Shepard Fairy, the artist who created the iconic Hope poster of Barrack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, has released a new series of posers ahead of the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump on January 20th.
The three posters, which feature a Latina woman, an African-American woman, and a Muslim woman wearing the American flag as a hijab, are all modelled in the same red, white, and blue colours as his previous work, and were created as part of a Kickstarter campaign called We the People.
The campaign is working to distribute copies of a number of posters by several artists to protestors before the President-elect is sworn in tomorrow. The crowd-sourced fund has now gathered almost €1.3m to create “images to disrupt the rising ride of hate and fear.”
“Our America is one of equal humanity that does not demean or discriminate,” says a spokesperson for the Amplifier Foundation, the organisation behind the project. “These ideas are not partisan. They are the foundation of America, and on inauguration day, with your help, we will make sure everyone remembers them.”
Fairey has been joined by artists Ernesto Yerena and Jessica Sabogal to design a number of posters, featuring portraits of American perceived as vulnerable in the present political climate gripping US and global politics. Styled on American propaganda and campaign posters, the people featured represent a number of minority groups, including Native Americans and those identifying as LGBTQ.
Representation even behind the scenes
For his three, Fairey says that each model was first photographed by someone of the same identity, with the images used to guide his take.
“The Muslim woman was shot by Ridwan Adhami, who is an accomplished photographer and proud Muslim,” Fairey told PBS. “The Latina woman was shot by Arlene Mejorado, a San Antonio-based artist and photographer and proud first-generation American, and the African-American kid was shot by Delphine Diallo, a French-and-Senegalese photographer based in New York.”
The Amplifier Foundation will use the money donated to it to print and hand out all of the posters in Washington DC before the new president is sworn in. More posters will be handed out for the Women’s March on Saturday, while money will also be used to pay for full page newspaper ads in the Washington Post.
All of the images are free to download on the Amplifier Foundation website.
