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<font size=3>A great movement artist and friend of the Freedom Archives,
Frank Cieciorka, has died. He will be missedhis work goes marching
on!<br><br>
<img src="cid:7.1.0.9.2.20081125152720.031b7e00@freedomarchives.org.0" width=100 height=144 alt="[]">
<br>
<b> <br>
<i>Frank Cieciorka, 69, Artist and Activist<br>
</i></b> <br>
Frank
Cieciorka, a nationally recognized watercolor painter, political artist,
activist, and author who created many of the iconic images of the 1960s,
including the clenched fist and the black panther, died on November 24,
2008 at his home in Alderpoint, California. The cause was emphysema.<br>
<br>
Born
April 26, 1939, Frank grew up in the upstate New York factory town of
Johnson City where his father worked at a grocery store. Frank
began work at the age of 14 as a bowling alley pin-boy and then on the
assembly line at the local shoe factory. Recognized since childhood for
his artistic talent, he enrolled in the fine arts program at San Jose
State College in 1957, where he became an anti-war activist, protesting
military interventions in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.<br>
<br>
On
graduating in 1964, Frank volunteered for Freedom Summer in Mississippi
and later was hired as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He helped organize African-Americans to
register to vote and assisted in organizing the racially integrated
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white
official Democratic Party. Frank also wrote and illustrated <i>Negroes in
American HistoryA Freedom Primer</i>, taught in Freedom Schools
throughout the south. The book is still used as a resource text.<br>
<br>
Frank
continued his political activism in San Francisco, where he became
artistic director of <i>The Movement</i>, a national newspaper of
community, anti-war, and civil rights organizing. His art also
appeared in many other publications, posters, and underground papers,
including <i>The Realist</i>. Among the powerful images he created for
<i>The Movement</i> were full-size front-page portraits of Nat Turner and
John Brown. His political artistry there and at People’s Press inspired a
generation of activist artists.<br>
<br>
At the
end of the Sixties, tired of city life, Frank became an avid backpacker.
In 1972 he purchased a half-acre plot in rural Alderpoint, where he
designed and built his own home and studio, and turned to watercolor
painting. His works celebrate the southern Humboldt County countryside,
the beauty of the female figure in natural settings, and ordinary people
doing what they do.<br>
<br>
He is
survived by his wife, the painter Karen Horn, with whom he enjoyed over
25 years of love and artistic dialogue. He is also survived by his
step-daughter, Zena Goldman Hunt and her family, and by his brother,
James Cieciorka, and his wife, Jean. Family and friends rejoice in having
shared Frank’s life: a testimony to political and artistic passion.<br>
<br><br>
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<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
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