The perSISTERS works are not the only things I’m making right now, but they are the pieces I finish the fastest. Every few days something happens to make a protest poster about! Soon I will be posting more about my (working title) Landscape of Objects pieces. August 28 is my deadline to complete three in that series, so there’s not long to wait.

So, Heather Heyer. This poster will be available at Black Lab starting on Thursday, August 17.

Heather Heyer, a 32 year old activist for social justice, was killed by a racist white supremacist terrorist in Virginia in August, 2017.

The following is excerpted, with light editing, from an article in the New York Times of August 13, 2017, written by Christina Caron.

Heather D. Heyer was killed on Saturday, August 12,  in Charlottesville, Va., when a car crashed into demonstrators protesting a white supremacy rally.

Heather D. Heyer died standing up for what she believed in.

Friends described her as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices. That sense of conviction led her to join demonstrators protesting a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday.

“We were just marching around, spreading love — and then the accident happened,” a friend, Marissa Blair, said. “In a split second you see a car, and you see bodies flying.”

The authorities said Ms. Heyer, walking with her friends, was killed when a car driven by a man from Ohio rammed into the crowd.

“Heather was such a sweet soul, and she did not deserve to die,” Ms. Blair said on Sunday.

Others said Ms. Heyer, who lived in Charlottesville, spoke out against inequality and urged co-workers to be active in their community.

“Heather was a very strong woman,” said Alfred A. Wilson, a manager at a law firm where Ms. Heyer worked as a paralegal. She stood up against “any type of discrimination,” he said. “That’s just how she’s always been.”

Mr. Wilson said in an interview on Sunday that he found her at her computer crying many times. “Heather being Heather has seen something on Facebook or read something in the news and realized someone has been mistreated and gets upset,” he said.

She often posted messages on Facebook about equality and love, said Ms. Blair, who recently left the law firm. “She’s always so passionate and she speaks with so much conviction all the time,” she said.

She worked to improve herself by taking classes and studying. “If she’s going to do something, she made sure she understood it,” Mr Wilson said.
Ms. Heyer lived alone with her Chihuahua, Violet, who was named after her favorite color.

For her, activism was about more than just “sitting behind your computer screen,” Ms. Blair said. “You gotta get out in your community and do things.”

“I’ve never had a close friend like this be murdered,” Ms. Blair said. “We thought, ‘What would Heather do?’ Heather would go harder. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to preach love. We’re going to preach equality, and Heather’s death won’t be in vain.”

There’s so much to make art about right now. Sigh.

“I thank you for your compliments about how great I am but I don’t want to waste my time on me.”
“The time belongs to the gentlelady from California.”

I’ve wanted to do a piece on Maxine Waters for a while but I’ve been waiting for a copy-able image of her looking over her reading glasses. The best one (not available for reuse) was by Alex Wong for gettyimages. But now I’ve made an illustration based on the video feed from the House Financial Services Committee meeting of July 27, 2017. Christine Emba of the Washington Post writes: “Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was testifying before the committee about the state of the international finance system when Waters, the committee’s ranking Democrat, asked why his office had not responded to a letter from her regarding President Trump’s financial ties to Russia. Mnuchin tried to sidestep the question with platitudes and compliments, apparently attempting to run out the clock on her questioning. It didn’t work. Waters shut down his rambling and redirected him to her question again and again with the phrase “Reclaiming my time,” a stone-faced invocation of House procedural rules.”

When I first started researching Maxine Waters and her questioning of Mnuchin, I was discouraged to see that the right’s painting of her as an “unhinged liberal” claimed the top three search results. When I went back to get the exact words for the background text in this design, I saw that the search results have been seized by the progressives because of the meme-ing phrase “reclaiming my time” and the amazing viral song produced by Mykal Kilgore. (You have to watch it!)

Seize the narrative.

From Wikipedia:
Maxine Moore Waters (born August 15, 1938) is an American politician, serving as the U.S. Representative for California’s 43rd congressional district, and previously the 35th and 29th districts, serving since 1991. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the most senior of the 12 black women currently serving in the United States Congress, and is a member and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Before becoming a member of Congress she served in the California Assembly, to which she was first elected in 1976. As an Assembly member, Waters advocated for divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime. In Congress, she is an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War and Donald Trump.

Waters was born in 1938 in Kinloch, Missouri. Fifth out of thirteen children, Waters was raised by her single mother once her father left the family when Maxine was two. She graduated from High School in St. Louis, and moved with her family to Los Angeles, California, in 1961. She worked in a garment factory and as a telephone operator before being hired as an assistant teacher with the Head Start program at Watts in 1966. She later enrolled at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) and graduated with a sociology degree in 1970. In 1973, she went to work as chief deputy to a Los Angeles City Councilman, and in 1976 she launched her political career in the California State Assembly.

#ReclaimingMyTime