This 1919 print by Viktor Deni is, "Death to capital or death under the heel of capital!"

In the right hands, printmaking can be one of the most personal of art forms. Or it can be one of the most political.

As it happens, examples of both sides of printmaking’s personality — the personal and the political — can be found in local galleries this month.

Political junkies, for example, will want to check out “Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons,” a sprawling Brown University exhibit that features more than 150 Soviet-era posters and political cartoons. Most of the material, which ranges from World War II-era caricatures of Hitler and Churchill to posters protesting American involvement in Vietnam, is on display at the David Winton Bell Gallery in Brown’s List Art Center.

Related exhibits are at the John Hay Library (20 Prospect St.) and the Rockefeller Library (10 Prospect St.)

At first glance, a lot of the work looks familiar. There are the usual images of heroic workers striving to meet production quotas and five-year plans. Greedy capitalists and warmongers — two of the Soviets’ favorite villains — are easy to spot. (Hint: look for the fat guys in the pin-striped suits and pompous-looking uniforms.) And Soviet leaders — mostly Lenin and Stalin, with occasional cameos by Marx and Engels — are invariably portrayed as heroic, larger-than-life figures.

Even the colors scream “Evil Empire!” Red, the official color of the Russian Revolution, is by far the favorite color choice among the show’s artists and designers. Blacks and grays (often in the form of jagged Cubist-style photomontages) round out the Soviet palette.

A closer look, however, reveals some surprises, both artistic and political.

One is a group of lubki — a type of satirical poster or cartoon whose roots date back to the 17th century. While many Soviet poster designers looked to modern art movements such as Cubism and Expressionism, lubki artists relied on older (and arguably more genuinely Russian) traditions of satire, caricature and exaggeration to get their points across.

Many lubki prints also feature more than one scene, a technique that allowed artists to draw basic contrasts between good and evil and before and after. In one print, the left-hand panel shows a group of fat-cat capitalists exploiting workers. In the right-hand panel, the workers have turned the tables, with a gleeful worker stabbing one of his former bosses in the heart.

That kind of simple, easy-to-grasp storyline — capitalists “bad,” victorious workers “good” — was typical of lubki, which were often aimed at rural workers and peasants who could barely read or write. Indeed, you might call lubki the Pop Art of the People’s Paradise.

Another surprise is the posters from the 1960s and ’70s. Though not as inventive as the show’s earlier works, these post-1960 posters offer something just as interesting: a view of recent American history, including the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War, through the eyes of our former Cold War adversaries.

A 1968 poster, for example, features the head of a shark, teeth bared, accompanied by the words “John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy — Who will be the next one?” Another shows a Vietnamese village being threatened by a snarling tiger wearing a U.S. Army uniform. The caption reads “Get Him Out of Vietnam.” The date: 1971.

Though the show, which was curated by Bell Gallery director Jo-Ann Conklin and Brown historian Abbott Gleason, doesn’t stray much beyond the 1970s, several works may strike viewers as strangely prescient. A 1958 poster, for example, shows an Arab man being grabbed by two arms — one marked with a U.S. dollar sign, the other with a British pound symbol.

Stylistically, the poster looks like a product of the 1950s. But the caption — “You Will Not Strangle the Freedom of the Arab People” — could have been penned yesterday.

(Note: In addition to the exhibits at the Bell Gallery and the Hay and Rockefeller libraries, “Views and Re-Views” has spawned several related events. One is a lecture by Gleason, on Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. in the List Art Center auditorium. There’s also a panel discussion on Oct. 10 from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in Pembroke Hall (172 Meeting St.).

“Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons” continues through Oct. 19 at the David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, 64 College St. in Providence. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 11-4 and Sat.-Sun. 1-4. For more information, call (401) 863-2932.

Prints with a personal side

For a taste of printmaking’s more personal side, check out Serena Perrone’s solo show at the Sol Koffler gallery on Weybosset Street.

A St. Louis native, Perrone earned her master of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. Since then, her work has been included in a number of high-profile exhibits, including last year’s “New Prints” show at the International Print Center in New York. The Whitney Museum recently acquired one of her prints for its permanent collection.

Why all the background? Because Perrone’s life story is clearly the inspiration for “In the Realm of Reverie,” a striking series of woodcuts that makes up most of the Sol Koffler show.

Artists, of course, draw inspiration from their own lives all the time. But “In the Realm of Reverie” turns out to be wonderfully, magically unique — a kind of Surrealistic coming-of-age story, complete with enchanted forests, hidden dangers and exotic landscapes.

In one print, a young girl (presumably a stand-in for Perrone herself) stands on the threshold of a bridge. On the near side of the bridge, the girl is surrounded by a lush forest. But on the far side of the bridge, the landscape looks cold and barren.

Eventually, of course, the girl will have to cross the bridge and confront whatever fate awaits her on the other side. Yet in this and other works in the series, Perrone transforms her own hopes and fears into something special. Clearly, she’s an artist to watch.

Ends Sunday at the Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery, 169 Weybosset St., Providence. Hours. Mon.-Sun. noon-8. (401) 454-6141 or www.risd.edu/exhibitions.

Two more options

AS220 also has a pair of print-related events on tap this month. One is a fundraiser to benefit the Community Printshop, an artist-run print studio that opened last year in the AS220-owned Dreyfus Building on Mathewson Street.

To help raise money for the shop, organizers invited more than 100 artists — including some with pretty hefty national and international reputations — to submit works to the first-ever Community Printshop Print Lottery. The results, which will be sold via a lottery system (in other words, bidders won’t know which works they’re getting until the lottery results are announced at the end of the month), are currently on display in AS220’s Empire Street headquarters. The cost: $75 per print.

Meanwhile, another Dreyfus venue — the AS220 Project Space — is showing the work of Providence poster designer Peter Cardoso. As a designer, Cardoso doesn’t have a signature style. Instead — and this may be the whole point — he’s more like a visual deejay, sampling everything from Sixties-era fashion photographs to 1970s’ psychedelia to vintage Goth and Punk images.

Local music fans, in particular, will want to catch this show, which surveys a decade’s worth of club and concert posters from Cardoso’s Ghost-Town Studio.

AS220’s Community Printshop Print Lottery will be held Saturday, Sept. 27, from 7 to 10 p.m. at 115 Empire St., in Providence. For more information, including a list of events associated with the Print Lottery, call (401) 831-9327 or visit www.as220.org.

“Peter Cardoso: A Ghost-Town 10 Year Retrospective Show” runs through Sept. 28 at the AS220 Project Space, 95 Mathewson St., in Providence. Hours: Wed.-Fri. 1-6 and Sat. noon-4.

bvansicl@projo.com