hoped. It was too easy to work together because somebody had an idea, and
everybody else said ‘Yes.’” Without more of an internal dialectic, the group
dynamic was less about pushing and shoving each other to better solutions
than about consensus. So it was disbanded.
By this time Victore realized that producing his own posters at his
own expense was also counterproductive. He mailed hundreds out (and
many of them were hanging in offices all over town), but he decided that
the most effective way to achieve saturation was to convince an appropriate
group to sponsor the work. Of course, balancing the artist’s want with the
sponsor’s needs is tricky, even when the work is done for free, and Victore
quickly learned that pro bono arrangements do not always result in the
holiest of marriages. He complains, “Groups of this kind don’t (for lack of a
better term) understand the tool of the poster and the power that it could
potentially have.” But after a few failed relationships he found the perfect
client for one of his sharpest posters in the venerated NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People), which was trying to
shed its moderate civil-rights image and regain its activist aura.
The NAACP had produced a documentary film called Double
Justice, about the racism inherent in the death penalty, and asked Victore to
design its promotional mailer. Instead of using film stills he decided to do a
large rendering of a child’s stick-figure hangman game, where players guess
letters that comprise a word, and for every wrong guess a body part is hung
from a scaffold—simultaneously presenting both an innocent children’s
pastime and a terrifying symbol (when presented in the context of racism).
The word that Victore used was “nigger;” the poster shows three letters:g,
g, and r. “I got the idea for the hangman game when I was in the elevator
leaving the meeting,” Victore recalls. “I ran to my bartender, who was the
guy from the Shakespeare Project, and said, ‘What do you think?’ He said,
‘James, it’s brilliant; they’ll never take it.’ But they took it.” The elegantly
simple poster was mailed to a list of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Education Fund, Inc., lawyers who help people on death row. It was also
sent to school teachers along with the video. “The last thing that I had
heard from them (which was a while ago now) was that they got a call from
[former U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Blackmun’s office to obtain copies,”
says Victore. “So it was in Justice Blackmun’s office just before he reversed
his opinion on the death penalty.”
The hangman poster (titled Racism and the Death Penalty) was the
first of two posters for the NAACP that confront racially biased capital
punishment. The second,The Death Penalty Mocks Justice, is a white-on-
black drawing of a skull with a stuck-out tongue in the form of an
American flag. Here Victore resorted to known clichés (something that he
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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