Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!) is a two-person public art project founded in 1991 by artist Carrie Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner. Between 1991 and 2004 DAM! blitzed the streets of New York City with public art projects that combined Madison Avenue savvy with Situationist tactics.

The campaigns dissected mainstream media by inserting lesbian images into recognizably commercial contexts, revealing how lesbians are and are not depicted in American popular culture. While questioning the basic assumption that one cannot be “present” in a capitalist society unless one exists as a consumer group, DAM! performed the role of the advertiser, promising the lesbian viewer all the things she’d been denied by the mainstream: power, inclusion, and the public recognition of identity.

DAM! began as a working group of Queer Nation and quickly evolved into a stand-alone agitprop unit whose exact membership remained anonymous for many years. Dyke Action Machine! campaigns presented a hybrid form of public address where civic issues such were packaged to fit seamlessly into the commercialized streetscape.

A typical DAM! campaign was comprised of 5,000 posters wheatpasted over the course of one month. Neighborhoods were targeted for both the volume and diversity of pedestrian traffic as well as their long histories as sites for graphic intervention and public discourse. As corporations and activists battled for the ever-dwindling public space in New York City, DAM! turned to other modes of propaganda (lightboxes, catalogs, matchbooks, buttons and stickers to name but a few) and distribution (the US Postal Service, the Internet and by hand).

Carrie Moyer is a painter, designer and writer. Her paintings have been exhibited widely in both the US and Europe. During the 1990s, she designed seminal agitprop campaigns for the Lesbian Avengers, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, and the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. She is a contributing writer for such publications as Modern Painters, Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail. Moyer is Assistant Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is represented by CANADA. For more information, visit carriemoyer.com

Sue Schaffner is photographer and publishes under the alias Girl Ray. Her work includes portraits of featured media personalities for magazines. Her photos have appeared in Men’s Health, People, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, Esquire, and Wired.  Getty Images and Corbis license her stock photography library internationally. In addition to being an artist consultant in the Creative Capital Foundation Professional Development Program, she is currently developing a camera review website, MyFavoriteCameras.com. She works out of her studio in the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn, NY.

“Their efforts are effectual reminders that k.d. lang is not the only lesbian in the world.”
Collier Schorr, ArtForum

“Culture jamming and identity politics make for a saucy stew in the work of Dyke Action Machine... Gynadome, their latest Web venture, is an elaborate and hilarious movie trailer-style teaser, involving “sexy techno-resisters” who go back to the land. DAM ironically terms it a “NeoLuddite reverie,” but only certified geeks could have made it.”
Robert Atkins, Art and Media Channel

“The agitprop duo of Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner, who armed with wheat paste, ire and wild graphic talents, have brought New York their perversely satirical lesbo themed...ads.”
Guy Trebay, Village Voice

“Their latest effort, DAM! S.C.U.M., emblazoned with the headline, ‘Are You A Man Hater?,’ communicates the political agenda of DAM! with a healthy—and explicit—dose of humor. They could have been co-scripted by Roseanne and John Waters.”
Tod Lippy, Print Magazine

“The slick hyper professional look of DAM’s projects exponentially increases their effectiveness, giving a poster’s juxtaposition with “real” advertising an eerie resonance.” Lisa Jervis, Bitch Magazine

“There’s some awesome activist artwork around New York and the Internet these days—by Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner, the chicks behind Dyke Action Machine!”
Esther Hanes, Jane Magazine

“Dyke Action Machine humorously counters this position... seen in struggles for social change and in many posters-for instance those demanding a bigger slice of the pie in contrast to those who say the pie is rotten.”
Carol Wells, Center for the Study of Political Graphics

“Though the name makes it sound like a street fighting group of hundreds, DAM! is really the dynamic duo of lesbian propaganda” Ted Loos,The Advocate