage: A Century of New York Women in Politics, and co-curated PRIDE: Photographs of Stonewall and Beyond by Fred W. McDarrah and King in New York, and the exhibition and catalog Armed by Design at Interference Archive. Dr. Seidman holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. She has received fellowships from the University of Rochester, New York University, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and her writing has appeared in Radical History Review, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, among other places.

Introduction

Lani Hanna, Jen Hoyer, Josh MacPhee, Vero Ordaz, Sarah Seidman




PART ONE On Tricontinentalism

Sarah Seidman

Third World Struggle in Motion: Alfredo Rostgaard’s Design for the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Josh MacPhee

Introduction to the Visual Index of the Tricontinental

Lani Hanna and Rob McBride




PART TWO
As Big as the World: An Interview with Jane Norling

Lani Hanna, Vero Ordaz, and Jane Norling

Cuba and the Revolutionary Option in the Arab World

Nate George

The Winged Horse of Global Solidarity: OSPAAAL Posters and the North Korean-Cuban Alliance

Sohl Lee

Influences Between U.S. and Cuban Poster Art

Lincoln Cushing




PART THREE

The Carlos Vega Collection of OSPAAAL Posters

Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey

Hero Genesis in OSPAAAL Posters and Cuban Comics

Javier Gaston-Greenberg

Los carteles de la OSPAAAL y el efecto de halo

Ernesto Menendez-Conde

Passafronteras: Notes on Archives, Tricontinental Graphic Action, and Solidarity

André Mesquita

Between Two Worlds: A Conversation with Joseph Orzal

Joseph Orzal