As most of you know, Northland is a small boat that runs the risk of being swamped in the rough waters of the financial tsunami. We’ve been getting by one month at a time (last month we made our do-or-die sales goal by $78!). After coming close to going under we begin to become fatalistic: […]

This is pretty specialized but if there are any union staffers out
there… We’ve just released a line of union sympathy cards (after
repeated requests from union reps). These are condolence cards for
unions to send to bereaved members or their families. They can also
be customized for a particular union or organization
(if done in quantity).

One of the things we’ve been doing to try to survive the global
financial collapse is to discontinue product lines that are less
lucrative or that require us to keep too large an inventory on the
shelves. Two of these lines are our bumper stickers. These stickers
have been the vehicle for popularizing some of the most beloved union
slogans […]

One way we have been reaching out to new constituencies is by means of “landing pages.” These are web pages that bring together a collection of images, whether they be posters, cards, buttons, signs or whatever. We then publicize the page to a particular audience (people working on environmental justice, say, or immigrants rights) and […]

Over three decades of producing activist art we have worked with activists engaged in many areas of political and social struggle: farmers, union organizers and rank and filers, immigrant rights activists, LGBT campaigners, high school students, prison inmates and so many more. The issues we have addressed through our art has run the range from […]

In line with Northland tradition, it is time to deliver your free monthly calendar page. So many new people have been signing up on this list I should explain that each month we feature a piece of
Northland art on an 11X17 one-month calendar highlighting various dates from the history of social change movements. Clicking on […]

“Tough times don’t last,” they say. “Tough people do.” Of course “tough” is relative. In some neighborhoods “tough times” seem to make themselves at home, even when the Wall Street Journal says that all is well. When things go bad on Wall Street, though, the CEOs crowd into our neighborhoods begging for handouts (with a posse of Congressfolk and police to show that they mean it. We’ve seen a lot of that these last months. As of this writing, they’re cooking up another cash infusion over on Capitol Hill. Some of it will be going to the same old suspects but some should reach the street (Main St., that is) […]

This spring the Northland poster Collective will turn thirty years old. Northland began at a graphic arts workshop at the Northland Cultural Workers Conference in April of 1979. Seems like a lot has happened since then. The above poster was designed by Richard Kees who was a founding member and is now back on staff after spending a couple of decades in other pursuits…

The financial earthquake (or shakedown, if you will) that is causing such hardship for those of us who are not the culprits is impacting the organization who traditionally fight against the inequalities that underlie the crash. Our email and mailboxes are filled with urgent appeals for funds from political institutions and arts groups whose sources of financial sustenance have dried up or shrunk or frozen.[…]

The stream of time always brings new vistas, new struggles and newborns to take their part in history’s unfolding. It also carries away those whose bodies can sustain them no longer. Some of the cultural warriors whose journeys ended this year are the singers Odetta and Miriam Makeba and the story-gatherer Studs Terkel. We are better for having marched beside them. We managed to produce tribute posters for Miriam and Studs (pictured).