WOMEN OF JUSTSEEDS by Melanie Maddison
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized community of artists based in Canada, the US and Mexico who have banded together to collaborate with and support each other and social movements.
I spoke with the women active in the diverse Justseeds artists’ co-op, who are an integral part of the collective: Melanie Cervantes (Oakland, CA), Bec Young (Pittsburgh, PA), Molly Fair (Brooklyn, NY), Meredith Stern (Providence RI) and Thea Gahr (Mexico), alongside Nicole Schulman (Brooklyn, NY) who has created art work for Justseeds. We spoke about political collective creativity, art in social movements, socially engaged printmaking, and art as activism.
Aorta: Why do you make prints and create posters?
Melanie Cervantes: I create because it is a process of empowerment for me. There are moments when the structures that shape my daily life frustrate me and I feel powerless to change anything. I rage at the idea that we live in a post-race, let alone a post-racist society, and I feel most powerful when I can use creativity to translate the dreams and visions of my communities for a different way of living and relating to each other, into something that we can see and hold. Making art, particularly through collaboration makes me feel like it’s possible to have a transformative movement that will change our society. My trajectory as an artist has always been as part of a collective community. I have never been isolated as I have developed my creative muscles. I like to fuse what I have learned from interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples, my art skills and my decolonizing politics in order be an “artist for the people”.
Nicole Schulman: I want to make art that has a purpose beyond being decoration or a product to be bought and sold in the gallery system. Posters have the purpose of education and mobilization. They are an active art medium by definition.
Thea Gahr: Why do I make posters? Most simply because I love it. It’s my preferred method for expressing ideas, emotions, and my hope for positive change. Also it’s my desire to use what I love doing as a part of building a new world.
Meredith Stern: I love that [posters] are a democratic medium- the fact that you can make multiples means that they can be distributed widely. I like that it is art that can be held in hand, put up on the street, or on a wall. It’s something that anyone can afford.
Aorta: What do you hope to gain by producing posters?
Nicole Schulman: To spread awareness about hidden histories and contemporary struggles of people who have been ignored by the mainstream media and mainstream historians.
Thea Gahr: I hope that I can inspire new thoughts, imagination, and inspire curiosity to look for truth.
How I see it is you have to live the politics you believe in and be brave enough to create the world you want to live in here and now. A part of that is producing your own work and another part is reaching out into the world with your images and creativity to make radical change
in a world that desperately needs it. And a big part of reaching out to the world is a collective effort. As a group we have a network that reaches far and wide and the possibility to participate and support struggles around the world.
Melanie Cervantes: I make work to break up the feeling of isolation that we can experience under oppressive conditions. I make work to make people feel like they are not alone in that struggle.
Meredith Stern: Mainly, communication and dialog. I hope that people can relate to things that I am thinking about, and that through communicating through visual images we can put things into language that are either more difficult with words; or speak on an emotional level.
Aorta: To whom do you hope to speak to with your work?
Nicole Schulman: The fear with activist art is that you are only preaching to the converted. I hope I am reaching people who may not be aware of the issues my work deals with- and motivate them to become involved in social justice activism.
Bec Young: I hope my work speaks to people who defend themselves ruthlessly against the vampiric pain, fear, and jadedness of living enough to keep their minds and hearts open. I hope my work speaks to that guy waiting for the bus, the woman who cleans the floors at my work, the teenagers I did a presentation for last week. I hope my work speaks to people who are engaged in the process of living, reclaiming dignity through acts of honesty and integrity, and those who are having a hard time of it but are keeping up the fight; also those who gave up, but who might come back.
Molly Fair: When I create work in support of a specific issue, social movement, or community, then I am speaking to those who also wish to support these things. Otherwise I want to engage anyone with my work.
Melanie Cervantes: My primary audience are the people who inspire the work. That ranges from domestic workers, to young women in lock up, queer mothers, freedom fighters, organizers, young people, it’s also the people who stand in solidarity with those whose struggles I capture in my prints.
Aorta: What can you tell me about how and why are you involved with the Justseeds collective, and/or why it is important to you?
Melanie Cervantes: [joining Justseeds in 2008 was] a great opportunity to work with artists that were consolidating their resources and creating collective projects to work on. I felt like it was important to have a space to work with other Leftist artists. I also thought it would be a learning and growth experience for us all since Justseeds was about 95% White before most of us from the Bay Area joined the cooperative.
