Submission declined on 2 June 2026 by ChrysGalley (talk). This draft is not adequately supported by reliable sources. Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires that all content be supported by reliable sources. Reliable sources include: reputable newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and books from respected publishers. Unacceptable sources include: personal blogs, social media, predatory publishers, most tabloids, and websites where anyone can contribute. Replace any unreliable sources with high-quality sources. If you cannot find a reliable source for the material, it should be removed. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by ChrysGalley 2 months ago. Last edited by ChrysGalley 2 months ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: This is difficult to review, though I can certainly see a path for notability. We need sources to demonstrate that notability, see WP:ANYBIO and WP:GOLDENRULE - and sources to verify the facts of the article. It's difficult with the list of sources presented here to do the review process - both notability and verification. And unless there is a fuller description of the subject in Carol's memoir (I don't have access) the requirement for significant coverage of the subject is difficult to ascertain. While it's not strictly speaking compulsory to have inline citations for someone who is now dead, it would help both reviewers and readers to appreciate the biography. See WP:REFB. ChrysGalley (talk) 12:36, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, I disclose that I have been paid by my employer for my contributions to this article. BarbaraMorganProject (talk) 20:10, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

Barbara Morgan
Born	Barbara Louese Morgan August 2, 1941 Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	April 20, 2021 Springfield, Oregon, U.S.
Education	Mount Holyoke College (BA), University of Chicago (MA)
Occupations	Activist, Artist, Historian
Movements	Second-wave feminism, Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP), Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU)
Founder of	Chicago Women's Graphics Collective (CWGC), Red Pepper Poster Collective

Barbara Louese Morgan (August 2, 1941 - April 20, 2021) was an American activist, artist, and feminist historian. Morgan was a founding member in 1973 of the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective (CWGC), which aimed to produce feminist art for the sake of political revolution outside of the conventions of the traditional male-centric art world, in a communal non-competitive atmosphere. The group primarily produced silk screened posters with political messages, which could be easily reproduced in order to reach a wider audience. CWGC's bold serigraphs dominated the national feminist poster market for a decade. Many of these posters can be found today on display at museums across the United States including the Cooper Hewitt, the Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Morgan understood the significance of the times in which she lived, safeguarding her journals from 1963 and well into 2011. These journals place Morgan at the American Historical Association’s highly documented 1969 Annual Meeting in DC with the Radical Historians’ Caucus, the newly formed Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) and the birth of the Radical History Caucus of the New University Conference (NUC) in Chicago. Throughout this time, Morgan was an ardent activist, not only working on feminist graphics, but also attending various radical historians’ conferences throughout the country and participating in many political demonstrations.

Morgan moved to San Francisco in October of 1976 where she founded Red Pepper Posters, a political graphics collective similar to the CWGC, its key difference being Red Pepper’s inclusion of men in the organization. Like the CWGC, Red Pepper endlessly reprinted the posters in its portfolio. In 1987 Morgan decided to leave San Francisco, enchanted by the histories of the pioneers and outlaws of 19th century West, and she began traveling the country, focusing on her twin passions: history and photography. She continued to travel throughout the rest of her life and lived in Colorado, Wyoming, and Oregon, where she passed in 2021. While at times a solitary figure, she maintained throughout her life a love of correspondence and accumulated stacks of letters from her mother and lifelong friends.

Morgan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Louese Morgan and William R. Morgan, a professor of ceramics, specializing in the diffusion of liquids in ceramic bodies. She lived in Westboro, Massachusetts, but moved to Urbana, Illinois where her father worked as a professor at the University of Illinois and Barbara attended Leal school for first and second grade. Her father soon moved to Detroit to take on consulting work, and the family followed, despite housing shortages in Detroit. They settled in the nearby suburb of Birmingham where Morgan attended Quarton school, and then went on to Kingswood School Cranbrook, despite one principals’ admonishment that “if she [didn’t] change her ways, she [would] never get to high school.” While gaining a reputation as somewhat of a troublemaker, her literary skills were apparent from a young age; she displayed an aptitude for Latin and won school spelling bees as well as Scholastic Writing Awards from the Detroit News.

Morgan matriculated at Mount Holyoke College in 1959 and was awarded the Louise Sproule Prize for poetry and prose in 1960 and competed against five other student poets for the Kathryn Irene Glascock memorial poetry prize in 1961. At Holyoke she was also elected poetry editor of the Pegasus, Mount Holyoke’s Literary magazine.

Morgan graduated from Holyoke in 1963 and spent the mid-sixties traveling England and Scotland conducting historical research. She received her Masters in History from the University of Chicago in 1965, writing thesis papers on “The Cistercian Idea of Art” and “The Intellectual Formation of Philibert de L’Orme.” Morgan was interested in feminist medieval and Renaissance history, and continued her historical research toward a PhD at UChicago until leaving the program in 1968 to focus on her activism work. While at the University, Morgan was involved in several political activist groups, including the Women’s Radical Action Project and later the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Around this time, she also began working in poster production, helping various small graphics studios wherever they needed work.

Founded in the late 1960s, the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP) was one of the first campus-based women’s liberation groups in the U.S. At the University of Chicago, WRAP brought together students and community members to confront sexism through consciousness-raising, organizing, and direct action. Their demands included abortion rights, free campus childcare, and the recognition of women’s labor––which too often was both unpaid and precarious.

