Posters and Patriotism: Selling World War I in New York

Posters and Patriotism: Selling World War I in New York

Co-curated with Donald Albrecht to commemorate the centenary of the nation’s entry into World War I, Posters and Patriotism drew on MCNY’s collection of hundreds of wartime propaganda posters and other artifacts to show how New York City played a crucial part in “selling” the war to the American people. Already the nerve center of American commercial art and public relations, Manhattan became the home base of the Division of Pictorial Publicity, President Woodrow Wilson’s think tank of artists whose dramatic images demanding patriotism, sacrifice, and manliness burned themselves into the American consciousness.

Donald and I made sure that the exhibition also explored the use of mass-produced images by immigrant, African American, and feminist New Yorkers to sway public opinion, and the darker story of how some posters inflamed wartime paranoia, bigotry, and the suppression of civil rights. The jostling currents of liberalism, ethnic pride, xenophobia, and racial stereotyping expressed in these posters seemed almost as timely in the politically polarized year 2017 as they had a century earlier. Designed by Perrin Studio.