Molly Fair: I became part of Justseeds through my old collective Visual Resistance. Justseeds was going through a transition as a project started by one person, and we were sort of languishing in our own collective. There was the invitation to become part of a wider network of artists that wanted to make art in support of social justice movements and were interested in using art as a tool for social change, so some of us decided to become part of it. It was a difficult process for me personally to let my old collective naturally run its course, but that is something that happens. In the end I think becoming part of Justseeds, and what it is now, revitalized my belief in the power of the collective process, and also introduced me to new people who are activists and artists that I am truly inspired by. I think of Justseeds as a strange and wonderful and ever-evolving experiment in collective art-making and cooperative business model. We are figuring it out as we go along.
Bec Young: We are working together, doing projects and collaborating, and at the same time engaged in the process of figuring out how to do that.
Molly Fair: I am happy that I have a network of artists that I am a part of, that I enjoy working with, and that inspire me so much. It is important in the sense that the work we create is able to support social movements and hopefully exposes people to different ideas. I also think it is important as an experimental business model, since the profits we make are put directly back into our projects and enable the artists to produce more work.
I think it is incredibly important to support each other, that is the main reason I enjoy working in the collective model and especially with this group of artists. I think that being able to support social movements would be difficult and somewhat superficial if we were unable to support each other.
Another major reason I like working with this group is that we don’t all have the same politics, or beliefs, and engage with people and communities in different capacities. At the same time we are unified in our goal to use art as a medium to communicate ideas, and our belief that there is power in having diversity in messages. Otherwise all of our work would just be a means to propagate a specific ideology, and that is not something I would want to do. I don’t want to impose our beliefs on other people, I want to create dialogue around issues.
Bec Young: Making art is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my life, and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to combine that with my passion for social change, and collaboratively with artists I admire for their far-sightedness, talent and dedication.
Thea Gahr: Motivated by an invitation to join Justseeds I created a radical graphic arts collective called Cordyceps 2 years ago with 2 friends here in Mexico. We’ve organized expositions and workshops in autonomous spaces in both Mexico and the U.S. Also painting banners and murals. We now have our own autonomous radical art gallery in Mexico city as part of a bigger project called Zona Autonoma Makhnovtchina. We recently organized a Justseeds exhibit. In the end we were invited to join the cooperative as individuals. It came as a big decision for me that I feel very happy with. As I’m having to learn many new ways of expressing my thoughts. And as a group the possibilities feel enormous.
I think Justseeds is a unique space for being able to distribute art that is accessible and meaningful on a lot of different levels. It’s had this amazing ability to build connections between people, collectives, and various movements, and struggles. I think a lot of great projects have been built and are being built from these connections.
Meredith Stern: There is no clear answer to [why Justseeds is important] other than every time I open my email, and see 20-30 emails from organizations and individuals asking us to be a part of the work they are doing. I realize that people all over the world relate to what we are doing and find importance in it- for millions of reasons- they want to liven up the work their organization is doing with visual images/ artists who want to feel connected to other artists/ people who are discontents or utopian visionaries looking to dialog on specific issues. So many reasons why people find us and find meaning in what we do: Love. Communication. A belief in a better world. Justice. Peace. People power.
Aorta: What social/political concerns does your work most commonly focus on? Why is poster/print making a good way to address/voice these concerns?
Molly Fair: The prints that I have made explore the ideas of collective direct action, communicating with prisoners through correspondence, and I am working on a print around the issue of creating safe spaces. Posters and prints are a good way to voice these concerns because they can be produced in multiples, and made available widely.
Melanie Cervantes: My work includes black and white illustrations, paintings, installations and paper stencils, but the work that I am best known for are my political screen prints and posters. I employ vibrant colors and hand-drawn illustrations, and in my work I try to move those viewed as marginal to the center — featuring powerful youth, elders, women, and queer and indigenous peoples in my graphics.
Bec Young: I tend to focus on group process, education and other issues of sustainability in cities, destruction of war, power, political and imagined boundaries, mental health and vision, self-image; I like to create positive, powerful images of women; environmental issues including food production, resources, transportation, and the importance of non-human species.
