“It has now been over 25 years since I designed and had the first Celebrate People’s History poster printed in 1998. That poster, in honor of Malcolm X’s birthday, was only the first salvo in what is likely one of the largest cultural projects in the production of popular history. In 2015, I assembled a boxset of the initial 100 posters in the series. What you are looking at here is the second set of 100 posters, and like the first, these have been designed, illustrated, and written by just as many people.

The CPH posters are rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history. Rather than simply create another exclusive set of heroes, this project has generated a diverse set of posters that bring to life successful moments in social justice struggles through the lens of not only individuals, but also groups and events. The posters tell stories from the subjective position of the artists, and are often the stories of underdogs, those written out of history. The goal of this project is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.

CPH posters have been pasted up in the streets of over a dozen cities, hang in the classrooms of hundreds of educators from kindergarten to university, have been part of hundreds of exhibitions, are featured in community centers and union halls, and grace the walls of tens of thousands of homes, offices, and dorm rooms. It’s been great to see the posters become part of curriculum, and to see lessons built around them—some of the posters in this box were developed out of these educational assignments. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives were taught, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.

The 100 posters designs here have had a collective print-run of over 250,000 total posters, bringing the total number of posters produced through the project to over half a million. From the beginning the posters have funded themselves, all of the income from poster sales goes right back into more printing. While I have organized and guided it, the project has always been a collective endeavor. almost 200 artists, designer and writers have worked on the posters, a half dozen shops have done the printing, hundreds have run around at night pasting them on the street, and thousands have helped distribute them around the world.” — Josh MacPhee

View the full list of artists and posters here. The box production and printing of letterpress colophon sheets was done by Sarah Nicholls.