I made a calendar with fourteen of the perSISTERS prints (includes cover) each in 8×10 plus beautiful grids for the days, and interesting dates relevant to women’s history in the USA. Now, since it is already 2019—today!—happy New Year!—I am putting it on sale for the next two weeks at my Female Power Project Etsy shop. Here is the link. The regular price is $28, but now you can buy as many as you want for $20 each with FREE US SHIPPING (until I run out). After the sale is over I will be matting the prints for individual sale. The calendar is printed in high-quality full-color offset lithography by a union printer here in Mount Rainier, Maryland. I am very happy with the print quality. Here is a gallery of the prints that are included in the calendar. You can read about each of these designs on this page.
TELL YOUR STORY for Toni Morrison, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
SHOW UP for Tess Asplund defying a march of 300 uniformed neo-Nazis in Sweden.
FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE for Emma González, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project. This person is now called X González and I don’t sell this print any more read about it
DISSENT — perSISTERS design in the #FemalePowerProject honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg
PAY ATTENTION for Rachel Carson, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
Sometimes You Have to SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE for Serena Williams, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
STAND for LOVE for Edie Windsor, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
TAKE UP SPACE for Rosa Parks, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
USE PRIVILEGE TO SOW JUSTICE for Eleanor Roosevelt, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
ORGANIZE for Dolores Huerta, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED for Ruby Bridges, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
QUESTION for Kamala Harris, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
Be inconvenient for Fannie Lou Hamer, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project read about it
Here is a another design honoring Emma González. My first highlighted her fierce use of words. This design highlights her fierce use of silence. It is compelling to be making these messages as history is unfolding. I finished this design on April 6, 2018.
FIGHT for your LIFE — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Emma González (part 2)
The image of González’s profile is based on an Instagram photo posted by one of her high school comrades and fellow activist, David Miles Hogg, who is also a stunning and wise speaker. His account is at https://www.instagram.com/davidmileshogg/
Emma González and many of her comrades have embarked on a passionate and wise campaign to reform gun laws in the U.S. They were responsible for organizing one of the largest marches in U.S. history, the “March for Our Lives,” on March 24, 2018 in Washington DC. It was too big for a march, in the same way the Women’s March of 2017 was too big. People were crowded together in the allotted space and we couldn’t move from one point to another as a group. We stayed put and it was rivetting to watch these young people (all young people!) perform their conviction and trauma on stage and screen.
Many Parkland students and young guests spoke well. Emma González was stunning because she held a silence after her short speech, so that her time on stage aligned with the time it took for the murderer to end the lives of 17 people and injure 14 others: approximately six minutes and 20 seconds.
To recap the context:
From Wikipedia and http://time.com/5160267/gun-used-florida-school-shooting-ar-15/
On February 14, 2018, from 2:21pm to 2:27pm, 19-year-old Nikolas Jacob Cruz murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Fourteen more were injured. He used a legally bought AR-15 semi-automatic style weapon during the massacre, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press. The highly deadly military-inspired rifle has been the weapon used by several mass shooters. The AR-15 was most notably used during the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. that claimed 27 lives, including that of the shooter. AR-15-style rifles have been used in recent mass shootings in Aurora, Colo.; Santa Monica and San Bernardino, Calif.
The AR-15 was classified as an “assault-style” weapon and outlawed under the assault weapons ban that lapsed in 2004.
“Six minutes and about 20 seconds. In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us.” That’s how Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and one of the organizers of the March for Our Lives, began her remarkable speech on Saturday afternoon at the rally in Washington, DC.
After reading the names of her classmates who were killed in the mass shooting, Gonzalez stood at the podium in silence for six minutes, fighting back tears. It was an incredible, chilling moment. All of the major cable networks carried it live. “Loudest silence in the history of US social protest,” my colleague David Corn tweeted.
“Never again,” many in the crowd of 500,000 chanted in response. After her timer went off, Gonzalez said, “since the time when I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest,” she said. “Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.” And then she left the stage.
MY EXPERIENCE AND DESIGN NOTE
It didn’t take us long in the crowd to realize what she was doing. If you’ve ever worked in radio you know that broadcasting silence is probably worse than cussing on air. Everything said before this was predictable, except maybe Yolanda; this is not to say meaningless. We know how we are supposed to feel. There can be a banality to the expected emotions of outrage. I have been persistently outraged for a long time. It is hard to hold that authentically for so long. The crowd was uncomfortable in the silence, and I extended my imagination over the crowd to feel their discomfort, to hold it present there, as well as my own. Some people felt moved to chant for change. I felt that too. Nervous laughter. That sort of thing. It was about the not knowing. And then something like a sigh when I heard the timer go off. It sounded like the timer on our old microwave. Done. This was about the feelings of the survivors. She stood there in her pain and the thousands of us could share it only insofar as we are individually able. This is about trauma.