These issues could be powerfully addressed in any art form, but printmaking allows a simple, reproducible design that can reach so many more people than a painting or sculpture, both in the actual print edition and when people view it online.
Nicole Schulman: I focus mostly on human rights issues, and in particular Labor and the effects that capitalism has had on the world. Posters and prints are democratic, inexpensive and are intended to reach a wider audience than work displayed in the context of a sterile, elite gallery.
Thea Gahr: Art is already powerful, and if rooted in a social movement it is an effective tool for mobilizing and informing people. Art is a tool to be used as propaganda, inform, decorate, and inspire. It’s one tool of many but it can be a way to fight against a blind accepting society of social norms that have been damaging to the emotional and mental well being of great masses of people. It is a fight for diversity and creativity is a world that is more and more homogeneous.
Meredith Stern: Art itself is something that relies on an audience- and social change is all about a group of people moving together. So, art and people are completely interconnected. One can’t exist without the other. Art is more powerful when it is a direct part of peoples lives and work. And social movements need culture and art to speak to people and be more than theories on paper.
Aorta: I love that posters for social change range from those with subtle political implications to those featuring bulldozing propaganda. What is your personal approach, and your thoughts on the range of uses (from subtle to overt) of politics within art?
Bec Young: My artistic style lends itself to a more subtle approach, although I love that as a part of Justseeds my work is seen in context with more overt messages. I like to build layers of meaning into my work that can be uncovered by people who are willing to look closely, and perhaps those meanings seep into the subconscious of everyone who sees the work, whether they look closely or not.
Meredith Stern: Different people respond to different forms of expression– it is all important to people in different ways. Overt art can help yell at things that are hurting people- they can let people feel like they are a part of a larger social movement. They can help like-minded people find each other. At its worst though, overt art can be off putting to people who don’t agree, and “preach only to the converted”. I think subtle art is more effective at drawing people in to new ideas. It can also be easily re-interpreted, or mis-interpreted, so that is the draw back there, I think when both exist together, new meanings and deeper meanings are created that can be more interesting to a larger group of people. It’s one thing I like about Justseeds- there is a wide range of artistic styles and ideas about this, and all the art together creates a really compelling and interesting conversation that wouldn’t exist the same way if each artist was operating alone.
Thea Gahr: For a long time I thought being subtle with a strong message undertone was The Way to reach a more diverse crowd. Now I’m not so sure maybe the strongest clearest voice a person has is the way to reach people. More than anything we need all the approaches.
Aorta: One of the things I find inspiring about Justseeds’ printmaking is not just that you’re producing politically radical material, but that you’re also enacting these politics through your organizational and production practices: handmade individual pieces as part of ongoing artistic practices within your everyday lives, all performed within a supportive, co-operative organisation.
How do you see these two factors (making posters, and making posters within this co-operative) at work within Justseeds, and why do you think it is (politically) important that the two work side by side, in terms of creating the most powerful and effective ‘results’ possible?
Meredith Stern: I think the two concepts are completely interlinked. I think of the phrase “be the change you want to see in the world” as a real truth. The most successful social movements are ones where the means and the end are the same.
Molly Fair: Being able to reach a wide amount of people with radical imagery and messages is linked with the process of printmaking and producing in multiples. Producing work that is handmade gives our work an added level of communication, and connection with whoever sees it or possesses it, since there is the understanding that there was care and some amount of physical labor involved in the production process. In terms of our cooperative and as individuals we give a lot of our prints away for free, and the art we sell is relatively cheap, because we want to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. I don’t think art should be for a privileged few, or that one person should have ownership of a piece. In that sense, we are disrupting the relationship of art as a commodity.
Aorta: Do you see advantages and potentials, and a power, in working and creating art collectively, as part of a politically creative co-op like Justseeds; bringing together the creative energies of a group of diverse people with multiple voices, in order to create an ability to distill powerful messages and reach diverse audiences.
Bec Young: Yes, our ability to do so many projects and be involved in so many shows is because we are such a large group of different people in different places; this is our main strength. Hopefully other people will see that and be encouraged to start their own cooperatives.
Molly Fair: I think that this speaks to the fact that the collective process itself, the interactions, and use of human energy and creativity is the art – not just the art object that is produced.
