Palestinian Poster Project Archive

"This website has been created to mark headway on my masters' thesis project at Georgetown University. It is a work-in-progress. I first began collecting Palestine posters when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. By 1980 I had acquired about 300 Palestine posters. A small grant awarded with the support of the late Dr. Edward Said allowed me to organize them into an educational slideshow to further the "third goal" of the Peace Corps: to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Over the ensuing years, while running my design company, Liberation Graphics, the number of internationally published Palestine posters I acquired steadily grew. Today the Archives numbers some 5,000 Palestine posters from myriad sources making it what many library science specialists say is the largest such archives in the world. The Palestine poster genre dates back to around 1900 and, incredibly, more Palestine posters are designed, printed and distributed today than ever before. Unlike most of the political art genres of the twentieth century such as those of revolutionary Cuba and the former Soviet Union, which have either died off, been abandoned, or become mere artifacts, the Palestine poster genre continues to evolve. Moreover, the emergence of the Internet has exponentially expanded the genre’s network of creative contributors and amplified the public conversation about contemporary Palestine. My research has two major components: (1) the development of a curriculum using the Palestine poster as a key resource for teaching the formative history of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict in American high schools. This aspect of my work is viewable in my New Curriculum and; (2) the creation of a web-based archives that displays the broadest possible range of Palestine posters in a searchable format with each poster translated and interpreted. This library and teaching resource allows educators, students, scholars, and other parties interested in using the New Curriculum to incorporate Palestine posters into classroom learning activities. Titles included are from the Liberation Graphics collection, the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Yale University, the University of Chicago and a host of other sources. To facilitate my research I have broken the genre of the Palestine poster into four sources, or wellsprings...." —Dan Walsh, https://www.palestineposterproject.org/