Jamie Reid ‘Taking Liberties’

Jamie Reid (born 1947) was an iconic and iconoclastic British artist and political activist who was involved in the student movement of 1968 where he and Malcolm McLaren organised an occupation of the college. Reid is best known for designing album covers for the British punk rock band the Sex Pistols. These covers featured letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note which became a defining aesthetic of punk rock.

The Social Gallery team members and Soft Touch helped to facilitate the exhibition at The Gallery at DMU (De Montfort University) which sadly became Reid’s last one as a living artist as he died on the 8th August, aged 76 years.

‘Taking Liberties’ featured Reid’s social injustice protest work which included drawings, stickers, posters, banners and publications from his seminal but rarely seen early 1970s Suburban Press period through to 1980s and 1990s. This included campaigns against the Poll Tax, English Heritage, the Criminal Justice Bill and Clause 28, to recent work for Pussy Riot, his ten year cycle of installation at the Strongroom Studios in London and through to his exploration of the celestial and spiritual Eightfold Year. Reid continued to engage visually with socio-political situations, such as Occupy, Extinction Rebellion and the Free Pussy Riot movement.

Soft Touch Arts with involvement of Social Gallery directors had been working with John Marchant, Jamie Reid’s manager, to curate Reid’s 7 metre Sex Pistols Mural, 1979-1984 for the Punk: Rage & Revolution exhibition, and felt a spin-off complementary exhibition was needed. We introduced Leicester Galleries curator, Hugo Worthy to John Marchant Gallery, helping to broker Reid’s social injustice collection and bringing the Taking Liberties exhibition to Leicester to run alongside the main exhibitions at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery and Soft Touch Arts.

The exhibition became DMU Gallery’s busiest ever summer exhibition and helped to inspire work from DMU students. The project gave students on creative courses opportunities to get involved with major exhibitions and produce their own punk and activism inspired fashion, textiles, print, film and photography.