jackpot city casino Artists Tried to Activate Voters With Billboard Art. Did It Work?

On Nov. 6, the day after the presidential election, the artist Hank Willis Thomas was at his studio in Brooklyn. His production assistants were poring over tables strewed with blobby red white and blue silk-screen prints of the words “Fragile/ Democracy / Handle With Care” in capital letters.

The design is one of Thomas’s many riffs on familiar phrases, meant to spur voters toward civic engagement. One version of the print ran on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Opinion section on Nov. 3. Another raised $18,000 in an online auction to benefit the Democrat Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Several are on sale, for $10,000, to support For Freedoms, an artist-run group Thomas helped found.

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Dancing between art, philanthropy and activism, For Freedoms addresses issues including racism, misogyny, violence and free speech, most visibly by commissioning artists to make billboards. They hope their imagery will provoke questions in people who see them.

It has been a Trump-era affair. For Freedoms began as a temporary artist-run super PAC timed to the 2016 presidential contest. After Donald J. Trump won that election, they reorganized as two corporations, one a nonprofit. They’ve since grown adept at fund-raising, coalition building,plusph casino branding and publicity. The list of their partners, friends and funders has more than 1,000 names, among them the philanthropists Andrea Soros, daughter of George Soros; Agnes Gund, a Museum of Modern Art board member; and Alicia Keys, the musician. They’ve broadcast their messages on more than 500 billboards across all 50 states, from urban centers to prairies.

And with Trump’s imminent return to office with solid margins, what now for the group?

“I feel confused,” Thomas told me in his studio in Brooklyn. “I guess I feel a little bit let down. But I also feel responsible. I think some of us want democracy and liberation and community to be easy. Some of us think that the truth is good enough.” He continued, “It’s a time for reflection and re-evaluation.”

But how do you evaluate something as subjective and mercurial as billboard art?

“I didn’t want to not vote, but it’s so hard to get behind someone who I really just didn’t feel was speaking for me,” she said. “Pretty much at that point, it was the lesser of two evils.”

ImageThe For Freedoms Congress held a procession through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in September, with artists, cultural institutions and civic leaders who were working to transform the political landscape through artist-led discourse and action.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

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