In 2024 Daisy Delogu, faculty director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, received an email “out of the blue,” she says. It was about the estate of Barbara Morgan, AM’65, a poster artist and activist who had studied history at UChicago.

As a graduate student, Morgan was a member of the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP), one of the first campus-based women’s liberation groups in the country. In the early 1970s she cofounded the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, which produced such iconic posters as “Sisterhood Is Blooming” (1972). Later she moved to San Francisco and started another collective, Red Pepper Posters.

Morgan died in 2021, leaving behind a trove of artwork and personal papers. “All of these materials were about to land in a dumpster,” Delogu says, until an artist friend of Morgan’s stepped in and offered them to the University.

Delogu, Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature, had never heard of Morgan. This was partly by design. At the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, all posters were created collaboratively, beginning with a conceptual process known as a “poster think.” The posters were silk-screened by hand at the group’s workspace at 852 West Belmont, “now a very classy neighborhood,” but at the time “very down and out,” as cofounder Estelle Carol, AB’71, described it in a 2012 interview. All posters were credited to the collective, not individual artists.

“These were not rarefied art objects,” Delogu says. The goal was not to make money, but “in the spirit of the ’70s, to do some consciousness raising.” Artists in the collective believed that “culture is the key to women’s revolution,” Carol said at a panel discussion in March. “We needed our own art.” Sold by mail order and in feminist and political bookstores, the posters were popular because they were “so huge, beautiful, incredibly affordable, and explained feminism in fun, unique ways.” Sometimes they were used as picket signs during political marches.

“Sisterhood Is Blooming,” one of the collective’s earliest posters, was designed to be easy to silk-screen, with a simple slogan and just two colors. It became their most popular poster and is now in the Library of Congress as well as in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, among other collections.

In 2025 four cardboard boxes from Morgan’s estate arrived at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. Delogu had hired four College students—Ahan Jayakumar, Emma Yu, and Ashley Zhou, all Class of 2027, and Yiyao Sun, AB’26—through a program called the College Summer Institute in Humanistic Research. The students were the first to open the boxes and discover the treasures inside: original posters, photo albums, personal letters, decades of diaries.

First the students sorted and cataloged the materials. Then they curated an exhibition, Radical Posters: Women’s Graphics Collectives, that went up at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality during Winter Quarter. The show was dominated by facsimiles of brightly colored posters with messages like “Women Are Not Chicks,” “Lesbian Pride,” and “Sacred Motherhood” (juxtaposed with an image of an exhausted-looking woman working in a factory while nursing a baby).

Morgan had started doctoral work in history at UChicago but left to focus on activism. Nonetheless, “she really thought of herself as a historian” as well as an artist and activist, Delogu says. Several of her posters reference medieval artwork that she discovered as a grad student.

So far Danielle Aubert, professor of practice in the arts in English, has made use of the Barbara Morgan Collection in her Winter Quarter course Graphic Design and Social Movements. For researchers of visual culture or political activism, “there’s so much you could do” with the materials, Delogu says.

And then there are Morgan’s letters and journals, which not only document her political and creative struggles but also serve as a snapshot of her everyday life: paying rent, dating, getting arrested. “One of the students felt like Barbara Morgan was her bestie,” Delogu says. “She knew so much about Barbara Morgan’s love life and her friendships.”