Tag Archives: Political Art

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

TAKE CREDIT honoring Elizabeth Cotten

Elizabeth Cotten, Feminist Art, Folk Music
TAKE CREDIT — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS design honoring Elizabeth Cotten

It’s really not hard to find amazing women to make art about. The Takoma Park Folk Festival is coming up and they were kind enough to count digital design and typography as a craft, so that the Female Power Project can have a booth at their juried craft show this Sunday. My work slips through categories, since I don’t do limited edition prints for the Female Power Project, and they aren’t strictly handmade. The message is my medium. Anyway, I thought I might do a folk musician for the event, and I immediately thought of Cotten, even though I’m not much of a folky. I even think I saw her at a folk festival in Oregon in the 1980’s, though she didn’t make much of an impression on me (probably because of the drunk jerks carrying on at the edge of the crowd where I was standing). But she really was immensely impressive, as I discovered in my research. I urge you to check out some of the YouTube videos I’ve linked to at the bottom of this post. As usual, I have relied a lot on Wikipedia for the highlights. Here are some details.

Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (née Nevills) (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was an American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter. A self-taught left-handed guitarist, Cotten developed her own original style. She played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as “Cotten picking”.

Cotten was born near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to a musical family. At age seven, she began to play her older brother’s banjo. “From that day on,” she said, “nobody had no peace in that house.” By the age of eight, she was playing songs. At the age of 11, after scraping together some money as a domestic helper, she bought her own guitar. By her early teens she was writing her own songs, one of which, “Freight Train”, became her most recognized.

In 1910, at the age of 17, she married and soon after she complied when her church told her to stop playing her music. Cotten did not begin performing publicly and recording until she was in her 60s. The story of her return to playing is remarkable.

While doing seasonal work in a department store, Cotten helped a child wandering through the aisles find her mother. The child was Peggy Seeger, and the mother was the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Soon after this, Cotten began working as a maid for Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seeger and caring for their children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny. While working with the Seegers (a voraciously musical family that included Pete Seeger, a son of Charles from a previous marriage)—surrounded by music and instruments—she picked up the guitar again. Peggy heard her playing and asked Elizabeth to teach her the song. It was “Freight Train.”

In a documentary, Mike Seeger described how astonished they were by this “folklorist’s dream. She was a true musician.” The quote on the upper left of this print is from Mike Seeger: “She was certainly a confident person. Before every show she would say to the audience [that] nobody taught her anything. She did it all herself. And she gave herself all the credit.” This is from the first YouTube link below.

In the later half of the 1950s, Mike Seeger began making reel-to-reel recordings of Cotten’s songs in her house. These recordings later became the album Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, which was released by Folkways Records. Since the release of that album, her songs, especially her signature song, “Freight Train”—which she wrote when she was 11—have been covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Joe Dassin, Joan Baez, Devendra Banhart, Laura Gibson, Laura Veirs, His Name Is Alive, Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, Geoff Farina, and Country Teasers. Shortly after that first album, she began playing concerts with Mike Seeger.

In the early 1960s, Cotten went on to play concerts with some of the big names in the burgeoning folk revival. Some of these included Mississippi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters at venues such as the Newport Folk Festival and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.

The newfound interest in her work inspired her to write more songs to perform, and in 1967 she released a record created with her grandchildren, which took its name from one of her songs, “Shake Sugaree”.

Using profits from her touring, record releases and awards given to her for her contributions to the folk arts, Cotten was able to move with her daughter and grandchildren from Washington, D.C., and buy a house in Syracuse, New York. She was also able to continue touring and releasing records well into her 80s. In 1984, she won the Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording, for the album Elizabeth Cotten Live, released by Arhoolie Records. When accepting the award in Los Angeles, her comment was, “Thank you. I only wish I had my guitar so I could play a song for you all.”

Cotten died in June 1987 in Syracuse, New York, at the age of 94.

from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cotten
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k439N7Ns0wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvXNT9Cu_X4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPJENW6i4c

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ORGANIZE honors Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta perSISTERS Feminist Art #FemalePowerProject
ORGANIZE — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta is profoundly gifted with the skills of listening, speaking, inspiring, and negotiating. These, along with courage, persistence, dedication to non-violence—and fed by her love of people—make her one of the most successful community organizers ever. I didn’t think organizing could be such an amazing thing until I started researching Dolores Huerta. I can only sketch in some details about this amazing woman here. I urge everyone to watch a recent documentary about her called “Dolores” (2018). I have started with some quotes of Huerta’s, then sketched out some of her history. I have pasted some links to my sources below.

To begin, you should understand that the migrant farm workers in the US around 1960 were subject to deplorable and shocking living and working conditions.
Dolores Huerta on organizing:
“It is rarely practiced today because it is tedious and time consuming. However, the results are long lasting and while people are in the process of building organization, they are learning lessons they will never forget and the transformative roots are planted. The fruit is the leadership that is developed and the permanent changes in the community. In other words, this is how grass roots democracy works.”

“…giving them the confidence they needed through inspiration and hard work. Educating them for months to realize that no one was going to win their battle for them. That their conditions could be changed by only one group of people, themselves.”

Huerta’s first occupation was as a teacher in California: “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

From the documentary film: “I used to think it was wrong to take credit for the work that I did. But I don’t feel that way any more.”

