Frank Cieciorka

Frank Cieciorka (April 26, 1939 – November 24, 2008) was an American graphic artist, painter, and activist. His best known work, a woodcut rendering of a clenched-fist salute, was a model for the New Left emblem.

Cieciroka (che-CHOR-ka) grew occurring in Johnson City upstate New York. In 1957, he attended San Jose State College in California, where he joined the Socialist Party out of enemy to American military action in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. In 1964, he was a volunteer organizer during the Freedom Summer desire to register black voters in Mississippi and served as arena secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, experiences which shaped his political consciousness. Cieciroka plus helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an interchange to the approved white-dominated let in Democratic Party.

Examples of the fist in embassy art can be found as far help in 1917, on an Industrial Workers of the World poster, but Cieciroka pioneered its advanced usage. Having seen the clenched-fist salute at a Socialist rally in San Francisco, he approved it was a natural image for a woodcut. It gained widespread popularity later than Cieciroka and others put the design upon a button and gave out thousands at diplomatic rallies and demonstrations. In particular, the fist for the 1967 cease the Draft Week became what art archivist and historian Lincoln Cushing considered "the iconic New Left fist — very stylized and simple to reproduce, picked up on immediately by Students for a Democratic Society and others." Although the Black Panther Party used as its primary logo a panther meant by Emory Douglas, versions of Mr. Cieciorka's "power salute" also were featured in its publications.

Cieciroka's other discharge duty includes the book "Negroes in American History: A Freedom Primer," which he wrote and illustrated afterward Bobbi Dearborn Cieciorka who then graduated from San Jose State. The tape was used in "freedom schools" throughout the American South during the fight for civil rights. Its lid shows four hands and one fist reaching for the circulate and is possibly the first use of the fist in the civil rights movement. He drew public notice art for labor groups including the United Farm Workers and additional labor groups, made contributions to the Peoples Press Cooperative and was art director for The Movement newspaper.

In the in advance 1970s he moved to Humboldt County, California and became a noted watercolor painter particularly of landscapes of his rural California home. He died at his house in Alderpoint, California from emphysema on November 24, 2008.