Frank Cieciorka

Who was Frank Cieciorka?

Frank Cieciorka 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 grew up in Johnson City upstate New York. In 1957, he attended San Jose State College in California, where he joined the Socialist Party out of opposition to American military intervention in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. In 1964, he was a volunteer organizer during the Freedom Summer drive to register black voters in Mississippi and served as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, experiences which shaped his political consciousness. Cieciroka also helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the official white-dominated state Democratic Party.

Examples of the fist in political art can be found as far back in 1917, on an Industrial Workers of the World poster, but Cieciroka pioneered its modern usage. Having seen the clenched-fist salute at a Socialist rally in San Francisco, he decided it was a natural image for a woodcut.