Aorta: As an accessible and very public art form, (prints pasted to walls/ boards/ posts/ buildings and beyond), do you think that the very nature of posters as tangible, real things that are present in locations gives them an ability to lend meaning to individuals’ understandings and appreciation of the politics inherent in the messages?
Nicole Schulman: I think art should be democratic, and art is an essential tool to make “public” spaces democratic. I am a community muralist, as well as a cartoonist and illustrator. I try to teach the young people I work with to question what public space really is, and who controls it. It is empowering for everyday people to see visual images that are not corporate advertising, art that has been generated either by activist artists or community groups that are demanding to be represented.
Molly Fair: Yes posters are tangible, and especially when they interact with each other in public space. The layering of multiple messages speaks to the plurality of ideas in our society. Sometimes they engage directly, but it depends on the viewer. Many people have learned to tune out the landscape around them because they feel so bombarded by messages or advertisements that exist in public space.
Thea Gahr: I think looking at the damaging effects of corporate advertising on the mental health of societies globally affected by it is a way to determine that posters and propaganda are extremely powerful and influential over peoples thoughts and feelings. The hopeful part of that is we also have that potential to fight back against all the lies and hopefully reach new realms of consciousness.
Aorta: Which Celebrate Peoples History posters have you created, about whom? Why did you wish to tell those peoples histories?
Nicole Schulman: So far I have done 2 poster designs, one is waiting to be printed. The first is the Korean Peasants League poster: this was initiated by the suicide of Korean farm activist Lee Kyung Hae during the protests against the WTO in Cancun. My husband is from Seoul, and his sister has connections to union activists and the KPL in South Korea. My husband Dustin Chang wrote the Korean text for the poster. It wasn’t as collaborative as I would have liked it to have been because of back and forth communication difficulties with the KPL. I chose to do a piece about the KPL because they are a prime example of how the World Trade Organisation’s policies are destroying non-corporate farms, particularly in non-western countries. Forcing South Korea to import rice and beef they don’t need (they used to produce more than enough for their own country) devalues local crops, the farmers can’t pay their bills and they go bankrupt. Lee Kyung Hae was actually a very innovative farmer- he was able to grow crops on what was considered inhospitable mountainous land. He had an agricultural school at his own farm. He was a pioneer, not just some mad man who killed himself. However, the impression I got from the KPL is that while they honoured his sacrifice, they didn’t want to be represented by one person. They are a cohesive movement that is more about the group than specific leaders- which is why I didn’t show Lee on the poster.
The newest poster is about the Co-Madres from El Salvador – the Mothers of the Disappeared and Assassinated. My friend Mara Komaska has been working with the Co-Madres and we collaborated with them on the design and the text. I felt really good to have their approval on every step of the process. When it is printed we will send them a bunch to use for fundraising. The Co-Madres are still fighting for justice. One of their leaders, Madre Alicia’s 16 year old son was shot leaving their office a day after the peace accords were signed. She and her eldest daughter are still suffering health problems from the rapes and tortures they endured at the hands of the Salvadorian military. Since the FMLN won the elections recently, there is hope that the Amnesty for war crimes will be lifted, and the new Left-wing government will investigate and prosecute the murder of Archbishop Romero and other victims of the civil war.
Aorta: Why do you think it is important to remember the positive and celebratory moments in our collective history via Celebrate Peoples History?
Nicole Schulman: We have to be reminded that WE are history, that we make history everyday, and it’s not just the people on the top of the pyramid who should be remembered and respected. I think this is a great project to preserve the stories of people underrepresented in history. I think they should be hung on the walls of schools. I think the truth of it is, that if we can preserve our own history, then we can create our own future, and by extension our own just society. I also believe that we have to honor those in the past who sacrificed for us, the future generations they would never meet. That is what a lot of my work is about. I think we have to remember the successes of past social movements in order to keep us from giving up and becoming cynical (or in my case, more cynical). Not to mention these are great stories, great personalities, people who made the world a better place by virtue of them being in it. And these examples should teach us not to take for granted the people and movements we have around us today.
For more info, visit:
Justseeds: www.justseeds.org
Individual art pages:
Melanie Cervantes: www.DignidadRebelde.com
Nicole Sculman: www.nicoleschulman.com
Melanie Maddison is the amazing talent behind Coloring Outside The Lines zine and a blogger at Remember Who You Are
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