Hi friends!
Today is DAY 7 of DrawTogether in Action! Our last mini-lesson on the intersection (and power!) of art and activism.
REMINDER: Tomorrow (Sunday 9/15) is our BIG COLLECTIVE ACTION DRAWING PARTY! At 10am PT/1pm ET join me for a 1 hour drawing/art/decorating party on zoom to Get Out The Vote. No drawing experience needed. All ages welcome. (Yay kids + drawing + civic engagement!)
Special guests artists Carson Ellis - and now Julia Rothman!! - will join us to offer drawing prompts and talk a little about their work and do a Q&A. Fun.
WHY: Studies show that envelopes with drawings and decorations significantly increase the impact of GOTV letters to voters in swing states. If a few hundred of us decorate just 3 envelopes each, that’s nearly 1,000 super impactful letters that could make a significant difference in voter turnout. Also, it’s just fun to hang out and doodle with friends on a Sunday.
WHEN: Sunday, 10-11am PT/ 1-2pm ET
WHERE: On ZOOM!
HOW:
1. Register for the ZOOM here.
2. Register for VoteFwd here. This is how you get the swing state voter names/addresses and letters to print out that we will send in our artful envelopes. If you don’t receive them from VoteFwd in time, that’s okay. You should get them in a day or two, and you can mail your letters then. We will help you with all this on the zoom.
3. Show up with 3 envelopes and ART SUPPLIES
Cannot wait!!
Now back to our regularly scheduled GUT lesson. :)
Collective Art & Action
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
American hero stories often center an individual: One person faces off against an evil empire. How a single human can change the world. A hero will save us all.
What a bunch of BS.
Any significant change has always been made by a group of people. While there might be a catalyzing leader, meaningful change is always a group effort. We are hero we’ve been waiting for.
Earlier this week, we looked at how portraits of one person can represent a group by creating a story and symbol in a viewers mind. Today, we’re looking at how groups can create a single image, and the unique power these group-artworks contain.
(This is all a tie into tomorrow’s collective action! Sign up to join!)
Quilts
Quilting has long been considered a “craft” - a contentious word that connotes creative - and often gendered labour - that is less commercially valued than “Art.” Recently, quilts and textile art in general, have started to get the respect they deserve. Curator of the 2020 exhibition “Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change,” at the Toledo Museum of Art, Lauren Applebaum wrote, “Quilts have always engaged the pressing social and political issues of their moment… Throughout history they have been deployed, often by marginalized people, to confront instances of violence, oppression, and exclusion.”
In preparation for tomorrow’s collective action, here are a few inspiring examples of quilts that have made significant impact on the artists, and the larger community.
AIDS Memorial Quilt
One of the most powerful artworks ever created with social engagement in mind is the AIDS memorial quilt.
The quilt celebrates the lives of people who died due to AIDS/HIV. Conceived of by activist Cleve Jones in 1985, the goal was to bring awareness to the scope of the AIDS pandemic, and make visible the invisible, humanizing the people who were affected. It also raised millions of dollars for AIDS service organizations. The quilt contains over 50,000 unique panels, each made by a different person or group of people, commemorating the lives of over 110,000 individuals. Today, nearly 40 years later, the quilt continues to grow. As of 2022, it weighs approx 54 tons.
Social Justice Sewing Academy
“Founded in 2017, the Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) is a non-profit organization that aims to empower individuals to utilize textile art for personal transformation, community cohesion, and to begin the journey toward becoming an agent of social change.”1 SJSA leads hands-on workshops in schools, prisons and community centers around the USA, and introduces quilting as a way to engage in social justice and art education, bridging personal expression and social activism.
Pro-Palestinian Quilt: “From Occupation to Liberation”
On March 24 this year, 350 pro-Palestine activists “unfurled a massive quilt on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and called for an end to Israel’s hostilities in Gaza.”2 Modeled after the AIDS quilt, the “Occupation to Liberation” quilt was made up for 65 artworks from anonymous artists, some featured traditional Palestinian embroidery.
Gee’s Bend
From the a wonderful piece written on Gee’s Bend quilts by the NEA:
When enslaved women from the rural, isolated community of Boykin, Alabama—better known as Gee’s Bend—began quilting in the 19th century, it arose from a physical need for warmth rather than a quest to reinvent an art form. Yet by piecing together scraps of fabric and clothing, they were creating abstract designs that had never before been expressed on quilts. These patterns and piecing styles were passed down over generations, surviving slavery, the antebellum South, and Jim Crow. During the Civil Rights movement in 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established as a way for African-American women from Gee’s Bend and nearby Rehoboth to gain economic independence. The Bee cooperative began to sell quilts throughout the U.S., gaining recognition for the free-form, seemingly improvisational designs that had long been the hallmark of local quilt design. As awareness grew, so did acclaim, and the quilts entered the lexicon of homegrown American art. Since then, quilts from Gee’s Bend have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service even issued ten commemorative stamps featuring images of Gee’s Bend quilts.
“Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” Gee’s Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art and today are in the permanent collections of over 30 leading art museums.”3
While Gee’s Bends quilts are each made by an individual, they are created in community, in the context of history, and in conversation with one another. A true collective, community art and action.
Read more about Gee’s Bend on the Souls Grow Deep website, an organization committed to increasing recognition of Black artists in the South.
Want more Quilts?
The International Quilt Museum in Lincoln Nebraska is a goldmine of everything quilting. And great resource to learn more about the history of quilting, art and activism is the Word Quilts project. I spent hours happily lost in their website.
Drawing Assignment (w/ a bonus!)
We have a two parter today. Part one is most important: to prep for our collective action tomorrow. Get all your supplies ready and all your ducks in a row. Instructions to do that are below.
Part two, if you just NEED to draw something today, is a bonus QUILT drawing assignment. Fun, easy, crafty, powerful. Alright, let’s do this. And SEE YOU TOMORROW.
1. Get Ready for our Collective Action
Step one: Get your supplies together! We are going to write 3 letters and decorate envelopes together during our call tomorrow. What you will need are:
Step two: Are you all set up with a VoteFwd Account? Awesome! What you need to do is log into your account at votefwd.org and choose a campaign. You will be opted into a default letter campaign, but you can choose a different option by clicking the gray "Adopt from a different campaign" button. It doesn’t matter which campaign you work on because all of them are helping get more people to vote.
Step three: Adopt a set of 5 voters (we will do the first 3 of our voters together. You will be able to keep track of your voters in the dashboard.
Step Four: Download letter templates (you should have 5 on your dashboard). Click the blue download button and you will get the letter templates ready to print. Each bundle will download as a PDF file, which will typically save to your desktop or downloads folder on your computer. Print these and you are ready to go!
If you have any other technical questions or want more step by steps you can visit Votefwd’s how-to guide.
“What if I haven’t set up a VoteFwd account yet?”
Don’t worry! We have a back up!
Step 1: Download the letter template here.
Step 2: Let us know that you need 3 voter addresses to go along with this campaign! Please fill out this form and we will email you.
You can still register here and see you tomorrow!
Also if covering the cost of stamps is going to be an issue for you let us know at Community@DrawTogether.Studio and we can with the cost.
2. Extra Credit Assignment: Quilt It
Time: 15 minutes
Materials: Paper, pens, scissors, tape, and all the drawings you have made this week (including any drafts.)
We made so much art this week! Inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, we’re going to take all of those pieces and turn them into our own tiled art piece.
Step 1: Gather all of your drawings from this week: your phrase, your collage, your portraits, and your call-to-action, poster.
Step 2: Rearrange your drawings. If there are drafts or drawings that would be more interesting as background, consider cutting them into quilt-like squares. Consider cutting out your phrases or sections of your collage.
Step 3: Once you’ve created an arrangement you enjoy, tape it together or glue it onto a larger piece of poster board.
Step 4: BOOM. You made an official Draw Something Artivism collage quilt. High five.
SEE YOU TOMORROW GUT PEEPS!!
xoxo
w
https://www.sjsacademy.org/about-us
https://hyperallergic.com/879985/activists-unfurl-massive-quilt-for-gaza-on-met-museum-steps/
https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers
Re: art projects with power: We desperately need a COVID memorial to the 1 million+ we have lost in the U.S., and the countless others disabled by COVID. I live in a town directly across the river from the Twin Towers and there is a 9/11 memorial that names every one of the 50+ my town lost. I will GOTV--I've been doing it for 50+ years now. I write postcards to voters regularly. I support the folks you would expect. I donate. But the truth is I do it knowing that the *second* epidemic to occur in my lifetime has been memory-holed by virtually everyone in politics, 4.5 years into the pandemic, Republican and Democrat. No quilts. No monuments. No ceremonies. Instead, I'll spend some of my political energy this upcoming week fighting a proposed *mask ban* in my state--blue, blue New Jersey, because I want to *survive.* This is so connected to every other issue we are fighting for, even though few people seem to see it: accessible, affordable health care, public safety, racial justice, the right to safely protest, protection of the defenseless, wherever they live. But they are all connected, to all of us.
This series has been fantastic. I come from Turkey, where voter turnout in the last presidential elections was over 85% and with average turnout of 79% since 1990s. Even though the results never went the way I hoped (read as devastating)—except for the first time I voted at 19 (I'm now 43)—I voted in every single election and I still feel very proud of our consistently high voter turnout. I wish the same for the USA (not the results but the turnout :)). Every election, I think of this great quote from Roosevelt: 'Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves—and the only way they could do that is by not voting at all.`