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Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Take Up Space

TAKE UP SPACE for Rosa Parks. You can purchase items with this design at this link.

This one is for Rosa Parks. It’s called “Take Up Space.” You deserve the space you occupy.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.

Parks’ act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town at the time.

When she made this protest, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers’ rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen “tired of giving in.” Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards.

After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that the struggle for justice was not over and there was more work to be done. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and third non-US government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.

Adapted from the Wikipedia entry

DESIGN NOTE     The design is based on a photograph of Ms. Parks on a Montgomery bus on December 21, 1956, the day Montgomery’s public transportation system was legally integrated. It was staged by the newspaper.

AP/Montgomery Advertiser

The stripes in this design are inspired by the shirt Ms Parks wears in the photo from 1955. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. isin the background.

National Archives record ID: 306-PSD-65-1882 (Box 93). Source: Ebony Magazine

This is from Wikipedia: “Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.
Parks’ act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.”

The design is based on a photograph of Ms. Parks on a Montgomery bus on December 21, 1956, the day Montgomery’s public transportation system was legally integrated.
The stripes in this design are inspired by the shirt Ms Parks wears in this photo from 1955.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

The Honorable Kamala Harris knows her place


Female Power Project Positive Protest Principles Poster: INSIST, honoring Kamala Harris, who knows her place

Here is my latest poster production honoring Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris is the junior Senator from California. Previously she served as Attorney General of California. Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of an Indian mother, a cancer researcher who emigrated in 1960, and a Jamaican-American father who is an economics professor.
On June 7, 2017, two Republican senators (Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina) tried to silence Sen. Harris at a Senate Intelligence hearing as she attempted to get a yes or no answer out of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. She wanted to know whether he would grant full independence to the investigator of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. She was told “to give Rosenstein ‘the courtesy’ to answer or not answer her question as he saw fit.”* Male senators had not been similarly silenced in this hearing. It was as if those two senators were trying to remind her of “her place”—women should be polite and people of color should show deference—at least that is how the Twitter-sphere interpreted the comment. Rosenstein would not answer her yes or no, and he rambled on about why it wasn’t necessary, and maybe a bad idea, for the investigator to have full independence. This could be called “mansplaining.” Sen. Harris gazed (what is the word for looking both amused and appalled?) at Rosenstein as he spoke. When he stopped, she asked, “So, is that a no?”
Yes, women in power should insist.
From Wikipedia; *Christina Cauterucci’s reporting on Slate.com; and the video clip “Kamala Harris Interrupted at Intel Senate Hearing” from CNN. The image of Ms. Harris is based on a screen shot from the CNN clip.

Uncategorized

Landscape of Objects (new work in progress)

 

I recently returned from a week’s trip back West. I am from New Mexico, and the landscape of the Southwestern United States is my ur-landscape—the space underlying all my experiences of space. These landscapes bellow out the slow drama of large and mighty processes: uplift; slipping; erosion. In the East, where I live now, the landscape is more about the faster but still inexorable forces exerted by humans on the land. The heavy cover of vegetation around here hides the slow earth energy buried in rocks. In my new works I am using the objects I have worked with for years: plant objects; animal objects; human objects. Now I am making landscapes with them. Landscape is the theater of vast forces and we move across the stage as participants and watchers. The artist is the kind of watcher who gathers and transforms the symbols of vast processes—the props and the costumes—and creates productions that participate with the landscape—allowing it to become self-similar—because the landscape absorbs all of this into itself like a vast, slow, ornamented wheel.

Like most of my work, this new piece will likely be part of a series. Please click on the image and enlarge on a desktop monitor, scroll to the left, so you can see what I am trying to get at here. As a landscape it can be seen as a whole, but it can also be experienced as a series of cropped views. I was inspired by a task suggested to me by a musician who was interested in my Celestial Bodies. He was looking for album art for his heavily layered and textured electronic music and he saw a similarity between our works. Since I am also a graphic designer, I knew I should first see what kind of format album art is in online nowadays. I discovered that it needs to work very small (phone screen) or it could be larger (print or large screen) and also appears in different proportions, square in some places and elsewhere rectangular. It seemed a daunting task to make something that flexible from my work’s highly detailed images. I knew a Celestial Body would not be readable at postage-stamp size! Then I was listening to his music in Spotify and noticed the sound histogram, or whatever it is called, and it looked like a landscape to me, a landscape through time. And that made me think about how we move through a landscape and capture bits of it as we pass through. So I thought I would make a layered and complex space using objects and I could crop different parts for different uses. During April I took a trip with my family and we drove quite a bit in Colorado and Utah. I am still digesting my experience of landscape from that time, in that place, and it is informing these landscapes of objects I am making here, in this time. I hope to get on the road again soon! Meanwhile, visit my Instagram @LedaBlackArtist to see my posts as I process that trip and trips to come.