Art is a central component of every successful political movement. From propaganda posters to Reddit memes, it provides visions of a better world and illustrates what values should be prioritized and why.
“Artwork, music, symbols. They surround us every single day and have a profound impact on our life, but often in very subliminal ways,” said Cleo Barnett, the executive director of Amplifier, a nonprofit design lab that builds art and media experiments supporting activism movements, during a conversation at Unfinished Live.
In recent decades, the internet has helped decentralize public art. Anyone can now share their work online, and movements have become increasingly global. But the physical space continues to play an important part as well. “I still am almost most in love with this tangible thing that you stumble upon in the streets,” said Aaron Huey, a photographer, and the founder and chief creative of Amplifier.
Claudia Peña, the executive director of For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that aims to increase civic engagement, said communities should always be credited for artwork they originally produced, even when someone else borrows from or remixes it. “All of that stuff, I think, is really important in terms of raising consciousness,” she said. “Learning, having those conversations, asking the right questions, not making assumptions.”
Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.
Cleo Barnett
I’m going to ground this conversation today in the world of images. Art work, music, symbols. They surround us every single day and have a profound impact on our life, but often in very subliminal ways and this makes up our culture and it’s our culture that defines how we see ourselves in the world, how we perceive one another, and how we show up. Whether or not we vote, if we will or will not get vaccinated. It’s this world of culture that brought Allie and I together. We just want to start off tonight by talking about Protect the Sacred.
How did you start Protect the Sacred and why?
Allie Young
I’m the founder of Protect the Sacred and also a programs manager at Harness, where Protect the Sacred was incubated, which started as really a campaign initiative last year in March of 2020 when my nation, I’m from the Navajo nation, was being impacted by COVID-19 and we were actually the hardest hit at the time. Protect the Sacred is really about inspiring our native youth through culture and storytelling and messaging so that we can protect what is sacred to indigenous peoples. Throughout the pandemic, which we’re still in, there is a threat to our culture because of our elders who carry that knowledge and that ancestral wisdom in our languages that define who we are; our identity.
So I called upon our native youth to step up in that moment to help relay the message of staying home and protecting our elders especially, but also our homes and our families. I used to work at Shiprock Indian Health Service in public health and health promotion and my friends there reached out to me. It was just before the surge happened. We were anticipating the surge. They said, “Can you help us develop some messaging that our youth can understand and help relay to the community and to their families?” Of course, I jumped in and we brainstormed some messaging. Indian Health Services is a federally run program so they have some restrictions. To get around those restrictions they brought me on board and also some young native people that have platforms and voices to help disseminate the messaging and the information.
For my approach I started creating memes and one in particular about our public health. Shero in Navajo Nation who dedicated her life to public health, Annie Dodge Wauneka. She has a quote that says, “I will go and do more.” I called up on our native youth to be like Annie. Annie Dodge Wauneka did so much in terms of public health and all we’re asking is for you to stay home and keep your families home. Then that slowly went into our civic engagement work and census outreach and our get out the vote. This is our ride to the polls that we did at the end of last year where we continued on with the social media messaging and grounding this activation in culture and what resonates with native youth.
I heard from on the ground native young people saying, “Why are we still participating in this system that is not built for us? Has never worked for us?” And I said, “Oh my goodness, we need to get native youth motivated around this election.” Native youth are very proud of our ancestors and our elders and our cultures and we see our native youth as our future leaders. We always do things for the next seven generations and that’s how we act in the world. I was thinking what kind of campaign would get them involved and motivated and Ride to The Polls came to mind because we believe in horse medicine and that spirit of the horse that carries us, and in this situation, to the polls so that we could show the world that we’re still here and that we’re showing up and making our voices heard in this election.
I think it resonated both within the community and also across the country and across the world.
Cleo Barnett
Your work’s so amazing, Allie. One thing that we’ve been talking a lot about is just nepotism and how that shows up generation after generation and how it’s really important to invest in the leadership of a more diverse range of young people. This is what you’re doing with your Native Youth Summit that just happened last week. Can you share more about the Native Youth Summit and where you want to go to next with that?
Allie Young
Sure. After our Get Out The Vote work and Ride to The Polls, Protect The Sacred is now focusing on native youth leadership development and this is our first big program after kind of figuring out what is Protect the Sacred moving forward. It’s about investing in native youth who don’t always have the opportunities that other youth have across the country or the resources or the funding. It’s creating an opportunity and a space for them to speak with people like be in space with the president of the Navajo nation Jonathan Nez, Marisa Tomei, Mark Ruffalo, the Vice President of the United States who sent us a very beautiful three minute video message that we played to kick-off the Youth Summit. She was speaking to native youth which is rarely done from our national leaders. To have our youth listen in on these panels and participate in workshops that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish is inspiring our native youth.
