With his Palestine Poster Project, Dan Walsh Wants to Promote Democracy, Free Speech, and Dialogue About the Middle East

Posters have played an important role in the movement to gain a Palestinian homeland. The vibrant, colorful, sometimes rhetorical, often beautiful messages appear not only in the Occupied Territories of Israel (where they are frequently torn down by the authorities) but also on streets and in subways around the world. This outspoken art form is actually an international phenomenon in which Palestinian artists have been joined by artists from Israel, America, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, China, Cuba, and Venezuela expressing their feelings of solidarity and wishes for peace by creating posters.

Dan Walsh, a political art director in Washington, D.C., who collects, translates, and conserves revolutionary posters and serves as a consultant to nonprofit social activist organizations, has made it his mission to inform more Americans about this surprising artistic collaboration, which he calls a 'completely original political Esperanto.' But he keeps running into roadblocks. After 20 years of trying, he has been unable to find a major museum, gallery, university, or corporation to host a retrospective.

Walsh, 52, is the unlikely keeper of what could be the largest collection of Palestinian solidarity posters in the world. Originally from the Bronx, Walsh was raised in an Irish Catholic family and volunteered for the Peace Corps. He was sent to Morocco in 1974. To practice his Arabic language skills, Walsh translated posters—announcing concerts, theater performances, soccer games—while he waited for buses. One day in Rabat he came across a poster with a word he didn’t know. He looked it up. The word was Palestine. He recalls his response: 'Boy, it takes a lot of nerve to put up a poster in solidarity with Palestine. They’re terrorists, aren’t they?'

It was 'the conditioned, Western, normative response to see things Palestinian in a very negative way,' he says. But from that point on, he grew increasingly interested in the Palestinian posters; by the time he left Morocco he’d collected more than 300. As part of his Peace Corps obligation—to share some element of his experience abroad after he returned home—he decided to show others what he had learned about visual culture, and about Palestine. In 1976, with a small grant from the now-defunct American Palestine Education Foundation, he organized the posters into a slide show and started lecturing at universities, cultural collectives, and Middle East studies groups in the Washington, D.C. area.