The Art and Political Science of Robbie Conal

By: Danny Klein | Alan Shaffer | March 19, 2008 | Art

Alan Shaffer

ESCORTED TO SCHOOL BY FBI AGENTS AT THE TENDER AGE OF 8 during the World War II Red Scare, raised by outspoken labor activist parents, and relying on New York City’s museums as surrogate after-school day care centers, it’s not surprising that revolutionary artist Robbie Conal is one of America’s most passionate voices of political dissent. Conal’s father, who risked everything in the name of improving the lives of the common American working family, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps by hitting the streets as a political organizer, but he soon realized that he was an artist, not a politician. The young artist’s mission, however, would eventually come full circle – both emulating his parents’ ideals and preserving the integrity of their convictions.

Conal embraced the streets in his own way, lifting up his father’s footsteps from the neighborhoods of New York and laying them down on a trail that would lead him all the way to California, landing him at the intersection of pop culture and politics. His suit: a canvas.  His tie: a brush. 

The product of prolonged pressure and heat, each of Conal’s works emerges as yet another priceless diamond, sparkling from all angles with a witty, gritty social consciousness never before seen in the world of artistic expression. Adorning America’s cityscapes with badges of civil disobedience, Conal and his “get-up” army view the streets as their own personal CNN, broadcasting their message under cover of night, town by town, block by block, street by street. People are definitely watching. And more importantly, they are thinking.

Robbie Conal

Danny Klein: Art and politics defined your childhood in such a powerful way.

Robbie Conal: You know, I went to art school all my life. I spent a lot of time in my room by myself with my crayons, an only child, you know. “SLAM! I’m gonna DRAW!” My parents thought the major museums were day care centers for me.

DK: And your dad was deeply involved with the Union movement. How did that play into your early political awareness?

RC: My father first worked at the River Rouge Ford plant when he was 17, but then got involved with the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] back in the day when the Union movement was more like a war.

DK: And in the heart of it all: New York City.

RC: Yeah. He had some talent. He was a charismatic guy and they sent him to New York to work in the national office. What he ended up doing was pretty much like the early days of polling, where he had 1,000 volunteers from the CIO and they would go neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street, apartment house to apartment house, apartment to apartment, and in low-income neighborhoods in New York with a questionnaire that he developed asking people things like, “What’s the most important thing to you, in terms of what a local representative could do for you to make your life better. COULD THE SCHOOLS BE BETTER or this or that? HOT WATER — would you like that? Heat — would that be good? FIX THE POTHOLES — really, pave the streets with gold as opposed to shit?” He gathered up all this information, and the idea was that in certain districts where the Republicans and the Democrats were within 5 percent of each other, they would run a labor candidate, an independent. They wanted to start a third party, a labor party, and he was totally into that. I had to work for him cutting out articles in all the newspapers he read for his filing system. I grew up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan — or as they call it, the “Upper Left Side.” And in my dad’s office, it was all maps, but they were these fantastic maps, wall-to-wall maps, like horror vacui, like five square blocks in Manhattan, all color-coded.

DK: What age were you when this was going on?

RC: I was 7, 8, and 9. But in 1941, when the United States entered World War II, the AFL [American Federation of Labor] and CIO merged and supported Roosevelt. My dad said, “What’s up with that? How about the labor party?” And they said, “Oh, no, no. Wartime.” Does this sound familiar? We’re just going to suspend all your civil liberties to keep you free. Unions are going to be patriotic. We’re going to send everybody off to war and make guns.

DK: The more things change…

RC: Yeah, yeah. So, he didn’t like that. He didn’t play that. He was really pissed off, and he just quit, which really upset them. He had all the stuff they’d been working on, and he started his own polling organization called the Voter’s Research Institute of America, which is a big title for a very small organization. He took his best people, and they would just work for any candidates up the Northeast coast. But he’s very good, and at 48, Henry Wallace, who had been Roosevelt’s vice president, got a hold of him and said “Look, I want to get on the presidential ballot as the third party candidate, the progressive party, but we have to qualify to be on the ballot.” Back in the day, they had to get something like 100,000 signatures from residents of each state from 36 of the 48 states. He said, “I’d like you to run the campaign.” But I remember when I was 4, Henry Wallace himself bringing me cookies. He’s a cool guy, unbelievable guy. He’d bake chocolate chip cookies and have a little brown bag and come over to the apartment, and they’d be talking smack and stuff, and I’d be like, “Where are the cookies? Hey, Henry, where are the cookies?” And he’s right there, so to me he was the Cookie Monster.

Robbie Conal

DK: And at some point your father was blacklisted, right?