In the process of building this design, it was very hard for me to leave that big white profile unembellished. I went through several versions with something in the space of González’s profile, and each time I told myself, “No. It is silence.” White space on a page correlates with silence when speaking. The words in the background of this design are from González’s spoken words, before she stood silent.
Here is a summary of Emma González’s story as of the day I finish this poster design, March 2, 2018. Most of these words are quotes. Design notes at bottom. #NeverAgain #EmmaGonzalez #Gonzalez #listentoemmagonzalez @Emma4Change #FemalePowerProject
On February 14, 2018, from 2:21pm to 2:27pm, 19-year-old Nikolas Jacob Cruz murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Fourteen more were injured. He used a legally bought AR-15 semi-automatic style weapon during the massacre, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press. The highly deadly military-inspired rifle has been the weapon used by several mass shooters. The AR-15 was most notably used during the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. that claimed 27 lives, including that of the shooter. AR-15-style rifles have been used in recent mass shootings in Aurora, Colo.; Santa Monica and San Bernardino, Calif.
The AR-15 was classified as an “assault-style” weapon and outlawed under the assault weapons ban that lapsed in 2004.
(From Wikipedia and http://time.com/5160267/gun-used-florida-school-shooting-ar-15/)
From: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html
Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, addressed a gun control rally on Saturday [February 17, 2018] in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, days after a gunman entered her school in nearby Parkland and killed 17 people.
Last part of her speech:
The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.
If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.
(Crowd chants) Throw them out.
We are grieving, we are furious, and we are using our words fiercely and desperately because that’s the only thing standing between us and this happening again.
I have talked so much in the past few days that sometimes I feel like I might have used up all my words and I’ll never speak again. And then I hear someone say something really stupid and I can barely keep myself from snapping in two.
But to the people out there who disagree with us: if you have ever felt what it’s like to deal with all of this, you would know we aren’t doing this for attention. If these funerals were for your friends, you would know this grief is real, not paid for. We are children who are being expected to act like adults, while the adults are proving themselves to behave like children.
Adults are saying that children are emotional. I should hope so—some of our closest friends were taken before their time because of a senseless act of violence that should never have occurred. If we weren’t emotional, they would criticize us for that, as well. Adults are saying that children are disrespectful. But how can we respect people who don’t respect us? We have always been told that if we see something wrong, we need to speak up; but now that we are, all we’re getting is disrespect from the people who made the rules in the first place. Adults like us when we have strong test scores, but they hate us when we have strong opinions.
I’m constantly torn between being thankful for the endless opportunities to share my voice, and wishing I were a tree so that I’d never have had to deal with this in the first place. I’d like to think that it would be nice to be a tree.
Still, if I’m able to communicate one thing to adults, it would be this: it should not be easier to purchase a gun than it is to obtain a driver’s license, and military-grade weapons should not be accessible in civilian settings.
But while González and her fellow students David Hogg and Cameron Kasky represent a youth protest movement that may finally lead to more gun control, Emma stands out as an emblematic challenge to the old ways of Cuban-American voting preferences in Florida, one of the most important swing states in national elections. She also portends a new generation of Latino youth who have the potential to be major political players through their ability to straddle different constituencies and mold a coherent message for change.
The daughter of Jose González, now a lawyer who arrived from Cuba in New York in 1968, Emma is unwavering in her embrace of her identity. “I’m 18 years old, Cuban, and bisexual,” she says in the lead paragraph of her recent essay published in Harper’s Bazaar. While Univision reported that she does not speak Spanish, she doesn’t shy away from her Cuban identity. And though The Sun Sentinel has reported that her short buzz-cut is for practical reasons — “Hair is just another sweater I’m forced to wear,” she demurred — her participation in her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and recent self-outing resounds with queerness.
A year and change into the Trump presidency, many groups — women, Muslim and Latino immigrants, African Americans — have been attacked and belittled, not only by the president’s callous behavior but also by the tenacious tactics of the Republican right. As a student, Emma represents not only youth but women, Latinos and the LGBT community.
“It’s interesting that she chose to say she belongs to multiple communities,” said Jorge Duany, a professor of anthropology and head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “It was a recognition of shared interests between communities.”
DESIGN NOTES
In all the perSISTERS posters I layer words and symbols behind the main figure and statement. In this design I used an ornament font, DB Trees, which is not letters but trees. Each keystroke types a tree illustration. I set González’s statement, “I’d like to think that it would be nice to be a tree” in this font (it is repeated several times). Then I colored 17 of the trees in a ghost color, to represent the murdered people. I based the illustration of Emma González on a photograph by: “Nicole Raucheisen/Naples Daily News/USA TODAY NETWORK/Sipa USA” available on the web here: http://people.com/crime/everything-to-know-about-emma-gonzalez-the-florida-school-shooting-survivor-fighting-for-gun-violence-prevention/
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