Vera Baker Williams was a longtime War Resisters League activist and designed the covers for seventy-six issues of Liberation – a publication intimately tied with the War Resisters League. Her covers for Liberation varied from direct social commentary and satire to more formal experimentations with color, pattern, and design. The editors’ commitment to Vera B. Williams' visionary cover art posited that creativity, play, and curiosity were essential elements in healthy and liberatory social movements.
Pictured above and to the side: Vera Baker Williams' covers for Liberation magazine, now reproduced in Signal:08 A Journal of Political Graphics and Culture (Courtesy Signal / Alec Dunn)
Born in 1927 in New York City into a radical, working class family she moved to North Carolina in 1945 to study art at Black Mountain College. Black Mountain was an innovative experiment in art education that lasted a little more than two decades and was located just outside of Asheville, NC. Black Mountain’s arts program mixed labor and study, it experimented in democratic structuralism involving students, staff, and faculty; and it was an early innovator in self-guided curriculum development. Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center has an exhibit about Vera Williams on display until May 11, 2024. While there she studied under Josef and Anni Albers, German refugees from fascism and former instructors at the Bauhaus. She also developed relationships with luminaries such as the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, the composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, and visitors like Bayard Rustin and Igal Roodenko who visited Black Mountain following the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 (Black Mountain was also the first non-segregated higher education institute in the American South during Jim Crow).
In 1953 she, along with her husband and fellow Black Mountain alum Paul Williams, left the increasingly fractious Black Mountain to establish Gate Hill Cooperative, an arts and craft oriented commune in the Hudson Valley. Other Gate Hill residents included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the potters Karen Karnes and M.C. Richards, filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, among many others. Residents of Gate Hill maintained ties with the Glen Gardner Cooperative, a pacifist commune in New Jersey where Dave Dellinger and Igal Roodenko lived and worked as the publishers and printers of Resistance, a magazine of the anarcho-pacifist left.
Infographic presenting Liberation's editorial board and roots (Alec Dunn)
Williams helped with illustrations for Resistance and this relationship later morphed into producing artwork for the newly founded Liberation in 1956 which aimed to be a voice for theory and action around civil rights and nonviolent direct action (it was seed-funded by the War Resisters League and Fellowship of Reconciliation). The original editorial collective was composed of veterans of the anti-militarist left: AJ Muste, Sidney Lens, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, and Roy Finch. Williams produced sporadic covers and interior illustrations for the first few issues and then in 1959 became an almost exclusive cover artist for the next decade. Her cover art ran the gamut from topical pieces, to social satire, to abstraction, to celebrations of life, birth, and the changing of the seasons. Politically, the bulk of her covers were dedicated to civil rights commentary and later to the escalation of war in Vietnam. Her cover work for Liberation stopped in 1966, as the magazine underwent editorial and direction changes.
Vera Williams went on to have a celebrated career in children’s literature producing colorful stories of young people experiencing solidarity, having adventures, and being creative. She also continued to work in the peace movement for the rest of her life. She served on the WRL executive committee in the 1980s and helped illustrate and coordinate several years of WRL’s iconic calendars. She collaborated with her friend Grace Paley on nonviolent direct actions as well as on one book, Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1993) and on WRL's 1989 Peace Calendar, “365 Reasons Not to Have Another War”. Vera Williams died in 2015.
I wrote an in-depth article about Vera Williams's Liberation cover art in Signal:08 in 2023.
