Design writing may tend towards the hyperbolic, but we feel pretty confident proclaiming that Jamie Reid’s ’70s graphics ripped up all that was familiar and (snarlingly) started things over. His record sleeve designs ushered in a completely new approach to album art; his ransom-note typography, blustering cut-and-paste newsprint, and defiant DIY aesthetic is still, almost 50 years on, the instant signifier of “punk.”

Much has been written on his work for the Sex Pistols, of course, and it’s easy to forget that in these intervening decades, Reid and his contemporaries are still making work. In the past, he’s voiced his suspicions of gallery shows—or, more precisely, the entire art-world-gallery-system—but thanks to a curator who’s a longtime fan of Reid’s, the artist and designer is now the star of a vast solo retrospective.

XXXXX: 50 Years of Subversion and the Spirit spans three floors and half a century of work, including pieces that give us a look into his lesser-known preoccupations with spirituality and nature, as well as unseen archival works. “It’s interesting going through all my work, especially with the paintings,” he says. “I’d forgotten how well I can paint!”

“I think I learned more about graphic design being a printer than three years at art school.”

While he’s a deft draftsman and an acerbic copywriter, Reid’s work is as much about making statements as it is applying type and brushstrokes. In the early days, this was through his collaboration on the satirical south London DIY community printing press and publisher Suburban Press, where his use of cut-up type was born of not being able to afford Letraset.

“I think I learned more about graphic design being a printer than three years at art school,” he’s said. “It gave me that ability to mess about with things.”  More recently, he’s been a vocal supporter of the Occupy London movement and Pussy Riot, for whom he created a poster when they were first arrested in Russia.

Now based in arts community center The Florrie in Liverpool, Reid is audibly baffled at how little support Pussy Riot received in the UK. “They told me it was easier to get out of Russia than to get into England,” he says. “I couldn’t believe their bravery—what they did in the World Cup [when a Pussy Riot activist ran onto the pitch during the final] was amazing, and I say that as a football fan.

“I’d forgotten how brave people can be in their art, and how complacent people have been. Everyone’s gotten used to toeing the line.”

Complacency isn’t something you could ever charge Reid with. When I ask what the word “punk” means to him, he replies that while he’s “never really understood that kind of labelling,” what lays at the heart of it all is “ideas and attitude.” The projects he speaks most ebulliently about are those related to campaigning. “I’ve always worked with things I’ve felt totally involved with,” he says. Alongside the aforementioned Pussy Riot, and the Occupy movement, he’s also supplied graphics for the campaign against the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, a piece of legislation passed in the UK to quell the free party and rave scenes. (Much weary laughter has been had of the legal definition setting out that “music” now included “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” I.e. any electronic music—an artform likely totally alien to the Tory party.)

Other causes that Reid has actively created art around are the bid to repeal Section 28, Margaret Thatcher’s controversial (and frankly, homophobic) legislation banning the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities and in Britain’s schools.

What this show proves, though, is that “there’s a whole other side of my work to do with my upbringing,” says Reid. “There’s a whole lot to do with magic. My background is druidic and socialist. What we’re taught in history misses out on a whole spiritualist and socialist tradition and eradicates people of the most enormous importance.” Such people for Reid include the Romantic poets, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, who are often taught as nicey-nicey, florid scribes, but who were actually very political, vocally supporting the French Revolution, and leading lives very much outside of societal norms. “They were truly radical,” says Reid, who knows a thing or two about the alignment of the natural world and art.

“My family has been very involved over hundreds of years with the Druid order, and the whole absolute appreciation of how special this planet is,” he says, as he emphasizes his love for Native American and Aboriginal art. “We’re here as guardians of it but we’ve fucked it up. It’s so important to have an appreciation of the solstices and the equinoxes—it’s so integral to everything, and nature is integral to my painting. There’s an element of the spiritual to do with practical magic.

“I did an exhibition in Bootle [a rundown and poverty-blighted area of Liverpool] and one of the guys, said ‘show me your work, it’s like free drugs!’”

That sort of engagement with communities is crucial to Reid’s practice, and his work hinges infinitely more on addressing inequalities than it does on hooks on gallery walls. “The last major exhibition I did was in Liverpool in an area that’s got fuck all going for it money-wise,” he says. “It’s not an established gallery but 11,000 people visited in a month, which is a hell of a lot. The local school had art taken out of the syllabus, so they organized all the students to come and do projects there, and as a consequence it had art put back on the curriculum.”

The terrifying pace at which the arts are being relegated in the English state school system is something that Reid is angry about, not simply because of the obvious injustice and idiocy at play, but because of his own journey. “I was in art school in the late ’60s without any qualifications, and I got a grant,” he says. “I loved the art school I went to [Croydon School of Art] as it was a technical college, so it didn’t have all that unnecessary art school snobbery.” It was there that he met the Sex Pistols, and many others who helped shape the direction of his career.

“It’s interesting because when I was at Croydon there was Malcolm McLaren [who went on to manage the Sex Pistols], Robin Scott who had a hit record with Pop Muzik, Sean Scully, an internationally known painter… and none of us would have got into that system now,” says Reid. “Education is such a basic right, it should be free.”

Education aside, for Reid, it was the ’90s that marked a nail in the coffin for British artists. “I think what did irreparable harm was Brit Art, and the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, and I find that so ironic,” he says. “They were brought into prominence by Saatchi and I regard them as Thatcher’s children: they lack ideology or ideas and spirit. There’s a complex stranglehold in the British art scene with those sort of artists and gallery owners. It’s so hard to break through now.”

Reid is angry, but not necessarily bitter, and this carries through in the depth of thought and feeling throughout his oeuvre. How much is it the responsibility of artists and designers to engage politically, as he does? “It’s really important. You have to stimulate and talk and have ideas—I think so much of art now, particularly in this country, is about gestures, not beliefs.

“I just hope the show creates dialogue and discussion and stimulates ideas.”