AMERIKILL

AMERIKILL

Kent State

After the death of four protesting students on the Kent State campus, campuses across the country responded in anger and protest. A group of students from Columbia College decided to form the Columbia Collective. This group of students used their artistic abilities and channeled their emotions into posters to confront the government and their actions towards the students of Kent State. Within the article Using Non-textual Sources: A Historian’s Guide., Panofsky’s Three Layers of Meaning is mentioned. One of the three is the ‘iconographical’ layer. Panofsky goes on to explain, “This means that the viewer, you, brings to bear all of your cultural knowledge about images… Images and their symbolism, their iconography, change over time and we must be aware of this.” Iconography is laced throughout this Columbia Collective’s poster. “AMERIKILL”, though without a proper artist attribution in the piece, using a crossbones skull to replace the stars on the American flag, and by engraving the year of the tragedy on the tombstone to the text alongside of the poster. The artist creates a statement about the current tensions the U.S. had with its youth by using strong acrylic painted imagery on top of construction paper.

Columbia College Chicago Students

Kent State, College Archives & Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago

College Archives & Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago

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“The oral histories are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. “All rights remain with the creators.

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