The Graphic Workshop was an artists’ collaborative in Boston that produced hundreds of remarkable silkscreen posters during a 22-year period…

“America in 1970 was unraveling. Richard Nixon’s announcement that the country would invade Cambodia and Laos triggered an unprecedented level of student protest. In an attempt to quell the outcry, authorities deployed National Guard troops and state police shot and killed four students at Kent State in Ohio and two students at Jackson State in Mississippi. Between those incidents, police shot and killed six young men protesting in Augusta, Georgia.

During the national student strike that followed, Massachusetts College of Art suspended classes, as did many other colleges and universities on the East and West coasts. With faculty help, MassArt students used the campus to organise community service activities. One was a round-the-clock silk-screening production centre that churned out posters, T-shirts, and armbands for protests in Boston and beyond. By September of 1970, the ‘Strike Workshop’, which by this time had moved to the personal studio of faculty member and painter Rob Moore, were ‘subsidized by blood, sweat, and friendship’…”

Excerpt from: “Disappearing Act” | Eye Magazine (2015)

By Paul Dobbs and Elizabeth Resnick

Print Magazine | Profile on The Graphic Workshop

By Carol Stevens

Excerpt from “NOTES ON ROB MOORE” (1979)

Essay by Chris Mesarch

When I was a senior, the entire college [The Massachusetts College of Art] went on strike to protest the Cambodian Invasion. Classes were cancelled for the last month of the school year and most students took part in some kind of antiwar activity. It was May, 1970. We students in the graphic design department designed and silkscreened posters day and night. 

One morning at dawn, after we had been printing all night, Rob appeared in the doorway to the room where we were printing. He stood there holding a bulging Dunkin' Doughnuts bag. 

"Coffee and doughnuts, y'all?" He never left us. That was when he gave up painting for seven years and we started The Graphic Workshop. 

…[Rob] offered the use of his studio to those of us who wanted to continue producing posters. The four or five of us who decided to give it a try found ourselves hooked up with a man who was, or seemed to be, confident that we could make something out of nothing but an idea. That was what the Graphic Workshop started with, an idea and Rob's loft. He moved to a small apartment.

Our equipment was ridiculously primitive. We saved tin cans from home to mix paint in and cleaned off our paint mixing sticks and reused them. In an age of high speed silkscreen presses we silkscreened our posters by hand. It was several years before we could afford a silkscreen press. 

We spent long hours together in teams of three people, printing posters. One would place the paper under the screen, a second would squeegee the paint onto the page, a third would remove it from under the screen and check it for flaws. We all grew to know each other over the printing table; talking, singing, and joking to pass the time. Everyone did everything at the Workshop: designing, printing, floor- sweeping, running to the liquor store for beer. 

Rob continued to teach full time at Mass. Art and to put the rest of his time into the Workshop. His energy seemed constant. There was no detail small enough to slip by him. It might be midnight on a Sunday and we might be printing an overdue job, longing to finish, and perhaps a color we were printing would be drying a shade too light. 

“We have to stop and remix the color”, he would say. And we would. Because of the desire for quality that propelled him and which was catching. If the first two ideas behind the Workshop were about the poster as an alternative art form and about artists working together, then the third was about quality. Time and money were sacrificed for it. It was never really stated that way at the beginning, it just happened that way. That was how he worked, pursuing an idea or an image until it was right. 

Sometimes we would protest against his suggestion that we redo a design or remix a color. Sometimes we would all fight about it. If we refused to see it his way, he would stop the printing anyway, remix the color and show us that it had to be done. Sometimes we won out and it stayed the same. There are posters today that Rob will look at and say, “Yeah, I like it, but that red should be darker.”

Many long, hard days were softened by Rob's appearance after his school day, breezing into the shop with that same breathlessness and lateness we'd known in him as students. This time he'd have a bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle of tonic in the other and we'd all have a drink. 

We would all have meetings to discuss what we were doing, what our plans would be, how we would implement them, and just for the sake of talking and having a drink together. Talking together became an important part of it. The shop was, and still is, about communication in all ways.  

Full Essay: “Notes on Rob Moore”

Written February 22, 1979; Published in BVAU NEWS | April 1979 | Vol. 7 No. 8

Source for Graphic Workshop Endangered Species poster images: Eye Magazine