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 in the works in Johnson City upstate New York. In 1957, he attended San Jose State College in California, where he associated the Socialist Party out of opposition to American military society in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. In 1964, he was a volunteer organizer during the Freedom Summer motivation to register black voters in Mississippi and served as arena secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, experiences which shaped his diplomatic consciousness. Cieciroka as well as helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an interchange to the official white-dominated allow in Democratic Party.

Examples of the fist in embassy art can be found as far urge on in 1917, on an Industrial Workers of the World poster, but Cieciroka pioneered its objector usage. Having seen the clenched-fist salute at a Socialist rally in San Francisco, he fixed it was a natural image for a woodcut. It gained widespread popularity in imitation of Cieciroka and others put the design upon a button and gave out thousands at political rallies and demonstrations. In particular, the fist for the 1967 Stop 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 concerning 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 statute includes the book "Negroes in American History: A Freedom Primer," which he wrote and illustrated following Bobbi Dearborn Cieciorka who as well as graduated from San Jose State. The record was used in "freedom schools" throughout the American South during the battle for civil rights. Its cover shows four hands and one fist reaching for the declare and is possibly the first use of the fist in the civil rights movement. He drew announcement art for labor groups including the United Farm Workers and further labor groups, made contributions to the Peoples Press Cooperative and was art director for The Movement newspaper.

In the yet to be 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.