Exhibit showcases collection of political postersDate: 7/19/2022 HOLYOKE – The Holyoke Public Library and Heritage State Park Visitor Center are currently home to a timely poster exhibit that is being staged for the month of July.
The theme of the exhibit is “Ban the Bomb” and features anti-nuclear posters from several countries. The exhibit encourages people to think about the dangers of nuclear weapons, as their relevance has grown once again. The exhibit is open at the Holyoke Heritage State Park Visitor Center Tuesday to Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m. as well as the library Monday to Saturday during hours of operation. Both exhibits close on Aug. 1.
Stephen Lewis, a longtime activist in the labor movement and the former treasurer of his union, started collecting political posters over 20 years ago and his collection has grown to over 9,000 posters to this day.
As a young college student in Boston, Lewis became politically active and found himself expressing his right to protest for causes he cared about, including the war in Vietnam and labor rights. The newfound interest in politics and the world around him soon opened the door to his career and his collection.
“I have no artistic ability and no background or training or anything. It was all learning on the job, so to speak. And it’s not a job because I don’t get paid for it,” Lewis said with a laugh.
Lewis’ first encounter with a political poster came when he went to an international labor conference in Moscow, where he met many people from around the world and was exposed to posters from many of the different labor organizations. Lewis came away from the conference with a collection of posters but once he was home, reluctantly put them in his attic for safekeeping.
After a few years of the posters just sitting in his home, Lewis decided to find a better way to share the political art he had collected. He began looking for exhibit options at public libraries and other potential locations to display the posters.
“No one was looking at them, I was looking at them. I finally decided, ‘Well, this is crazy. I should find out if I can exhibit these around,’” Lewis said.
Lewis eventually settled on finding library space to showcase the collection and began fundraising to purchase frames and string to hang posters along with printed flyers for the exhibits. He was able to raise the necessary money with help from people he had met in various labor unions who were also interested in what he was trying to do, and began sharing his collection. The exhibits in Holyoke have been supported in part by a grant from the Holyoke Cultural Council, the local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
As a young man just becoming politically active, Lewis was once fired from a job for supporting a union strike. This changed his views on labor and once he secured a new job that he knew was unionized through the state, he started working toward union rights.
“I did that deliberately so that it put me into a union which I immediately became active in and was elected to higher and higher positions, eventually ending up as a full-time officer working for the union,” Lewis said. “The other things are all political issues that I got involved with in college. I thought the Vietnam War was wrong, I wasn’t going to go.”
While Lewis does not remember the first poster that caught his eye and started his collection, he developed camaraderie with many people from around the world through trading and collecting different posters. Through his newfound connections he was later invited to other labor movement events around the world where he collected more unique posters when he could attend.
The issue of nuclear weapons has been a present one for almost a century and with the current war in Ukraine and the passive threats made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the issue has presented itself front and center once again. Lewis has always been against nuclear weapons and his collection of posters often is related to protesting the use of these weapons, due to the issues’ significance around the world.
Lewis hopes that his exhibit will remind people of the dangers of nuclear testing and usage.
“An educated public is the best deterrent to the continued possession and testing of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have been in the press lately because of Russia’s attack against Ukraine and making sort of covert threats about nuclear weapons,” Lewis said. “I think it’s a timely exhibition for that and I hope this helps dramatize it to people who see the posters.”
Lewis said he has started attaching recent newspaper clippings alongside certain pieces that relate to the theme of the exhibit and provide some information on current events on these issues.
He also has a different exhibit he showcases called “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” which is a series of numbered posters about nuclear weapons and their impacts as a result to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
One memory Lewis has during his early years collecting posters was on a trip to Istanbul. While there, he went to visit a progressive labor union that he had been trying to get into contact with via the Internet.
Lewis went to their office with a piece of paper with a message translated into Turkish explaining who he was and why he was there. He stopped a worker as they were entering the building and showed him his message and was then gestured by the man to follow him into the building.
“He took me upstairs to the fifth floor into an office where there was a guy on the phone who had a heavy beard, a cigar in one hand and he was in military camouflage. He read the note and gestured for me to sit down,” Lewis said.
He ended up sitting there for over 20 minutes with no way of communicating with the man. Meanwhile, the man who had led him inside the office had left the room and was nowhere to be found. A few minutes later, the man who let Lewis enter returned with a roll of Turkish political posters and gave them to him to add to his collection.
Lewis said they said their goodbyes and he left with a nice addition to his collection. About six or seven years later, Lewis was attending an international conference of unions in Berlin where he arranged to do a poster swap at one of the meetings to try and collect more.
Later in the night, he ran into a man who he could tell had a Turkish name which prompted Lewis to share his story from Istanbul. Quickly, the two realized they had met before.
“He said, ‘I was the guy that brought you the posters as the general secretary.’ It was great,” Lewis said. “It gets even better because our paths crossed again. I was just recently in Amsterdam and found out that he was coming so we met there. Hopefully we’re going to see each other again soon, we really developed this long-distance relationship over the years.”
Now as a retiree, Lewis hopes to continue sharing his collected posters through different exhibits in the region as he still lives in Boston. He often reflects on the joy the collection has brought him as it had opened doors to different relationships with people around the world.
“For me, the most fun I’ve had doing this has been the people I’ve met and the events that I’ve had collecting the posters in a number of countries,” Lewis said.
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