Rarely is a poster more effective than live TV coverage, but
Victore’s Racismadded a critical dimension to the event. If Victore never
created another polemic after this, he should be satisfied that he made a
contribution to contemporary visual iconography. But this was not the first
nor would it be the last of his visual commentaries. Although it is a
standard against which his future work will be fairly or unfairly judged, it is
one of many memorable images that he has created in a little over a decade
since becoming a graphic designer.
In 1992 , Victore designed and produced his first polemical poster,
Celebrate Columbus—or what he calls the Dead Indian—to commemorate the
five-hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America by Christopher
Columbus. “My reason for doing the poster,” he explains, “was because, at
the time, everybody in media was saying that from one man’s accidental
discovery we are such a great nation.” Victore suspected that the hoopla
around the celebration, which was being criticized by Native American and
other human rights groups, demanded further scrutiny, and he wanted to add
his voice to revelation of, in his own words, “what I like to call the ‘pox-
infested blanket story,’ the genocide of indigenous peoples by the American
government. I wasn’t trying to throw a stone through anybody’s window. I
just wanted to inject the notion that there’s always another side, which at
that time was getting lost. The whole revisionist, nationalistic view was
getting stronger and stronger. I wanted to offer a small counterpoint.”
Using his rent money Victore printed three thousand two-color
posters, which showed a vintage photograph of a Native American warrior,
whose noble face he drew over graffiti-style in black marker to look like a
skull. With a couple of volunteers, he illegally pasted about two thousand
copies on walls and scaffolds around New York. He also obtained the
addresses of Native American groups in the United States and Canada and
mailed them tubes containing twenty posters each. For all his effort,
Victore’s first stab at advocacy went mostly unappreciated. A request for an
appointment with a Native American organization in Washington, D.C.,
was ignored. “I left the posters on their porch with a note and got no
response at all.” Meanwhile, back in New York, the police tore down as
many posters as they could so as not to mar the celebration, yet enough
remained intact on Columbus Day to have something of an impact. “I
witnessed few people actually looking and reading,” he acknowledges.
Although it was a small return, he was encouraged.
At the time, Victore veered somewhat from commercial work
toward an indy sensibility. It is axiomatic that new ideas rarely emerge from
tried-and-true venues, so Victore hooked up with kindred renegades. He
had met two bartender/actors who founded the Shakespeare Project,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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