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Artists’ Collectives Mostly in New York 205
exiled artists from Central America. After a small show at the Taller on the
theme of strife in Central America, the group engaged with the exiles to
produce the monumental installation at the P.S. 1 museum in Queens, New
York, of a time line of U.S. intervention in Central America. This was part of
the 1984 Artists’ Call, a broad cultural front protesting Reagan’s support for
repressive regimes in El Salvador and the U.S.-funded counterrevolution in
Nicaragua. The installation featured the raw materials—piles of coffee, copper
ingots, bunches of bananas—that U.S. corporations extracted, mixed in
with artworks and artifacts of popular culture, like a red Sandinista bandana.
In the broad front of activist art organizing against Reagan’s foreign
policies, Group Material worked with the advocacy group Committee
in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). They also worked
closely with the artists in PAD/D—Political Art Documentation/Distribution.
PAD/D formed in New York in 1981 and quickly became an organizing
and archiving resource for a network of groups in the United States and
abroad working under the banner of cultural democracy. (Today these archives
are in the Museum of Modern Art library.) The group formed around Lucy
Lippard, then writing regularly about art for the weekly Village Voice. PAD/D
held regular lectures and discussions, produced performances and projects,
and made signs for demonstrations. A key project of PAD/D was Not For Sale, 30
FIGURE 7.6. Political Art Documentation/Distribution’s (PAD/D) antigentriWcation street poster
project Not For Sale, East Village, New York, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Gregory Sholette.