To see some of these activists and these leaders within Indian country who are paving the way and using the art and the passion that they have to make a difference and to have a voice, that’s really what we’re inspiring our native youth to do. Presenting these people to them to say, “Look, we do it, you can do it and you can use TikTok, you can use social media, whatever sort of path that you see yourself going down.” I think that’s what we’re trying to do with our native youth.
Cleo Barnett
Beautiful. How Allie and I met was through my work with Amplifier and our collaboration with Harness. At Amplifier we’re amplifying the most important movements of our time to shift the national narrative and we’re doing that by bringing this artwork out into public spaces to interrupt public spaces and to bring the messages of the voices of the people created by the people. One way that we’ve been doing this is through our education work. All of our artwork is available on our website as free, high resolution downloads. We believe in the power of open source artwork and open source teaching tools. All of a sudden we started seeing educators all across the country putting this artwork up and asking us for lesson plans in response to current events.
While we’re working with the young people at this time when they’re kind of shaping their views of the world around them in real time, we’re reflecting on… So, we are located in every single state across the United States. We can reach over a million students currently. But we are reflecting on just our own misinformation and disinformation and how that’s making it really hard for us to be in conversation with one another, especially if we disagree at all. We launched the Reframe Campaign which was very inspired by leaders all across the country that are both progressive movement leaders but also rural community leaders that are leading these sorts of challenging conversations within their community.
We asked each of the leaders to pick a reword and we chose the re- prefix because it’s both looking backwards and looking forwards at the same time and it’s the cycle of again and again, which is what we need to continuously do with this political system that we’re in; these cycles.
Allie was one of the leaders and you chose the word remember, which was so powerful and so necessary for this series. I wonder if you could share more about why you selected the word remember. What that means for you.
Allie Young
Remember is how we move forward and remember is all that we ask as the native, indigenous community is to remember that we’re still here, to remember the land that we occupy, which is stolen, native land. Also, to remember the history, which is a dark past, that is often left out and erased from, as I call it, the fabricated American narrative, and the education system. It’s a history that, if it’s not taught and not talked about then that’s where we tend to repeat the past and our mistakes. But if we can identify that and own up and take accountability for that history then that’s how we move forward, that’s how we progress, that’s how we heal and that’s really what remember is about. It’s also about for native youth to say, “Remember what our ancestors have been through.” A genocide. We’re not supposed to be here but we are, so remember that resilience and hold it within you as you move forward and walk through life.
So yeah, that’s really what it’s about. I think that when we can call upon that history that is sometimes shameful we can learn from it.
Cleo Barnett
Well, I’m very excited to kind of step in and do what we do, which, over the next few months we’re going to be bringing this artwork out into public spaces all across the country. We’re going to be bringing this artwork into classrooms but we’re also partnering with some unfinished network partners like Citizen University who’s going to be hosing Civic Saturdays all across the country using this artwork as a jumping off space for conversations. We’re also working with the People’s Action Network who do deep canvassing in rural communities and they’re going to be bringing this artwork door-to-door to spark conversations. It’s very exciting. All of the artwork’s AR activated. You’ll see some of the artwork throughout the venue. There’s a QR code. It’s a free app and then you can actually hear from Allie and hear from the voices of these leaders themselves with their calls to action.
Also, every single artwork is going to have a teaching tool that goes with it. You might see a few newspapers around the venue and those newspapers are going to be shipped out to over a million student’s classrooms starting in two weeks. It’s going to have the full artwork series in it, it’s going to be able to go up on teachers walls. The artwork’s going to be AR animated, it’s all free resources for educators, and then Allie was able to create a lesson plan that goes with her artwork that’s going to be taught in classrooms. If you all want, you can download the app here through the QR code, I’ll give you a couple seconds. But, Allie, a big thing that we’ve been talking about especially in response to the themes of this even, decentralization, what does decentralization mean to you and the work that you’re doing?
The last few days and weeks when we’ve been studying this, it’s a lot around decentralizing the economy, or decentralizing the web from a technical standpoint, but how do you see decentralization?
