page_title: Robert Donley
section_title: Protest art
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Donley / Art work / Protest art
caption_attribution_description: English: Original Painting protesting the Vietnam War by Robert Donley
context_page_description: Robert Morris Donley is an American artist who has been identified with the Chicago Imagist movement. Judith Wilson of the Village Voice called him the "Chicago imagist Tolstoy." The narrative aspects of his work center on broad social and political statements that are complex--often playful and satirical with respect to ways in which propaganda, power, and social diversity mix with and conflict with historical and religious personalities. In this career retrospective in 2000 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Dr. Paul Jaskot wrote that "his art investigates the changing political and social geographies of [the modern] city."
  Donley has spent most of his career in Chicago, where his work was exhibited in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Peace Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, and numerous other group and solo exhibitions. He started his professional career in Los Angeles at the Paul Plummer Gallery and was later represented by Monique Knowlton in New York City. Donley was a chair and full professor of art at DePaul University.
context_section_description: In 1968, Donley marched with other artists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an event that pitted police against anti-Vietnam protestors in a bloody battle that changed the course of history and affected many artists, including Donley. At the same time he was marching, two of his two anti-war paintings, LBJ and Tank Attack were being displayed at the Armory on South Wabash Avenue. The year prior, he created one of the pieces in the Protest Papers, a bound portfolio of 20 black-and-white serigraphs published by the Artists Collaborative to protest the U.S. "policy of mass destruction in Vietnam." Donley was one of five directors of the Artists Collaborative and also involved with Dominick Di Meo, Donald Main, and Jim Falconer in the Chicago branch of Artists against the War in Vietnam.
  Through the 1960s and 1970s, Donley remained active in civil rights and anti-war protests. After this time, Donley's involvement in protest art continued. In 1982, his painting On Target, was part of the Atomic Salon: Artists Against Nuclear War at Feldman Gallery in New York to bring awareness to nuclear disarmament. In 1983, Capitulation was exhibited in Chicago Area Artists of Peace at the Peace Museum in Chicago in an effort to bring awareness to peace in the midst of the Cold War. In the same year, his work was exhibited at Nexus Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia in "What Artists Have to Say about Nuclear War". A year later, his work was shown in Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America at Frumkin Struve Gallery in Chicago. In the late 1990s, East Side, West Side traveled throughout Southeast Asia and China as part of a show to build a "new bridge between different cultures... [and, thus] seek to contribute to the larger goal of greater global harmony in the twenty-first century."
caption: LBJ, 1968, oil on canvas, 46" x 31"
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