The picture of protest

The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Social Justice & the Environment, 1965-2005
At: Massachusetts College of Art's aBakalar gallery, through Nov. 11

In March 1968, US troops swept through the Vietnamese village of My Lai and massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians. The atrocity and its coverup sparked international outrage and inspired one of the most famous protest images of the war. A trio of artists from the group Art Workers Coalition reproduced a picture taken by an Army photographer of women and toddlers gunned down along a muddy road. Atop it they printed one US soldier's response when asked by a television reporter about orders he received to kill all the villagers: ''Q. And babies? A. And babies."

The 1970 poster still chills. It is among the most powerful of the 121 strident and seductive works featured in the exhibit ''The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Social Justice & the Environment, 1965-2005" at the Massachusetts College of Art's Bakalar gallery through Nov. 11.

Most celebrated art of the relatively peaceful generation between the end of the Vietnam War and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been apolitical. And despite our current wars and calamities, there remains a deep aversion to political work in much of the art world -- as if mixing it with the gritty matters of life debases their creations. Of late, visual artists tend to politely segregate their politics to demonstrations rather instilling them in their art.

The art in ''The Graphic Imperative" doesn't share this aversion. The posters rally for literacy, the environment. They rage against atomic bombs, racism, child soldiers, gun trafficking, Nazism, war in Iraq, homelessness, land mines, hunger, substance abuse, rape, and AIDS. They are heartening works, making you feel less alone, less powerless -- assuming, of course, that you fall on the same side of these issues.

There are several classic images here. Lorraine Schneider's 1967 flower-power poster, saying, ''war is not healthy for children and other living things," still hits home. In 1982, Ester Hernandez transformed the trademark Sun-Maid raisin package into ''Sun Mad Raisins: Unnaturally Grown" to criticize pesticide contamination of water in her hometown in California raisin country. A 1989 poster by the artist group Guerrilla Girls, designed for the sides of New York buses, charges that women artists are underrepresented in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art -- and it retains its power, in part, because the complaint remains true. A 2001 image that merits comparisons to these superior works is Cedomir Kostovic's black-and-white poster of the American flag, the stripes made from lighted candles, as an elegy for the Sept. 11 dead.

The best posters enlist simplification and metaphor to seize our hearts, alerting us to problems, awaking us from complacency, sparking us to act. But designers slip up when their posters grow too simple or metaphors fall wide of the mark.

Forkscrew Graphics' appropriation of the iPod advertising design for its 2004 ''iRaq" poster indicting American troops for torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is aesthetically neat but conceptually sloppy. Swiping Apple's look attracts eyes, but it also implies complicity by the manufacturer that just isn't the case. And without the wall label, would you guess that Steff Geissbuhler's cute 1985 ''Peace" poster of Godzilla and King Kong holding hands commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and urged peace between the US and USSR?

Many flaws can be forgiven because powerful political art need not be perfect or eternal -- it just needs to get the job done. And when vital matters are at stake, why shouldn't artists risk addressing them? Still, if you care about these issues, you may feel a twinge of melancholy that these street fighters are cooped up behind glass in a gallery. You could console yourself with the thought that here (many of the posters were donated to the college for the show) they may seed future work.