Over the past few years, the Community Outreach program has expanded their communication tools to include more graphics and infographics to explain scientific concepts as well as information related to work we are associated with. Much of our content is informed and inspired by community groups that we work with. Whether it be by direct request or the motivation to get out the "word" about something, we are producing more colorful graphics to depict how various forms of pollution and toxic exposures effect people and impact communities.
The poster featured here was inspired by one of our community partner organizations, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice who has tirelessly, over many years with their community, worked to bring justice to their community and the exposure to lead they have experienced as a result of the now shuttered, Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon, CA.
The numbers on this poster bring attention to the length and extent to which residents have been exposed to lead as a result of Exide's battery smelting operations over many years. We are pleased that this poster, that was created for social media channels, has been chosen to be featured in a new traveling poster exhibition, Too Hot to Handle: Posters on Climate Change, Pollution & Environmental Justice, to premiere in May 14, 2016 at Mercado la Paloma near USC's main campus in downtown Los Angeles. The exhibit is produced by Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG).
From the CSPG website: Too Hot to Handle will consist of laminated digital reproductions of 77 posters created throughout the world during the last 45 years, and includes graphics from Australia, El Salvador, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Topics covered will include environmental racism and environmental disasters such as Bhopal, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Ongoing crises will include the lead poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Michigan and the lead poisoning of hundreds of East Los Angeles homes caused by the manufacturing of batteries by the Exide plant in Vernon, CA. The exhibition concludes with international efforts to fight back against pollution and climate change through organizing and mass movements.
CSPG is an activist, educational, and research archive with more than 85,000 social movement posters from the 19th century to the present, including the largest collection of post-World War II political posters in the United States.
Too Hot to Handle was funded in part by the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, and the California Arts Council.