Abstract Activism: Sam Maitin's Philadelphia

Sam Maitin’s upbringing taught him to be critical of the injustices he saw in the world. Maitin grew up steeped in the socialist and pacifist beliefs of his father, Isaac Boris Maitin, who had fled Russia at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Isaac Maitin and his wife, Ruth Pollack Maitin, an immigrant from Ukraine, raised their three sons to be politically engaged in the Jewish community in their North Philadelphia neighborhood. They held regular discussions of political philosophy around the family dinner table above the grocery store that they ran at 1738 Oxford Street. Later in life, Sam Maitin recalled how his parents emphasized mutual aid, hospitality, equality, and education as the principles of their political and community life.

The Maitin family nurtured their love of learning in Philadelphia’s many educational institutions. Maitin recalled, “We used libraries voraciously. There was one library in particularly in that neighborhood, called the Wagner Branch of the Free Library… I used to practically live in that bloody place.” He also attended free art classes at the Fleisher Art Memorial’s Graphic Sketch Club, founded to make art instruction accessible to working-class children. Maitin devoted himself to art as he advanced through the Philadelphia public schools. After high school graduation, he accepted a City Scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art.

Despite unsupportive teachers and his father’s wishes for him to pursue a more “intellectually trying” career, Sam Maitin became an artist. He graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1948 and then earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania three years later. In 1959, he held his first solo art show at the Print Club, now the Print Center, a non-profit gallery dedicated to promoting the art of printmaking.

During these years, he fell in love with printmaking. In 1949, he won first place in a poster contest for the Philadelphia Flower Show. Maitin recalled this experience as the moment that he awoke to the possibilities of poster art as a means of communication: “The very idea of a poster, which to me meant an art form that could be shared with people you didn’t know, and places you could never even think much about – that could be distributed and disseminated ... So to me it was an art form that could become almost ubiquitous.”

Maitin continued to make posters to support various causes throughout his life. This 1966 photograph depicts his prize-winning entry in the design competition for bookmarks in support of Philadelphia’s Bonds Campaign. His accompanied his abstract graphics with a direct appeal: “vote yes on the City Bonds.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Maitin joined a number of artists in expanding artistic experimentation and community building in Philadelphia. As he remembered, “The nature of my work grew out of this postwar period where anything was possible. We didn’t give movements names.” Nonprofit studios, artist collaboratives, and college art programs popped up all over the city. Many institutions attempted to make art more accessible through public programs.

In 1959, Philadelphia adopted its “Percent for Art” Ordinance. It required up to one percent of the budget for city construction or renovation projects to be set aside for site-specific public art. Considered the first ordinance of its kind on a citywide level, it was soon replicated across the country.

Yet many believed Philadelphia’s art scene still lagged behind the one in New York City, where artists such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Roy Lichtenstein created a flourishing abstract and Pop Art scene. Sam Maitin joined with the Arts Council, an organization established by members of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of Philadelphia (YM/YWHA), to bring new cultural events to Philadelphia to raise its prestige.

One of their earliest efforts was among the first Pop Art exhibitions on the East Coast, “Art 1963/A New Vocabulary.” Maitin contributed by designing the exhibition’s poster and catalog. He completed 47 posters for art projects run by the YM/YWHA from 1961 to 1968 and served as a key Arts Council member.

Many of Sam Maitin’s artistic collaborators were his neighbors in the rapidly changing neighborhood of Society Hill, south of Independence Hall. Maitin was one of many artists and young professionals to move to the area as it was targeted for redevelopment by city lawmakers and urban planners. Their plan for “urban renewal” aimed to attract middle-class families with favorable lending practices. In 1961, Maitin bought a 150-year-old rowhouse at 704 Pine Street and made it his studio and family home for the remainder of his life. He regularly collaborated with poets, playwrights, visual artists, creative professionals, and children who lived in the neighborhood.

Unlike many new residents of Society Hill, Maitin joined with long-time residents of the neighborhood to fight their displacement. Redevelopment razed buildings populated by many low-income renters, and many Black and Eastern European working-class families struggled to stay in their homes. Motivated by his upbringing, Sam mediated meetings related to the gentrification.

Dorothy Miller, a lifelong resident who organized neighbors to fight displacement, recounted how she and Sam Maitin went door-to-door to gain support for their petitions and secured the assistance of Community Legal Services and the Society Hill Civic Association. In 1972, Sam Maitin published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that Society Hill had room for residents of all classes.

Sam Maitin created community to generate alternative forms of support in a capitalist economy. He believed that all artists–visual, performing, and literary–should support one another. He nurtured creative projects through collaborating, teaching, and even lodging artists of various sorts in his Society Hill home. This dedication to artistic solidarity helped earn Maitin the nickname “Mayor of the Arts” in Philadelphia.

Maitin saw his creation of posters as a way to resist a profit-minded orientation to art. As he put it, “Dealers tell me not to do posters. It makes your work available to everyone for nothing.... Well, I despise the elitism of art.... Art is an attempt at a gift. It’s an offering.” We can see Maitin’s commitment to this philosophy in his list of causes that he supported through the donation of art. Made over a decade before his death, this list remains incomplete.

Sam Maitin never stopped arguing for public support for artists. He regularly pushed the city of Philadelphia to recognize and back underground and emerging artists. In the 1970s, he worked with the advocacy organization Artists’ Equity to improve work protections and fair payment for visual artists. Philadelphia and other major cities declined to adopt these rules as policy. Maitin later succeeded in rallying local artists to pressure Philadelphia’s City Council to change the use-and-occupancy tax for artists who worked from their homes.

Sam Maitin engaged in international politics as deeply as local ones. He produced the bulk of his poster art during the Cold War, when the U.S. government fought communist regimes on military and cultural fronts.

Maitin saw the creation of art as an exercise of U.S. ideals. In his words, “Art is an expression of freedom, and some view it as a threat or danger to have that much freedom. An expression of individualism and civil concern, art is anti-tyrannical.” Maitin created protest art that embodied his vision of U.S. democratic values. He used bold imagery, bright colors, and historical quotes to criticize U.S. military action and advocate for world peace.

In 1979, Maitin reflected, “People called me up during Vietnam and said, 'Why don't you do a picture of tanks and guns pointing at people?' I said I can't be an illustrator of agony. As the world got worse, my colors got brighter and brighter. It may have been a way of pushing it back. I realize now, undoubtedly it was."

Maitin regularly made posters for The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), founded in 1957. This pacifist and anti-nuclear activist group advocated for disarmament as tensions grew between the United States and the Soviet Union. They also advocated to end the U.S. war in Vietnam. In 1970, he contributed 8 works commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their “Peace” exhibition, organized to protest the war and raise funds for anti-war groups. Maitin’s “peace posters” included verse by poets who addressed themes of social justice.

In 1993, SANE awarded Maitin the Dr. Benjamin Spock SANE Peace Award in recognition for his dedication to anti-war and humanitarian causes.

Sam Maitin made it a lifelong cause to improve the lives of children with art. His popular media works for children include the short, animated film, Androcles and the Lion (1963), and illustrations for several children’s books. He sought to nurture their curiosity, learning, wonder, and originality—characteristics that he deliberately tried to retain in himself throughout his life.

Maitin’s work took a more activist bend when he produced art to support children in need. In some cases, he created prints to raise money for causes, such as the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. In other cases, he created art in hospital settings to cheer sick children and their families.

Maitin also sought children as honest critics and creative collaborators. He would invite neighborhood children into his studio for feedback on works in progress and bring them into the process of design and creation for public works.
News footage of his 1971 mural project shows his work with neighborhood children in action.