RC: Yeah. HE GOT CALLED ON BY THE HOUSE ON UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE, AND HIS NAME WAS IN THE PAPERS. He had to go down to Washington and stuff, and he was blacklisted along with thousands and thousands of other people. The whole New York City public school system was purged at that time. We can say thank you because that’s where all the great progressive public schools come from on the East Coast. Those teachers who were out of work in the middle of their professional lives just decided to start their own schools — or commit suicide, which they did, too.
And the thing that’s so extraordinary for me growing up in that is that there was a whole subculture matrix of progressive culture and politics that was just wiped out of the economy and also ostracized with the Red Scare and everything — demonized — and thousands and thousands of families in New York gone. Different people reacted to it differently. You know, you could get very paranoid; you could fold up and hide. My parents, just the way they treated it in relation to me, has served me so well. I didn’t even understand it at the time. They would tell me everything, so that’s the good part about Das Kapital and all those test fights. It’s like, you take the bar [exam], you don’t pass, and you take it again. Read the second volume. You don’t understand it. I’ll explain it to you. You want to understand use value? OK, I got it. My parents loved life and stuff, but the FBI used to just to razz my dad to shake him up. It’s like total harassment. That’s all it was. They sent two guys …

DK: In fedoras, huh?

RC: Yeah, the whole thing. They were wearing trench coats and fedoras.

DK: Just a typical morning in the life of an 8-year-old New Yorker.

RC: Yeah, going to school at PS 93, they’d come show up at, like, 8 o’clock in the morning at the apartment, knock on the door, ring the bell, and I answer the door. “Where’s your dad? We’re here for your dad.” I had my lines to read. I knew my part.

DK: So what would you say?

RC: “He’s at work.” Of course, he didn’t have a job; no one would hire him. Maybe at the Polo Lounge selling peanuts … maybe not. They said, “OK, when’s he going to get back?” I’d say, “I don’t know, whenever he’s finished with work.” And they’d say, “Are you going to school today? OK, we’ll walk you.” And I’d say, “OK.” What am I going to say? “Where’s your mom?” “She’s in the kitchen,” “she’s in the shower…”
These two giant guys in fedoras and trench coats … this is like the worst job in the world. It’s like, “We joined the FBI. We’re agents. We’re going to walk an 8-year-old to school.” And they had pretty good attitudes about it, a good sense of humor. And all the time we’re going, they are saying, “This is a good thing. We are good guys. We know this neighborhood. You are the safest kid in the neighborhood. Nobody’s going to mug you. You got us.” And I’m going, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

DK: Of course, you’d never been mugged before…

RC: Later, later! Where were they when I need them [when] guys [were] chasing me around the schoolyard for my baseball glove and my stick? Where were those guys then? They were probably busy with some other 8-year-old. And they were asking me these leading questions and stuff, but I was totally prepared. And that’s not even the greatest thing. The greatest thing is that my parents were so up-front with me about it and explained everything to me. “IT’S VERY COMPLICATED, THE U.S.’S OVERREACTION TO EXTERNAL ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL THREATS.” It really is a big deal and it’s a perennial. There’s something about the United States political economy and culture that is very isolated from the rest of the world in terms of ordinary citizens’ everyday experience of the rest of the world. The interaction we have with it is very limited. Also, it’s circumscribed. We don’t get all the information that we might otherwise get from the media, and there’s always spin on everything. The cool thing about my parents, aside from the fact that I learned all this cool political theory without knowing that I was learning it, was that they would send me to museums. They knew I liked art. They were a little disappointed that I was not going to be a firebrand. [Other parents would say,] “Oh, my boy’s not going to be a doctor.” But with my parents, they were like, “Oh, he’s not going to be a fiery union organizer or the head of, like, ‘Justice for Janitors’ or something. Oh, God, it’s a tragedy! He’s gonna be an artist. Oh well, we can roll with it. We’ll figure out a way. Goya, Dommier — they weren’t so bad. Picasso had his moments, and Mirò. He likes art; we’ll send him to museums” I was an only child and they were busy. After school, on the weekends, they would send me to museums. So, I got both of those things. But the weirdest thing was, I didn’t appreciate it until, I think, high school, the High School of Music and Art.

DK: Do you recall a certain point when you said, “Mom and Dad, I want to be an artist?”

RC: I never said that. There were only two things I could do: I could draw and I could play baseball. And they were like, “We know he’s bright, but he’s always using up his crayons like crazy, and breaking everything in the house throwing a ball around. When’s he gonna read a book aside from Das Kapital? What’s he gonna do with his life?” And I think it wasn’t like “I wanna be an artist” and they freak out. It was more like, “what can he do?” And they went with it. They were great. They were pretty culturally enlightened people aside from that “You have to be a Union organizer” thing. And they tried. I got dragged around to every meeting, but they would send me to the Art Students League when I was 8 — by myself. The way it worked was in the morning I’d get up and get ready to go to school, and in the bottom shelf of the refrigerator there would be a paper bag, and in the paper bag there was always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, two subway tokens, a dollar bill, and one Oreo cookie — go figure — and a note.

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