Welcome to the brand-new Artists 4 Democracy Newsletter. We’re a group of artists working to promote democratic and civic engagement by mobilizing our fellow artists to get involved in political action. Through voter registration drives, fundraisers, and events, Artists 4 Democracy seeks to foster and protect our participatory democracy. In 2021, we’re focused on building a better American democracy centered on racial, social, and environmental justice.
Each month in this free newsletter, we’ll share one action that you as an artist can take, and one piece of legislation in the works, both of which will help strengthen our democracy. We’ll also profile an artist whose work reflects democratic values. If you find this useful, please share it with your friends.
ACTION ITEM
Think globally, act locally
Like a lot of folks who care about American democracy, we’ve been focused in recent years on the national level. Voting rights have been eroded by the Supreme Court and the President, and Republicans in Congress have refused to act to restore those rights. But elections are only one example of democratic backsliding in the US.
What’s been happening at the state level all this time? Quite a lot—some of it good and some of it very bad for democracy. At the local level, many cities and counties expanded vote-by-mail to ensure everyone could vote safely during the pandemic. But too many others actually are making it harder for their citizens to vote.
To build a better democracy, we need to pay attention to what’s happening at the state and local level just as much, or even more. A lot of what government does that affects you on a daily basis - from filling potholes to how (and whether!) you’re able to vote - is decided at the state or local level.
Our democracy-building action for this month is to learn about your state and local government.
Your local government might be a city council, county commission, town meeting, or you might have more than one of these. State governments generally have a two-chamber body that looks a bit like Congress, with a state senate and a state house (or assembly). Some things you’ll want to learn:
Who represents you at the state and local level?
What are their positions on issues that are important to you?
How often do they meet?
Did any of them attend the January 6 insurrection?
How often are they re-elected?
Getting smarter about how local and state governments work is a critical step toward building a better democracy.
LEGISLATION YOU SHOULD KNOW
John Lewis Voting Rights Act
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was a landmark law designed to prevent state and local governments from passing laws that deny or make it harder for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) folks to vote. In 2013, the Supreme Court decided some elements of the law were unconstitutional. With those sections of the law overturned, states that had been subject to those elements (mostly former slave-holding states of the Confederacy) suddenly made a flurry of changes to restrict voting rights, from voter ID laws to closing polling places to gerrymandering voting districts.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act (also called the Voting Rights Advancement Act) would restore those civil rights protections. It would also bar last-minute changes to voting rules, and would authorize the federal government to send elections observers to places where voter discrimination is likely. The bill was passed by the US House of Representatives in 2020 but was never voted on by the Senate.
Look for Congress to take up the bill again in 2021.
ANOTHER ARTIST FOR DEMOCRACY
June Edmonds
Artist June Edmonds was driving to Memphis, Tennessee, with a friend when they passed an enormous Confederate flag flying in front of a country house. It was a chilling reminder of the dangers for an African-American woman of something as simple as getting a flat tire in the wrong place. It was early 2017, Trump had recently been sworn into office, and she was working at an artist residency in Paducah, Kentucky, only two miles south of the Mason-Dixon line that separated slave states from free states during the Civil War.
A few months later, back home in Los Angeles, Edmonds had a dream in which she saw four drooping black flags. She awoke hoping it might mean Trump would only be President for four years. But she never said this aloud, for fear that she might jinx it.
Edmonds began her career as a figurative artist, but over the years moved into abstraction, working in sacred geometry as her palette also evolved. Her work “explores how color, repetition, movement, and balance can serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal connection to her African-American roots” (Luis De Jesus Los Angeles).
After returning from her residency in Kentucky, Edmonds began to increasingly work in black and brown hues, the skin tones of people of color. These colors are woven together in her flags, which she titles after Civil War heroes, freedom fighters, champions of civil rights like Claudette Colvin, and race scholars like O.V. Catto. One flag makes the ‘Case for Reparations.’ Another is ‘Unbought and Unbossed.’
The colors serve as, “a declaration that we know who we are. We know that the ‘all’ in ‘and justice for all’ includes us.”
This has always been the great challenge for American democracy. “I think ‘democracy’ means the same to all of us. It’s just that everybody has a different definition of who the ‘we’ is in ‘We the People,’” Edmonds says. “Black folks are always fighting to even be thought of as the ‘we.’”
The role she sees for artists in building a better democracy is to express themselves authentically, whether their work is overtly political or not. While some Black abstract artists put multiple layers of content into their non-representational work, others choose not to. What matters is that they are doing the work they want to do, without being told who they should be or what they can and cannot paint. “A Black artist painting a line because of the pure joy of just painting a purple line, that is the freedom the people who came before us want for us.”
Edmonds tells art students to “know your power and speak up.” You have a right to hold your teachers accountable, to demand respect and a great education.
About her flags, Edmonds says, “I hope the viewer asks themselves, why is it painted in this way? Why are these browns here? What artist painted this? Hopefully they start thinking about identity, that maybe a person of color painted this and is saying something about who this flag represents.”
See more of Edmonds’ work at her website and at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
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