Protest and Survive

1962 – Aged 13, I set up my first studio in the coal shed beneath our flat in Paddington. The shed was empty, no longer in use after the 1956 Clean Air Act banned coal fires in London. It was small and dirty, but I cleared out as much coal dust as I could and turned it into a space where I made paintings, prints and collages, often on material scavenged from local bombsites. I remember the grit and dust of the city, which seeped into my work. Old black and white movies of London look like the reality I lived through then. I’ve never quite got over how St Paul’s Cathedral turned from black to white when they cleaned it years later.

17 MARCH 1968 – I went to the huge anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Afterwards, I joined thousands of others at a protest outside the American Embassy (then located in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair), which saw violent clashes with the police. That same year, Martin Luther King was assassinated. French students and workers demonstrated on the streets of Paris, almost bringing down the government, and Soviet tanks and troops moved into Czechoslovakia to destroy the liberalisation movement. These events constituted a political awakening for me and for many of my generation. Up until then, I had primarily been painting, but that year I started tearing photos of world events from newspapers and magazines, rephotographing them, then laying the negatives on top of each other to create merged images. Adding scratched and abstracted marks, I made a kind of Rorschach test of global struggles. I also produced STOP, a visual book which will be published in 2026, more than 50 years after it was made. I used to tell my students not to be in a great hurry to show their work but this is not quite what I meant!

4 MAY 1970 – Four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot dead by National Guardsmen while peacefully protesting the Vietnam War. In response, I made my first image intended to be pasted up in the street. It was based on a photo of one of the students lying dead on the ground. Together with fellow students at the Slade School of Art, we flyposted a stack of them around London as a temporary memorial, and to show solidarity with the American students rebelling against the war. Because they were dyeline prints, which are water-based and printed in red, the figure appeared to be bleeding when it rained. The prints that weren’t pulled down faded gradually to blanks and were used as noticeboards for anti-war slogans and messages. Since then, many of my images have been fly-posted and used on placards. The streets are free art galleries.

11 SEPTEMBER 1973 – A military coup led by General Pinochet and backed by the CIA and big business overthrew Chile’s constitutional socialist government. Seventeen years of terror ensued with thousands murdered, tortured and ‘disappeared’. I made photomontages for newspapers and demonstrations, and eventually a travelling exhibition about the recent history of Chile, which was shown in town halls, community centres and even a launderette. That exhibition made me realise that art can express solidarity with brutalised people and build community with an audience who might think of art as something removed from everyday life.

From these experiences, I’ve come to understand that a series of pictures can create a narrative about the horrors inflicted on people by the powers that be. I’ve since worked on several series of images – some with text, some without – covering themes of nuclear weapons, climate disaster, and, currently, the destruction of Gaza and the massacre of its people.

^{Several works by Peter Kennard are in Tate’s collection, including Haywain with Cruise Missiles, a photomontage made for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and based on John Constable’s celebrated painting The Hay Wain.}

^{Peter Kennard is an artist and activist who lives in London. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Art at the Royal College of Art. His book, STOP, will be published by MuseumsEtc in 2026.}