all}: transformed but otherwise persistent and recuperated' hegemonic social order. '1 In the late 19405 and earl].t 1950s, abstract capressionism began to take on a new meaning: the deant rejection of mainstream values, the individualism of more paintings that nus their hallmark, was effectively stolen by an expanding capitalist political system in order to promote these painters as \"an index of the superiority ofilimencan democracy.\" Artists like Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, and David Afato Siqueiros who speeiiiv callv questioned this authority,' were among the few to maintain a political and artistic commitment to the New Deal ethic in a postWar eta. While aware of the need tbr a new aesthetic language to depict the changing political climate, these artists were not interested in abandoning their Faith in the basic and fundamental compatibility of art and social change via established political institutions. Their art was based on the idea that political artistic practices were essential to social reform, that social reform was necessary for both political and artistic progres- siveness, and that in order to make political art, that art mttst be ultimately visible and accessible to a large number of people. Their approach was therefore more activist in its philosophy and method, relying to some degree on earlier notions of political revolution and public access. lter WI], Ben Shahn began working for the C10 Political ction Com- mittee, designing posters intended to highlight the struggle and inequity be- tween labor and big business, and encouraging the public to register to vote.H In a poster entitled We Want Pears [1946], the gure of an emaciated child loolts out at the viewer, obnrioushr recalling the deprivation and suffering brought on by war. Cutting across the child's body is the command \"Register to Vote,\" which was an appeal to returning soldiers and to civilians alike. By choosing the reproducible medium of print and lithography, Shahn recognised the potential of his images to reach a wide, public audience, rather than a small group of art world elites. Among his subjects were the somewhat romantieitaccl portraits of Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, and the civil rights workers James Chaney and Arthur Goodman who were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi during \"Freedom Summer)\" Shahn felt that it was possible for artists to revive the human spirit by remaining politically engaged. To be engaged, Shahn stated, implied \"the obligation and need of the individual {working in cooperation with others) to do something about the evils of his time."\"' Shahn's worl: was a general call to viewers to heighten awareness of inequity and the ptsaribilities of political involvement. It provided a model of art that is both explicitly political and accepted by mainstream institutions, is interested in the artist's personal liberation as well as the widest-ale enactment of social change, a general form of liberation that works within hegemonic social models. Shahn's work, therefore, effectivelyI bridges the gap bctween 19405- and 1950? style \"political" art and Dolls-style \"activist" art. Overlapping with Shahn's later, more explicitly activist work, are photographic Wadi-s that shared his humanistic impulse. Although they can neither be considered