Art for Action
Launched in advance of the 2020 election, “Art for Action” was an artist-driven non-partisan voter awareness campaign developed to counteract voter suppression, encourage engagement, and drive action through the deployment of dynamic public art and voter resources. It was the largest and most geographically diverse effort of its kind. Curated by the Wexner Center for the Arts and Diana Nawi, the campaign featured the works of seven local and four national artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, and Tomashi Jackson. The art component worked synergistically with OBM’s “You Can Vote” ads to enable action through resource links, customized digital tickers counting down to key state-specific deadlines, and proprietary software that allowed IKE kiosk users to register to vote and request an absentee ballot via QR code handoffs. The campaign ran on a network of digital billboards and kiosks in 16 cities nationwide, including key battleground states Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Georgia.
Featured Artists
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer is an American Conceptual artist best known for her text-based public art projects. Exploring how language is used both as a form of communication and as a means of concealment and control, Holzer has employed a variety of media throughout her career, including large-scale projections, LED displays, T-shirts, and posters. “I used language because I wanted to offer content that people—not necessarily art people—could understand,” she explained. Born on July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, OH, Holzer received her BFA from Ohio University in 1972 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. Her popular series Truisms began in 1977, when she started pasting ambiguous quotes such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” throughout New York, while enrolled in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, among others. in 1990 Holzer was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale She currently lives and works in Hoosick Falls, NY.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Carrie Mae Weems
Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible. “Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prixde Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala, a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, as well as Honorary Degrees from: California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is Executive Director of Light Work.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist and craftsperson merging traditional Native American materials and forms with those of Western contemporary art to create a new hybrid visual vocabulary. Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is forging a multifarious practice that redresses the exclusion and erasure of indigenous art traditions from the history of Western art as it explores the complexity and fluidity of identity.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson was born in Houston, Texas in 1980 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019, and her first solo museum exhibition, Interstate Love Song, took place at the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia in 2018. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at MoCA Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. Jackson was a 2019 Resident Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She will have a solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum during the summer of 2020. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; and Cooper Union, NY, and she has been a visiting artist at New York University. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
https://www.nightgallery.ca/exhibitions/tomashi-jackson/about