Protest art is centuries old. Every era of upheaval enjoys its own visual culture–usually defined by the day’s technology–from 17th-century British broadsides to the political posters of the suffragettes of the 1910s. But within the past decade, we’ve entered a new epoch for activist-driven visual culture, one that depends heavily on the medium that broadcasts it: smartphones.
That’s the backdrop to Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18, a new exhibit at London’s Design Museum that situates itself amid a constellation of protest events, starting with Occupy and ending with the Trump era. The show is far-ranging and secular about what it includes in its definition of graphics. Alongside plenty of videos and multimedia, there’s an illustration of Jeremy Corbyn dabbing (nope, hasn’t aged a bit), a Nasty Woman T-shirt riddled with enamel pins, an entire wall displaying dozens of magazine covers satirizing Donald Trump, North Korean propaganda, and a satirical Volkswagen ad by the group Brandalism reading “Drive cleaner–or just pretend to.”
And of course, it wouldn’t be a 21st-century protest without a gift shop; you can buy a $10 Corbyn face pin or a $126 sweatshirt embroidered with “Liberal Elite.” The merch might be the show’s most poignant symbol of activism culture during this era–when what we buy has come to represent, for many, what we believe.
You can check out Hope to Nope until August 2018.