"I didn't want to protest the events that occurred at the convention but to protest the system that allowed it and created it . . . We are trying to make an impression on the city's business and cultural leadership . . . We want to make known where the creative and thinking people of the world stand vis-à-vis the Chicago political system."

Richard Feigen, Chicago 1968

 

...In the exhibition...they have assembled the first major collection of art expresing a political and social point of view since the Social Realists' exhibits of the nineteen-thirties. They have brought together contemporary American artists who work in dissimilar modes andhave united them in a common goal which invites comparision of a new kind. They have stimulated artists to create works of art of anew kinds focusing on specific happenings - in some cases challenging hitherto unrealized expressive potential in the individual artist. Barnett Neuman and Hans Breder, both of whom explore formal problems in their oeuvre, have come up with surprisingly different works and very powerful statements...The Richard J. Daley exhibition has given us more than an assemblage of objects of variety and quality; it has given artists more than a common frame of reference; it has produced a specifically contemporary kind of artist-activist.

Richard J. Daley , Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago.