VOTE!

The new 2024 Art for Democracy campaign is here! Brought to you by artists Lena Wolff and Hope Meng, our public art initiative encourages people to vote for urgent and timely issues — for reproductive freedom, the planet, and democracy at large. This election year we’ve added the message, VOTE for the Freedom to Read, in response to widespread book bans initiated by the right wing.

For 2024 we’re prioritizing the placement of our images on billboards and bus shelters in swing states, pending funding. The more funds we raise, the more broadly the messages can spread across the country ahead of November.

Thanks to a partnership with our fiscal sponsor, SaveArtSpace, donations to the current campaign are fully tax deductible.

Democracy is a group effort and we couldn’t do this without you!

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

Art for Democracy is a broad public art and civic engagement project by artist Lena Wolff that initially began with an anti-hate poster in Berkeley, California in 2017 in response to the rise of right-wing anti-democratic leadership in the US. Posters and related billboards for the 2022 midterms and 2024 general election were made in collaboration with multidisciplinary designer Hope Meng.

Since their release, the Art for Democracy posters made between 2017 and 2022 have been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, and the San Francisco History Collection at the SF Public Library.

PROJECT HISTORY

In 2017, Lena first enlisted the help of graphic designer Lexi Visco to create a poster for the City of Berkeley that was made in response to an overall climate of aggressive political division and rising xenophobia after the election of Donald Trump. Following a series of violent demonstrations and counter-protests in the center of the city sparked by far-right groups aligned with white supremacy, the duo created a public poster for residents and shop owners to hang in their windows that simply read, “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate.” Printed initially in a batch of 20,000 by the local union print shop Autumn Press, this series was subsequently adapted and reprinted over 200,000 times for 10 Bay Area cities.

These posters 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 and Visco teamed up again ahead of the 2018 midterm elections to create new 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 linking 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 2020 VOTE posters were printed at Community Printers in Santa Cruz, California in September 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.

In 2018, 2020 and 2022, 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! Very special thanks to Lisa Cole for helping to organize the 2020 fundraising efforts, to Ranil Abeysekera, Lauren Anderson, The Berkeley Art Museum, Masami Chin, GOTVmoms, Lisa Wong Jackson, Rumi Koshino, Steven Malk, Clare Nolan, Jean Packard, Miriam Klein Stahl, Hilary Reyl, Jessica Williams, and to all who supported the effort. We couldn’t make this happen without your support!