Artist's Poster Committee of Art Workers Coalition
Q. And babies? A. And babies.
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1970
63.5 x 96.5 cm.
Edition size unknown
Cover-Up, the 2025 documentary about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, features a chilling interview clip that I had read many times, but never seen:
Mike Wallace: So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
Paul Meadlo: Right.
Mike Wallace: And you killed how many? At that time?
Paul Meadlo: Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t- You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
Mike Wallace: Men, women, and children?
Paul Meadlo: Men, women, and children.
Mike Wallace: And babies?
Paul Meadlo: And babies.
Coupled with the infamous My Lai Massacre picture taken by combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968, the last question and answer became part of one of the most enduring and disturbing art world images of the Vietnam war.
The Artist's Poster Committee of Art Workers Coalition presented the two word question with the identical two word answer in an enlarged, blood-red distressed font overlaid onto the colour photograph of women and children killed by US forces on a dirt road
It has been estimated that over 500 unarmed civilians were killed - some raped, tortured and mutilated before their deaths - as part of the March massacre in South Viet Nam. The story caused global outrage when it became public knowledge in November of 1969. Eventually twenty-six US soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only one was convicted. Despite being found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he served only three and a half years under house arrest.
The poster was produced by AWC and GAAG members Frazer Dougherty, Jon Hendricks and Irving Petlin, along with Museum of Modern Art members Arthur Drexler and Elizabeth Shaw. Unexpectedly, the MoMA had agreed to fund and circulate the poster, but it was eventually vetoed by the president of the Board of Trustees, William S. Paley (chief executive office of the CBS radio and television networks). He and fellow board member Nelson Rockefeller were both "firm supporters" of the war and had backed the Nixon administration.1 Paley reportedly "hit the ceiling" when he saw the poster proofs. Funding was cancelled and the MoMA's press release stated that the project was outside the "function" of the museum, which could not take a position on any matter not directly related to a specific function of the institution.
"We picketed and protested in front of Guernica, published 50,000 posters on our own and distributed them, free, via an informal network of artists and movement people; it has turned up all over the world," wrote AWC member Lucy Lippard in November of 1970. The poster image was broadcast on television and reprinted in newspapers, as well as carried in protest marches around the globe.
"The success of And Babies gave the AWC a sense of self-determination that MoMA’s patronage would not have offered,” Lippard later wrote, in Vietnam in Art.
The AWC press release stated "Practically, the outcome is as planned: an artist-sponsored poster protesting the My-Lai massacre will receive vast distribution. But the Museum's unprecedented decision to make known, as an institution, its commitment to humanity, has been denied it.”
A second version of the poster was released when Nixon ran for re-election, with the caption changed to “Four More Years?”
The poster was included in two major MoMA exhibitions: Kynaston McShine's 1970 exhibition of conceptual art, Information; and Betsy Jones' The Artist as Adversary in 1971. It is now included in the gallery's permanent collection.
1. In the years that followed Paley would shorten a second instalment of a two-part CBS Evening News series on the Watergate, based on a request by Charles Colson, an aide to President Richard M. Nixon, and order the suspension of a critical analyses by CBS news commentators following Presidential addresses.
It was just reported this week that new head of CBS News Bari Weiss has spiked another 60 Minutes story critical of the Trump administration.
