In the collective U.S. imagination, the 1960s and most of the ’70s are represented by chaotic urban spectacles of burning cities, assassinated leaders and mass protests against the war in Vietnam.

Contemplating a photograph of two militant-looking "Local Boyz" sporting Black Panther-style berets (by Ed Greevy), the clenched fist in the breaking wave that defines the Save Our Surf Foundation’s hand-drawn logo, or a picture of a woman being forcibly arrested by cops (by Wayne Sasaki) reminds us that the revolution and resistance fomenting across the globe was equally at home in Paris, Watts and East Oahu.

Working intuitively, and motivated by a desire to respectfully integrate into the place that he now calls home, writer, artist and lawyer Sonny Ganaden has produced an exhibition that brings his own inherently collaborative printmaking work together with materials from the Hamilton Library’s archive of Save Our Surf’s printed and photographic communication.

As if backed up by a grandparent, the former body of work stands firmly on the foundation created by the concrete political reality of the latter.

Prints in Ganaden’s "Trip Around the Island" series, created in collaboration with 12 other artists, depict various locations on Oahu. Most often, the collaborating artist took Ganaden’s photo-based grayscale lithography and added a new layer of content (abstract, graphic, representational …) as she or he saw fit, introducing a wide spectrum of styles.

The material difference between a mimeographed flier that was probably produced during off hours at a high school, and a fine art print, is minimal. But their conceptual distance sets up an intriguing call-and-response between the past and the present.

For example, Ganaden’s collaboration with Jasper Wong blends the latter artist’s signature faux-naive cartoon figures with a lithograph featuring the Kapo­lei Costco. Wong’s giant hot dog shoots lasers from its eyes, while a smaller meat perched on the edge of the business that spawned them utters an expletive-driven cheer. In a nearby display case, a vintage flier announces a protest against Wai­a­nae coastal development with cartoon planes literally bombing the landscape with completed skyscrapers.

Compared with the flier, Ganaden and Wong deliver a kind of Toki­doki visual politics, but who is to say that their image couldn’t be used to rally an audience?

In contrast, "Wai­‘anae" is a piece by Ganaden and Carl Pao that invokes the classical political urgency of the SOS materials. Pao practically obliterates Ganaden’s base image of an American flag hanging in the branches of a keawe tree with block text the color of fresh blood. Reading, "Do you know the aliens of the aina?" and finished off with a question mark over the tree, this piece is timeless.

The wall-mounted pieces interact with display cases featuring fliers, newspaper clippings, maps, bumper stickers and political cartoons outlining a struggle for land rights, limited commercial development and environmental responsibility that continues today.

Developers are still trying to realize projects with roots that go back 30 years (from Kaka­ako high-rises to Disney’s colonization of the Wai­anae Coast): a testament to popular, sustained grass-roots resistance that was largely driven by young people.

One of the strengths of Ganaden’s collaborative approach is the diversity that it produces. A collaboration with Gina Bacon Kerr mixes myth, science and magical realism. Kerr takes Ganaden’s literal bamboo man ("kane ohe") and adds a group of hammerhead sharks, a species that is found in the bay and deeply connected to Hawaiian culture.

Conceptually opposite to Kerr is the nihilism of "It’s All Such Nothing," a collaboration with AJ Fedu­cia which cuts Ganaden’s image of the old Queen Theater in Kaimuki into a set of 12 indigo-stained squares. Feducia’s intervention appears to be minimal but points through the ruin at the apathy that the SOS organizers feared would spread if developers were left unchecked.

Though Ganaden has shown "Trip" before, he has accomplished a kind of alchemy by recontextualizing it via these historic materials.

The Save Our Surf show reminds us that grass-roots reactions to Hawaii’s rapid and contentious transformation through the ’60s and ’70s is not only historically underrepresented, but arguably a prototype. Twenty-first-century activists have rediscovered the critical role that visualizing locality, indigenous issues and geographic immediacy plays in politics and community organization.