Four cards signed by Edith Segal and illustrated and signed by her husband, Samuel Kamen
Brooklyn: Segal-Kamen, 1968-76. Four greeting/holiday (?) cards issued by the radical Jewish poet and dancer Edith Segal and her husband, the artist Samuel Kamen. The cards were likely produced each year for the couple's wide circle of friends, comrades and family and possibly issued as holiday cards since these four are all dated in December. They appear to have issued them until at least 1981.
The earliest card in our grouping is from 1968 and features Segal's poem "Challenge" and a cover illustration by Kamen showing a trio of multi-racial babies reaching for a white dove. The 1969 card includes the poem "March Against Death," which along with the cover illustration documents the couple's participation in the November 14, 1969 Moratorium Againt the Vietnam War. The 1972 card includes the poem "Recognition," with a cover illustration of a multi-racial group of adolescents in a field and reprints an illustra features an illustration of three multi-racial children in a field of flowers. The 1976 (?) card reprints Segal's poem "U.S. Calling UNICEF Friends" reprinted from her children's book Come With Me: Poems, Guessing Poems and Dance Poems for Young People (1963), with Kamen's illustrations also reprinted from that work.
Segal and her husband were lifelong leftist political activists and used various art forms to protest racism, capitalism, labor exploitation, war, etc (living Segal's maxim "Art is a weapon," which she declared following a visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s). She and her husband were both involved with numerous Jewish and progressive camps, such as Kamp Kinderland, and campaigned to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Mort Sobell (see Segal's pamphlet, I Call to You Across the Continent, 1953). Segal performed the first interracial dance titled "Black and White" and authored a number of children's books celebrating racial diversity. Samuel Kamen died in 1995, Edith two years later in 1997.
The cards vary in size but are generally 8 ½” x 5 ½”. Each signed by Segal and Kamen to the same recipient, with their Brooklyn address printed to the bottom of the rear panel. Some soiling to two of the cards, toning, but a very good grouping. A number of these cards are separately catalogued in OCLC, but not for these years. There are presumably examples in her papers at NYPL. Item #11611
Price: $150.00