Allie Young
I see it as decolonizing and the way that we live in this world. For me, decolonization is from the indigenous world, view, and perspective is about interdependence and it’s about how we’re all related. You often hear that in different native communities and they all have their different sayings. In my Navajo culture we have a word which means beauty and means that’s how we live life. That’s how we walk through life is self awareness and also being aware of our surroundings. I think when you can approach life that way you’re taking in the experiences of other people and it creates compassion and empathy. When we can show up that way in our work and as a society where we’re relatives to one another, we’re all related, I think that’s the way that we’ll heal as not only a nation and a society but also Mother Earth.
Just want to call out that this week is Climate Week and the way that we have a relationship with Mother Earth. We can’t live without her and she can’t live without us. We have to think that way and that’s how we move forward.
Cleo Barnett
Thank you so much, Allie. Can we give it up for Allie?
Okay, well it looks like we’ve come to the close of our conversation but there’s a lot more to explore so I want to invite up my partner in crime, and the founder of Amplifier, Aaron Huey on stage and he’s joined by the founder of Four Freedoms, Hank Willis Thomas and the Executive Director Claudia Peña.
Claudia Peña
Alright, we’re talking about the art of decentralization. Where is the center?
Aaron Huey
Well, I started feeding slides in of propaganda because I think when we talk about movements, the art of decentralized movements, I think of the origins of mass propaganda, like 1914 Britain, the way the Russians used it there on the right, the way the Americans talked about anti-communism, the way Hitler used it. Maw in the ’60s and ’70s. And then eventually, and this is part of the lineage that Amplifier comes out of, artists started using those same styles against the state. The one on the right is Shepard Fairey, the one on the left’s the one he took it from. He doesn’t mince words about appropriating and stealing that work to fight back.
Claudia Peña
So where is the center between these two?
Hank Willis Thomas
I want to see the next slide. Let me hold that.
Claudia Peña
Nope. No chance.
Hank Willis Thomas
This is where the center goes. For me, I’ve been thinking a lot about throughout the last couple days this concept of decentralization and the way in which the idea of the center is a mythology. The idea that there is a kind of area where ideas and culture are shaped. I believe the center is in each and every one of us and the more conscious we are of our actual core and our center that more actually we’re able to empower others to do that. I think human beings are emergent in the way in which our ideas and our life flow is actually dependent upon our capacity to relate to our center. Actually, I think… I’m in a process, actually, of finding my core. A lot of the work that I’ve done, a lot of the work that we’ve all done, is really trying to understand how where we belong can kind of harmoniously align with others who we may disagree with. I think the center is the air in between.
Aaron Huey
That was pretty heady. That was good. I liked that.
What I like about what Hank just did is I think a lot about why Amplifier and Four Freedoms work really well together is because we’re really kind of brutalist in that approach and very populous sometimes and we’re going straight to really obvious messages and trying to boil things down into its most simple terms and having that more expansive poetic approach is what makes our collaborations really great.
I do have to talk about this one just because in the history of propaganda this was some of the coolest stuff I found. Martin Luther in the 1500s and the reaffirmation was making pop-up Popes where you move the paper and he turned into the antichrist. You ever see any of this stuff? The ultimate propaganda. It’s the beginning of the printing press. The response to Pope Paul III. There’s some guys farting on now, on the Bible here. This was the origins of real mass distributed propaganda works.
Claudia Peña
Very high brow arts.
Aaron Huey
Yeah. High brow. Super high brow.
The next stuff is really the first time that Amplifier, that we ever really started working with you in a collaborative way. I just found all these stickers in a storage room last week with peoples stories that they had written on them like five years ago. You had done the Truth Booth.
Claudia Peña
What’s the Truth Booth?
Hank Willis Thomas
The Truth Booth is another space for decentralized conversation. There’s so much about dialogues. I’ve always been interested in this idea of the mega log. This kind of conversation that is actually happening subconsciously all over the world with so many people and actually in our mind’s. The work that we’ve done has been really about putting that out there. With the Truth Booth we created an inflatable speech bubble with allowed people to go inside and record themselves saying, “The truth is…” Because everyone has their own version of the truth and this idea of your truth being different from my truth and allowing those truths to both exist without having to be in conflict is something that I wanted to put out into the world.
And Aaron came through Amplifier and thought that we could actually speak directly to the modern day slavery system and invited us to do this.
Aaron Huey
I was really interested in going into spaces without permission and multiplying that effect. You could set up that Truth Booth on a college campus with permission and get X amount of people, but I was really interested in the idea of could you take 10,000 black and white stickers, printed for $1,000, and hack $2 million or $3 million worth of ad space and make tens of thousands of Truth Booths? A lot of these… Go to the next slide. There’s a bunch of these. There’s piles of them all over upstairs.
