This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I\u2019m Amy Goodman.<\/p>\n
Last week, when I was in Los Angeles for the theatrical opening of the documentary Steal This Story, Please! about Democracy Now!, I visited the gallery of the artist Shepard Fairey. He created the artwork for Steal This Story, Please! poster. Shepard Fairey gained national prominence in 2008 as the artist who made the iconic poster of then-candidate Barack Obama, accompanied by the word \u201chope.\u201d He has roots as a street artist with well-known images wheat-pasted on walls around, including one of professional wrestler Andr\u00e9 the Giant and the word \u201cobey.\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked Shepard Fairey about his thoughts about art and politics and to describe some of the pieces hanging in his latest exhibition.<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: I think art can help turn things around by taking something that\u2019s, you know, a feeling more in the ether and crystallizing it in a way that\u2019s very direct, clear and resonates with someone\u2019s emotion. You know, art can be used to persuade people in bad ways, too. I\u2019ve always looked at my art as not propaganda in that it\u2019s meant to be the end of the conversation, but that it\u2019s \u2014 if you want to call it propaganda, it\u2019s meant to initiate a conversation, a counternarrative that isn\u2019t happening in a robust enough way.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me about the Statue of Liberty in handcuffs?<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: Of course. The \u201cIt can\u2019t happen here\u201d is a reference to Sinclair Lewis\u2019s novel of the same name, that\u2019s examining the rise of fascism in the United States, and it\u2019s a cautionary thing based on some of what was happening in the \u201920s and \u201930s in the United States. But we are experiencing it in a more intense way here now. So, it can happen here, and it is.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: Shepard Fairey then walked me around his gallery, showing me some of his other work. We then walked over to a quartet of posters. Each showed an ICE officer in riot gear holding a baton. Above each is a label: \u201cpaid agitator,\u201d \u201cdomestic terrorist,\u201d \u201cintent to massacre\u201d and \u201cworst of the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: And they have differences, but it\u2019s the same dominant figure in each one. But, I mean, I did these because this is \u2014 it\u2019s called Projection Mirror. These are based on all the things that Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller threw out there about the \u2014\u00a0about the protesters and about the immigrants that were being targeted, that really is what they\u2019re up to. They\u2019re the paid agitators. They\u2019re the domestic terrorists. They\u2019re, you know, out there with intent to massacre. And they\u2019re the worst of the worst. So, yeah, the series was meant to be a mirror back at the people projecting.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: We went to another image that showed an oil derrick.<\/p>\n
Can you say what it says?<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: \u201cExtracting blood at the world\u2019s end, igniting the globe.\u201d Yeah, it\u2019s basically about how this extracting oil, that fossil fuels are heating the planet up and killing the planet. And, you know, a lot of people are still saying, \u201cDrill, baby, drill. Keep the price of gas down.\u201d And we need to be investing in renewables.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: I\u2019m intrigued by how much you use newspapers. Like, here we have Frida Kahlo.<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: Oh yeah. Well, newspapers, I think, are great in, first of all, like, making sure that you can read what the idea is succinctly, or it creates a little bit of an amplification to what the primary narrative of the piece is. But it also demonstrates that we frequently have been warned about mistakes that we\u2019re making, or we\u2019re making the same mistakes again and again. I can pull newspaper things from 40 years ago about civil rights or global warming or any number of other issues. And we think we progress, but we always relapse to bad behavior. And I want to remind people that, hey, we should know better.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: Tell me about this Frida Kahlo. You have a lot, this one with the newspaper that says her name.<\/p>\n
SHEPARD FAIREY: So, you know, I\u2019m a big admirer of Frida Kahlo\u2019s work and, you know, her feminism relative to her era especially, and the ways in which she talked about art as a tool of resilience, that art helped her to overcome the pain of her bus accident she had when she was young, that was \u2014\u00a0gave her chronic pain through her life. But also I love that Frida Kahlo was initially seen as like this cute romantic partner to the important Diego Rivera. Now she is more well known and more celebrated than Diego Rivera. They\u2019re both very important artists, but I think that the progress we\u2019ve made in terms of her being someone who\u2019s taken very seriously as a woman artist is \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s important progress, but we still have a long way to go.<\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: That\u2019s the acclaimed artist and activist Shepard Fairey speaking at his Los Angeles gallery. He made the poster art for the film about Democracy Now! called Steal This Story, Please! I\u2019m here in the Bay Area<\/a> as the film opens in different theaters. Tonight, I\u2019ll be in Sebastopol<\/a> at the Rialto Cinema Sebastopol for the 4:00 and 6:00 screenings of the film. And then, tomorrow, we\u2019ll be in Sacramento<\/a> at the Tower Theatre, Sacramento, at 7:00. On Wednesday, we\u2019ll be at the Rialto in Elmwood in Berkeley, as well as the Roxie.<\/p>\n This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We\u2019ll look at the Trump administration\u2019s plan to restructure the U.S. Forest Service, which many fear will dismantle the 120-year-old agency. Back in a minute.<\/p>\n [break]<\/p>\n AMY GOODMAN: \u201cJaano Jot,\u201d Sonny Singh, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-620471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}