Peter Carr: This Is How We Will All Be Saved

Mini Gallery, September 9 – December 10, 2026

Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr (1925-1981) produced a prolific body of work that advocated for people-powered movements fighting against war, U.S. imperialism, corporate greed, and environmental plunder. A dedicated peace activist, Carr’s frenetic poetry, art books, political posters, and paintings emphatically advanced his personal sense of urgency to collectively organize for survival in the face of capitalist and militarist destruction. Working diligently until his sudden death in 1981, Carr developed a visual lexicon of people’s struggle that is humanistic, highly expressive, and deeply poetic. Peter Carr: This Is How We Will All Be Saved explores Carr’s deft use of text and image to speak truth to power and to move people from complacency to action.

Peter Carr: This Is How We Will All Be Saved is organized in conjunction with the Special Collections and University Archives exhibition Peter Carr: The Right to Protest, which explores the history of campus protest and peace activism at Cal State Long Beach. Carr was a professor of Comparative Literature at Cal State Long Beach, where he co-founded the Department of Comparative Literature (now the Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics) in 1965.