Detail from Sad! by Marilyn Minter.
Courtesy of Lightwork.
The billboards going up around the country this week will have a familiar message for this midterm election: Vote. But featuring images of protests and reminders of the 2016 election, produced by some of the country’s best-known artists, the billboards—one for each of the 50 states—will look nothing like your average political advertisement. Part political action, part art outreach, the For Freedoms billboard project is bringing the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Marilyn Minter, Trevor Paglen, Awol Erizku, and Alfredo Jaar, among others, to places it might not ordinarily appear—and, hopefully, some more people to the polls in the process.
When artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman founded For Freedoms in 2016, they called it the first super PAC run by artists, intended to use art to deepen the public discussion about politics . The organization’s name comes from a World War II–era series of Norman Rockwell paintings, Four Freedoms, which show regular citizens exercising their rights in an everyday setting.
Their earliest work was a billboard campaign that featured some of the same artists making work about the 2016 elections. Weems, a photographer most well-known for her black-and-white portraits of domestic scenes with trenchant commentary on race, contributed a somber image of a woman standing at the Lincoln Memorial with the phrase: “With democracy in the balance, there is only one choice.”
“The dynamics haven’t changed, maybe they’ve simply intensified. We’re all questioning at this point what a progressive democracy might look like,” Weems said in a phone interview. This time around, Weems decided to go full color for her billboard, which went up in Sarasota, Florida, last week. “I wanted there to be a sense of hopefulness,” she said. “The image in Florida conveys that sense of a broad coalition of many kinds of people that are together in a single space, wanting the same thing.”
From top; Trevor Paglen, For On Kawara on view in Hartford, CT; Carrie Mae Weems, Wall and Door in Sarasota, FL and Portland, OR and With Democracy In The Balance There Is Only One Choice in Syracuse, NY; Marilyn Minter, Sad! in Little Rock, AK.
Courtesy of Lightwork.
The photograph is of the author Sapphire, famous for writing the novel that was adapted into the movie Precious, while she was participating in the 2017 Women’s March. “She just happened to walk into my frame with that unbelievable smile, looking up, a very natural sense of effervescence and energy.”
Minter took a very different approach in making her billboard, currently on display in Little Rock, Arkansas. Minter, best known as a photographer whose bright images comment on beauty and celebrity, used a medium she’s been experimenting with to make her billboard, which says “sad!” in graffiti-style lettering.
“It’s a font I made with spray paint, and then we cut it up and made it into shirts and things you can put in your window. I’ve done about four different versions of the word ‘resist,” she said. “The connotation is of rawness and outlaws. Graffiti artists used to get arrested, some were even killed. Ultimately, it’s about defamation, and I feel like there’s been a defamation of our spirit.”
For this billboard, she knew she wanted to do something a little more neutral. “Well, I couldn’t be political, but I would have been really aggressive if I could, because what I wanted to do was write, ‘F— you, Trump,” Minter said. “This is as mild as I could get. Taking one of his signature words and trying to re-purpose it into a really sad-looking word.”
She wants the billboard to prompt questions from the people who see it. “Hopefully people will recognize the word, see the connotation, and think about the president saying it all the time as a put-down,” she said. “Drawing it the way we drew it changes the meaning. It’s not didactic, it’s just something you can think about if you want to. Those are the images that affect me, the ones that make you go, ‘Hmm, what does that mean?’ Multiple meanings makes something more profound.”
For Minter, the project is also deeply personal. “I think it’s important for everyone to get involved, not just artists. If you’re not upset, you’re not awake,” she said. “I just can’t tolerate injustice, but who can? I just don’t ignore it, and that’s really it.”
Credit:Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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