VOTE!

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

Art for Democracy is an ongoing self-initiated public art and social practice campaign founded in 2017 by Bay Area artist Lena Wolff. The project was conceived as a means for progressive communities to express their values and encourage civic-engagement in light of the rise of right-wing autocratic-leaning leaders in the United States who are actively working to dismantle reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants rights, racial justice, movements for a sustainable planet, and democracy at large.

Beginning with an anti-hate poster made in 2017 for the City of Berkeley in collaboration with graphic designer Lexi Visco (Companion Platform), in 2018 Lena pivoted the goal of the project to boost voter participation with new messages for posters, billboards, postcards, and images to share on social media. Rather than promoting a single candidate or party, the new series encouraged people to vote for meaningful, timely issues related to social and environmental justice. Fellow artist and letterform designer Hope Meng came on board ahead of the 2022 midterms to take over as Lena’s primary collaborator and equal partner in the project.

To date, over 100,000 posters from the series have circulated for free in over 100 cities in 25 states across the US (in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024.)
50 billboards with the Reproductive Freedom message were installed in 8 swing states durning the 2022 midterms and 2024 general election combined.

Physical posters from the series have been collected by SFMOMA, Oakland Museum of California and the history collection at the San Francisco Public Library.

PROJECT HISTORY

Lena first enlisted the help of graphic designer Lexi Visco to create a poster for the City of Berkeley during a moment of heightened political division and rising expressions of xenophobia following the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Together, the duo created a simple poster reading, “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate” that quickly spread across the region, with requested adaptations made for other Bay Area cities in the following months.

Printed initially in a batch of 20,000 by the local union print shop Autumn Press, the posters have since been reprinted over 400,000 times for 10 Bay Area cities.

They are still visible in storefront windows and people’s homes today. 

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On the heels of the widespread reach of the United Against Hate posters, Wolff reached out to Visco again ahead of the 2018 midterms to create a new series of posters to boost voter participation. 20,000 posters from this series were printed and shipped for free to over 15 states in early fall 2018. When they landed in cities across the country, poster distributors set up free public pick-up locations on porches, at libraries, independent bookstores and other accessible spaces.

Ahead of the critical 2020 election, Wolff and Visco paired up once more to redesign the VOTE posters with the addition of new text, typefaces and colors.

Graphically the 2020 series included the use of spare visual symbols drawn from Wolff’s collages that reference nature and American quilt patterns, representing iconography that speaks to hope and that visually links the personal with the political. Typographically the posters incorporated the introduction of two new typefaces; Martin, designed by Tré Seals of Vocal Type Co., described as "a non-violent typeface inspired by remnants of the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968,” combined with Pirelli, designed by Jungmyung Lee (of Jung-Lee Type Foundry) and Karel Martens.

30,000 of the VOTE posters were printed at Community Printers in Santa Cruz, California in September 2020 and shipped in bulk boxes to over 100 cities in states across the country.
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Over the years, the project’s taken on other formats beyond physical printed posters. In 2020, 25,000+ postcards to voters were printed in the Bay Area alone and free downloadable files of the posters and postcards were made available for independent printing that were used in creative ways all across the country. People printed versions of the posters and wheat pasted them on walls throughout several cities. In 2020 a couple of billboards were adapted to scale and placed in rural Wisconsin and the Orlando Weekly printed the posters on their front page so that they could be cut out and placed in windows.

During rollouts of our campaign, people send and post images of the posters in use from New York to the West Coast.

Thanks to a partnership with a new fiscal sponsor, SaveArtSpace, in 2024, 23 billboards with the reproductive freedom images were installed in over 8 states through generous donations of individual sponsors, including poet laureate, Amanda Gorman. In 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 the Berkeley Art Museum projected images from our campaign on their outdoor screen.

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ABOUT THE PEOPLE BEHIND ART FOR DEMOCRACY:

Lena Wolff an artist, craftswoman, and activist for civic engagement who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990's. Her work extends out of American folk-art traditions while at the same time being rooted in minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Lena's broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based works, frequent collaboration, and public projects. In 2017, she formed Art for Democracy, beginning with an anti-hate poster in the Bay Area, followed by the widespread national public art campaign to boost voter participation that launches ahead of critical elections in the US every two years. Over the last two decades, her work has been presented in galleries and museums across the country and collected by ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Arts Commission, Alameda County Arts Commission, Cleveland Clinic, University of Iowa Museum, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, among others. She lives with her wife, artist, teacher, and illustrator, Miriam Klein Stahl and their daughter in Berkeley, California. November 12th was named Miriam Klein Stahl and Lena Wolff Day by Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin in 2019 for their work that merges art and civic engagement.

Lena’s work can be found at Sarah Shepard Gallery in Larkspur and Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Hope Meng is a designer who believes in the power of letters to communicate through both their content and their form. She is the designer behind Monogram Project, and the artist behind TEXT/TILE Studio. For the 2022 and current 2024 election cycle, she’s collaborated with Lena to produce new images to generate voter engagement across the US with Art for Democracy. Hope lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Lexi Visco works with what she identifies as a birdhouse model of graphic design. Through people, community, and place, she inhabits modes of research, collaboration, deconstruction, and rebuilding. With these models of engagement she makes publications, drawings, sculptural objects, and identity systems, which are shared across publics and fields of distribution. She is based in Berkeley, California.

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Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this project in recent years! We couldn’t make this happen without your support!