Project Title
Love and Revolution

Discipline
literary/visual

Grant Amount
$1000

Website
 

Description
In the graphic novel Love and Revolution Hester L. Furey and Michael Rovinsky will tell the story of The Masses, a radical magazine created through the cooperative effort of various artists and writers living in Greenwich Village during the Progressive Era. The Masses was an art-driven magazine run by a combination of political radicals and art-for-art’s-sake advocates that included John Sloan, Art Young, Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Louis Untermeyer; a design ancestor of the New Yorker, it was removed from the US mails for alleged violations of the Great War–era Sedition and Espionage Act, but after two trials the writers and artists were acquitted and went on to create The Liberator (1918–1924). Furey and Rovinsky intend for different chapters of the graphic novel to reflect the distinctive styles of its artists—Sloan,Young, and Boardman Robinson in particular. Beginning with The Masses’ own artists’ strike of 1916, the graphic novel’s episodes will dramatize conflicts from the time including the fight for women’s voting rights, the Paterson Silk Strike, and the run up to WWI.