Dolores Huerta on learning about the history and dignity of your own people (this is in the context of Arizona eliminating ethnic studies in the schools and erasing Dolores Huerta from their history curriculum): “All that a person has is their story. If you deny their story you take away their power.” (Of course this resonates with me and my work!)

Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta (born April 10, 1930, in New Mexico) is a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, was the co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California. In 1966, Huerta and her fellow organizers led a 300-mile march from Delano to the state capitol in Sacramento to focus media attention on the strike. In 1966, she negotiated a contract between the UFWOC and Schenley Wine Company, marking the first time that farm workers were able to effectively bargain with an agricultural enterprise. But what made the largest impact was the nationwide grape boycott, which Huerta went to New York to organize there. While in New York, Huerta worked with feminists like Gloria Steinem, and they influenced each other greatly. Huerta embraced feminism, and Steinem realized that the women’s movement should try harder to include people of color. The grape boycott was successful. The entire California table grape industry signed a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the United Farm Workers in 1970. Furthermore, in 1975 the California Labor Relations Act was signed, the first law in the country that recognized the right of farm worker unions to negotiate contracts with the agricultural industry.  Huerta originated the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede” which she and Cesar Chavez used during a 25-day fast in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to organize farm workers to demand fair wages and better working conditions. It means, “Yes, it can be done.” Huerta created the phrase because people kept telling her, no, you can’t do that, it is not done: “No se puede.” But two negatives make a positive, and saying “no” to a no, means saying “Yes,” yes, it can be done. And she did it. Over the years, “Sí se puede” has also been adopted by other civil and labor rights groups involving Latinos around the country. It was adopted also by Senator Obama during his presidential campaign. In 2012, President Obama awarded Huerta with the highest civilian award in the United States, The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Upon receiving this award Huerta said, “The freedom of association means that people can come together in organization to fight for solutions to the problems they confront in their communities. The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights. I thank President Obama for raising the importance of organizing to the highest level of merit and honor.”The Female Power Project supports causes that resonate with the stories of the females featured. Using her unrestricted gift of $100,000 from the Puffin Foundation, Huerta started a foundation to train people to do community organizing. I urge everyone to support The Dolores C. Huerta Foundation (as I have).  http://doloreshuerta.org/

SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Huerta
http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/
http://eloquentwoman.blogspot.com/2015/09/famous-speech-friday-dolores-huerta-at.html
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/09/nfwa-march-and-rally-april-10-1966/
https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/media/oral_history/ParadigmArchive/arc%2029.pdf
https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2004/interview_dolores_hurerta.html
https://www.amazon.com/Dolores-Huerta/dp/B07F5FXP71/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1535663112&sr=8-2&keywords=dolores+huerta
https://insider.si.edu/2018/04/dolores-huerta-a-latina-civil-rights-icon/

Female Power Project, On My Mind, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

Fannie Lou Hamer: Be inconvenient

Fannie Lou Hamer Feminist Art Feminist Graphics Protest Art Resistance Art Womanist
Be inconvenient — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Fannie Lou Hamer

I’m not saying I’m finished with this new perSISTER design for the Female Power Project. But I will post updates if I change it. Regardless, Fannie Lou Hamer’s story will remain the same. Here goes:

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917–March 14, 1977)

It was inconvenient to the racist white establishment of Mississippi when Hamer decided, at the age of 45, that she wanted to register to vote. She was prevented by an arbitrary literacy test and then fired by her boss (“we’re not ready for that in Mississippi”) and kicked out of her house and shot at by white supremacists. She failed the test a second time. On the third time she passed, but when she went to vote she was told she needed to have two poll tax receipts. She eventually did pay for the receipts and it was inconvenient that she finally did vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent such voter suppression. (See RBG)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had no sense. “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” (This fearlessness reminds me of Harriet Tubman’s)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had returned to Mississippi after attending a pro-citizenship conference in South Carolina. She was arrested and it took her a month to not-fully recover from the beating the police gave her. It was inconvenient that she never recovered because it proved the brutality of the white people in power there.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so gifted at organizing voter registration drives like the Freedom Summer.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so good at hosting and nurturing activists of all colors.

It was inconvenient that Hamer could quote a Bible passage to support every social justice initiative she embraced.

It was inconvenient when Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to contest the legitimacy of the all-white “official delegation” to the 1964 Democratic convention from that state. It was so inconvenient that President Lyndon Johnson had to interrupt the broadcast of her testimony to the credentials committee. He was afraid of it looking like the “Negroes” were taking over the Democratic party platform, and that too many scared white people would vote Republican. (Sound familiar?) After this election the racial alignment of the parties did shift, starting in the South.

In 1971 it was inconvenient that Hamer co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, created “to increase the number of women in all aspects of political life—as elected and appointed officials, as judges in state and federal courts, and as delegates to national conventions.”

More than anything else, it was inconvenient that Hamer told her story so eloquently, authentically, and clearly. It was inconvenient that people couldn’t ignore her words. “…but if I can’t tell the truth—just tell me to sit down—because I have to tell it like it is.”

At her funeral service in 1977 Andrew Young said, “None of us would be where we are today had she not been here then.”

Here are my sources and some really great resources:
Film, “This Little Light of Mine, The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer” https://www.fannielou.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
http://www.crmvet.org/docs/flh64.htm
https://timeline.com/hamer-speech-voting-rights-d5f6ddc7470a
This is a very interesting text laying out the racial politics in the US during the 1964 election. It has everything to do with what we are seeing now:
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/lbj-and-white-backlash-1.html