Call Number:

F0962

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

13 item

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0099, F0962, Week of the angry arts against the war in Vietnam, Week of the angry arts against the war in Vietnam ephemera collection, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

1967 (inclusive)

Creator:

Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam (1967 : New York, N.Y.)

Form:

Posters, Schedules (time plans), Letters (correspondence), Newspaper columns, and Press releases

Abstract:

Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam ephemera collection consists of posters, schedules, correspondence, newspapers proofs, press releases, information sheets, and other ephemera related to the events held during the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam in 1967.

Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam ephemera collection consists of posters, schedules, correspondence, newspapers proofs, press releases, information sheets, and other ephemera related to the events held during the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam in 1967.

Ephemeral pieces documenting the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam, which took place from January 29 through February 5, 1967. Included is the schedule of events; an invitation to the "Line Dance for Life," with a call for participants in The Maze; a press release on the "Black Death" Midnight Mass; a rehearsal announcement for the Vietnam Life Project; participant guidelines for the Vietnam Life Project; a broadside solicitation of support for Broadway Dissents; a broadsheet poster listing the Dance Protest events at Hunter Playhouse; a program for Carolee Shneemann's kinetic theatre piece

Snows; a broadside announcement of an unspecified event to take place at midnight, February 3rd at S. Marks and Second Avenue; the full-page ad for the Week of Angry Arts in the New York Times; a two-page handout on the existence of bubonic plague in Vietnam, which may or may not be related to the week's events; and a form letter of thanks to those responding to requests for support, the verso of which lists some of the artists involved or sympathetic. Among the writers listed are Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Roth, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Donald Barthelme, Robert Bly, Louise Bogan, Hortense Calisher, David Ignatow, Dwight Macdonald, Grace Paley, and many others. Among the performers listed as participating in events during the week are Meredith Monk, Ruby Dee, Alan Alda, Jules Feiffer, Aldo Tambellini, Saul Gottlieb, The Fugs, and many more.

Several of these sheets are folder and/or sunned; The New York Times ad has a tear at the center fold; the lot is near fine. Scarce ephemeral materials for an important event in mobilizing opposition to the Vietnam war, before the antiwar movement had spread out widely to the middle class and beyond. Such early opposition to the war tended to be centered within the communities of artists, the intelligentsia, the Old Left and the New Left, and this week, which includes such headings as "Broadway Dissidents," "Off-Broadway Dissents," "Dancers Dissent," "Folk Rock Dissents," and even "Avant Garde Musicians Dissent" shows the political engagement of the artistic community, particularly those at the cutting edge, in mobilizing against the war and rallying their audiences and constituencies against it. Angry Arts continued with events in June and spread as far as Los Angeles in promoting antiwar artistic performances.