A salute to our first woman Vice President, Kamala Harris, commemorating her inauguration in January 2021

Available as a digital original print, 11 x 14, by Leda Black, Creatrix. You can order at this link.

The print says: Lived Experience is Representation. “at some point in Kamala Harris’s life, someone has instructed her to carry her keys like a weapon” (quote by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, October 29, 2020). The Female Power Project Salutes Kamala Devi Harris. First woman Vice President of the United States of America. Taking her oath on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC.

The election of a woman Vice President is a historic occasion, and one that must absolutely be commemorated by the Female Power Project. It is especially interesting when we remember that voting rights for women were not protected in our constitution until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, 100 years before the election that brings Kamala Harris to the office of Vice President of the United States of America. (100 is a nice round number, and thus satisfying, but I think it has taken an insanely long time to achieve this.) Although women won the vote in 1920, after over 70 years of organized protest and struggle, it took another 45 years for the votes of black women to be protected by law, through the Voting Rights Act. So it is especially compelling—and must be emphasized—that our first woman vice president is also a woman of color.

Since I started the perSISTERS series in 2017, I have created three designs for Kamala Harris: INSIST; QUESTION; and I’M SPEAKING. This one you are reading about is the fourth.

Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) was the junior Senator from California and is now the new Vice President. Before she was a Senator, she served as Attorney General of California. Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of an Indian mother—a cancer researcher who emigrated in 1960—and a Jamaican-American father who is an economics professor. (based on Wikipedia)

DESIGN NOTE
When I was coming up (and Harris is about my age) the constant fear of being a target of violence was truly represented by this fist of keys, and it works as a graphic statement. When walking to your car, when walking home from the bus stop, hold your keys so that you can use them as a weapon to defend yourself when attacked by strangers sneaking up on you. However, having a young woman as a daughter, I’ve learned the current predation technique is adding a drug to her drink when she is out dancing and having fun in crowds. It is on her mind every time she goes out. (Back when we could gather together in crowds.) The drug causes a woman to pass out, and then the predator rapes her. This is violence, even if the targeted human is completely inert and there is neither struggle nor physical effort. Obviously, a doped bar glass is not an effective image for this salute, so I have added this note to elaborate on how devastating the experience represented by the fist really is. Rape culture teaches us that this is just the way things are. But we will change the way things are. This lived experience has to inform the decisions of our women leaders, and now we have someone at the executive level who knows, really knows, what this means.

Copyright Leda Black, December 2020

Leda Black,
Creatrix at Female Power Project