Before founding the Red Pepper Posters Collective in San Francisco, Barbara Morgan was an active member of WRAP. As a graduate student, Morgan worked on a radical campus newspaper and was committed to redistributing power from the “haves” to the “have-nots.” Her family viewed this activism with concern, but she remained undeterred in her alignment with WRAP’s mission: to challenge institutions and build feminist alternatives.

Morgan’s later poster work with Red Pepper highlights this ethos—blending grassroots organizing, anti-elitism, and creative resistance into bold visual activism

Morgan participated in various political demonstrations throughout her activist career, most notably traveling to the 1971 May Day protests held in Washington DC against the war in Vietnam. She, along with 40,000 other activists, camped out in West Potomac Park and flooded the city over the course of two days. Barbara was arrested twice in those two days along with 12,000 others, making it the largest mass arrest in US history.

In the 1970s and ’80s, feminist artists turned posters into urgent, accessible tools for political resistance. These works bridged the personal and the political, translating everyday struggles—domestic labor, body image, sexual violence—into bold, public declarations. Far from the galleries, they were plastered in kitchens, clinics, and on city streets, confronting viewers with a visual activism rooted in women’s lived experience.

Created collectively in workshops and women’s centers, these posters rejected traditional authorship. Instead of signing names, artists shared skills, argued over messaging, and embraced collaboration as a feminist ethic. Their goal wasn’t recognition, but empowerment and consciousness-raising. The CWGC offered their services free of charge to movement organizers—according to one conference organizer, their posters “saved us from going into debt.”

This was art not meant to be admired in silence, but to provoke thought, laughter, anger—and change. As one critic put it, these posters “combine talent with anger, experience, and humor.” In doing so, they helped build a movement and educate a generation—through a form of guerrilla pedagogy as radical as it was accessible.

Founded by Morgan, the Red Pepper Posters Collective emerged from the Bay Area’s dynamic social serigraphy movement—a grassroots screen-printing tradition rooted in the political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s. This movement prioritized accessibility, activism, and community over gallery art, using inexpensive materials and collaborative methods to spread radical messages.

Similar to the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, Red Pepper operated as a non-hierarchical cooperative, grounded in shared labor and consensus. The collective created posters in support of feminist, anti-war, labor, and anti-imperialist struggles—tools for education, resistance, and solidarity. Posters were printed in limited runs, often overnight, and distributed through activist networks, bookstores, and mail order. The process was as radical as the message: low-cost, collaborative, and intentionally outside the commercial art world.

How does art play a role in activism? The close tie between political ideas and the visual graphics that bring them to the general public goes as far back as activism itself. But starting in the 1960s, the rise of screen printing allowed activists to print their own graphics at a scale and precision never before possible.

The student-designed exhibition, "Radical Posters: Women's Graphics Collective of the '70s," on display October 8, 2025 through March 13, 2026 in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at the University of Chicago, presented a collection of posters and writings from the heart of this era, offering a glimpse of the relationship between image, politics, and organizing during the period. Sourced from the donated collection of Barbara Morgan, the works presented in this exhibit hearken back to a not-so-distant era of political organizing, where posters like these were circulated from a room in Hyde Park to Chicago, San Francisco, and beyond.

While handmade posters are now rarely seen outside of protests, they played a central role in all corners of political life in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Whether used as signs, carried in protest, reproduced in books and calendars, or displayed in bookshops, offices, and homes, these deliberately designed protest artworks brought organizing to the world of culture on a mass scale.

In an age where template digital graphics seem to have become the norm, the vibrant and powerful art in this exhibit serves as a reminder of the vast range of potential that lies between art-making and politics.

^[1]Blumenthal, Shirlee and Barbara Bejna, directors and School of Education, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, producer, “It Can Be Done: Chicago Women's Graphic Collective.” Lesbian Herstory Archives AudioVisual Collections. https://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/items/show/1321?collection=125

^[2]Boycott Lettuce and Grapes, 1978. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Behring Center. https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746a3-3ce2-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa

^[3]Carol, Estelle. "The Chicago Women's Graphics Collective: An Introduction." Chicago Women's Liberation Union: Herstory Project. https://www.cwluherstory.org/chicago-womens-graphics-collective/the-chicago-womens-graphics-collective-an-introduction See also Poster Gallery, https://www.cwluherstory.org/poster-gallery

^[4]Carol, Estelle. "The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective: A Memoir." Feminist Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 104–24. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fem.2018.0014

^[5]Fight Evictions, 1977. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2017.315/

^[6]International Women's Day, 1975. Cooper Hewitt. https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2017/03/08/internationalwomensday/

^[7]"Preliminary Inventory to the Barbara Morgan Collection 1871-2011, bulk 1960-1989." Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, 2026. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.MORGANB&q=barb

^[8]Rossman, Michael. "The Evolution of the Social Serigraphy Movement In the San Francisco Bay Area, 1966-1986." 2007. http://www.mrossman.org/posters/socialserigraphy/socialserigraphy.html

^[9]Sisterhood is Blooming, 1972. Chicago History Museum. https://images.chicagohistory.org/asset/193243/

^[10]Veenstra-VanderWeele, Julian. "Radical posters, real students: Unboxing the life of Barbara Morgan." University of Chicago News, 2026. https://college.uchicago.edu/news/radical-posters-real-students-unboxing-life-barbara-morgan

^[11]Women Are Not Chicks, 1972. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Behring Center.https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_518591