Are You Registered To Vote? Our Art Asks You To Protect Your Voting Rights!

We live in California and for the longest time our primary took place in June. We were, for lack of a better term, irrelevant. Now our primary is March 3 on what is now truly a Super Tuesday primary. Over the past few years, our art has sometimes focused on the political process and the importance of voting rights. While some may want to restrict them, we want to encourage EVERYONE to vote. Here’s a sampling of our work on the subject with a preview of our latest work in process, perhaps our most poignant artwork about voting rights.

Mark Your Ballot (2016)

This 12″ x 12″ quilt (shown above) is a twist on our Language of Color series, which uses colored pencils as a way to discuss race. Here we strictly went for the red, white, and blue of marking your ballot. If you look closely, you’ll see the hand-stitched x’s, which signify each person’s vote.

 

Flag (2016)

 

In 2016 we were inundated with election mail. Vote for Candidate X, vote for Candidate Y, etc. Our thoughts constantly gravitated toward the people who were not going to vote. Perhaps they weren’t motivated to vote, but laws were also quietly being enacted to restrict voting rights. Most troubling to us was the 2013 Supreme Court decision to mark part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. (Click here to read about the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) In the tradition of many artists who created their own version of the US flag (think Jasper Johns or Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others), we recreated the flag, this time using the same ratio of the official flag measurements. Ours measures 36.5″ x 67.5.”

 

D is for Donkey (2015)

 

We were once commissioned to create 26 mini quilts, one for each letter of the alphabet. What a creative gift it was for us to be able to decide the object and theme of each letter. We couldn’t resist L is for Legos, V is for Volkswagen, and Z is for Ziggurat. (We actually have a ziggurat right across the river in West Sac!) Well, we also couldn’t pass up the chance to use the D to make a donkey and start a little conversation about politics. At 5″ x 7″ (framed about 8′ x 10″), we had to use tweezers to place some of the text! Below is an image of the back of the quilt. We had fun with the backs, which are now hidden by the frames.

 

 

Katharine McCormick: Making Her Mark (2019)

 

Made in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, we were cognizant during the entire creative process that Katharine McCormick was able to march and advocate for women’s voting rights because she was a wealthy white woman with all the means to do so. We still remain in awe of her activism. (Click here to read about our creative process on this piece.)

 

Mrs. Hamer (In Progress – 2020)

 

Perhaps in marked contrast to Katharine McCormick but with similar voting rights goals, Fannie Lou Hamer is our most recent subject. Born in Mississippi to share croppers in 1917, Mrs. Hamer, as she liked to be addressed, took inspiration from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register to vote and to advocate for the voting rights of Mississippi’s black population throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Mrs. Hamer even spoke at the 1964 Democratic Convention in an effort to have the Mississippi delegation unseated because it had absolutely no African American representation. The image above is our collage. We have sent the image off to be printed on fabric. “Mrs. Hamer” will premiere this fall at the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. Come back to our blog as we update our readers on our progress. Here’s a detail from the collage:

 

 

To underscore Mrs. Hamer’s uphill struggle, we incorporated a 1960 population map of the state of Mississippi into the back of the quilt. Reading the fine print on this map is quite sobering. Such discrimination is what Mrs. Hamer had to put up with. Voter suppression did and still does loom over politics. We will take some comfort, though, if our art helps bring awareness to the critical need to protect the voting rights of all our citizens. Check your registration status (scroll down the linked page to find your state) and be ready to cast your ballot!