Hank Willis Thomas
We traveled across the country. We went to like 35 states with these stickers.
Aaron Huey
Yeah.
Hank Willis Thomas
What I love about this is that all of a sudden now we’re in conversation with the mega log that is commerce. That is about what value really is. that actually goes back to Jim Crow 2.0 but also to the prison industrial complex.
Claudia Peña
On this project would you say the original Truth Booth was a center and then it became decentralized with the stickers?
Aaron Huey
Definitely… Well…
Hank Willis Thomas
No, because-
Aaron Huey
Definitely maybe?
Hank Willis Thomas
It was a collaboration… Everything I do is a collaboration and it’s because I understand that I’m just a small part of so many other things. The beauty and the challenge of the Truth Booth was how do we actually get as many people to feel that their voice is as critical and important to the work as anyone else’s. The idea is that this is so-and-so’s artwork but it’s not, it actually always belongs to the public.
Claudia Peña
Do you have a different opinion, Huey?
Aaron Huey
No, because that’s that generosity of opening up to the open source to make it into any shape possible. It’s really like, then it is the spirit of a lot of the projects we’ve done at Amplifier, all open source, and people taking it, running with it wherever they want to take it.
Claudia Peña
Yeah, that’s one of the things that makes these projects interesting, including the Four Freedom’s photos, if you want to mention that earlier slide, is the remixing of art. How artists iterate on other art and build and build on it. Where do you think that fits into the conversation?
Hank Willis Thomas
The art historical conversation goes back tens of thousands of years and the very artwork is actually in conversation with everything that came before and also with everything that will follow it. The beauty of an artwork is that the lifespan is infinite because it actually lives in our subconscious. What I love about kind of becoming more engaged in the public discourse is that even though this may not seem pertinent there is a relationship to the pyramids. There’s a relationship to the Statue of Liberty. When you start to put work out in public and make it larger I think it starts to… And it’s also not state controlled. It starts to actually beg the question, for future generations, of who should be speaking and who should be listened to.
Claudia Peña
Aaron, earlier we were talking about how one form of sort of centralized art is thinking about spaces like museums, galleries, institutions that are “legitimized” what about other spaces? Why does it matter to be out in the public?
Aaron Huey
In the beginning we just didn’t have access to those spaces so we had to steal the space. The idea was by hook or by crook take the space we needed. It was just the necessity of finances but it was also… Am I answering that question?
Claudia Peña
Mm-hmm.
Hank Willis Thomas
I just laughed at, “By hook or by crook,” but I was like, “Which one was where?”
Aaron Huey
Which one? Yeah.
There’s still something about that street work of getting dirty that… No matter where NFTs go and the AR work we’re doing or everything everybody’s doing out into the infinite digital universe, I still am almost most in love with this tangible thing that you stumble upon in the streets that you don’t have to subscribe to that streaming service or scan that QR code. I’ll keep making that stuff, but this piece in Oakland will still be something… It’ll still be my favorite work, I think.
Hank Willis Thomas
What about the next slide, though? To me, what I loved about the We The People campaign is that people didn’t know who Shepard Fairey was, they didn’t know what Amplifier was. They knew that their performance of protests and actually using these images was something that was going to resonate. I’m so amazed as I go across the country and I see this work up in places where I’m least expecting it. By the way in which things can become kind of both tangible and viral, in the physical world, as well as in the ethernet and the internet.
Aaron Huey
What’s the throughline for Unfinished? Can you give me the throughline?
Claudia Peña
I just saw Angela Glover Blackwell in the audience. Right here.
Aaron Huey
Reimagining, renew-
Claudia Peña
She’s got it.
Angela Glover Blackwell, from the audience:
Reimagining the economy, culture, and technology to build a vibrant, multiracial democracy.
Aaron Huey
That’s the punchline. To build a vibrant, multiracial democracy. That is the undercurrent of this collection of images. The moment demanded this work and we were building it organically. There was a slide where a bunch of people have sticky notes and stuff. We didn’t know what we were making yet. We just knew that all the cameras in the world were going to be pointed at one place-
Hank Willis Thomas
The Women’s March.
Aaron Huey
Yeah. Well, the Inauguration is actually where we thought they were going to be pointing at, or that moment kind of surrounding that, because we started building it before the Women’s March really took off a little bit.
We knew that if we put the right thing there then everyone would see it and the question was, “What do you say when the whole world is watching?” You say who we really are. You show that multiracial democracy. We are greater than fear. We defend dignity. We protect each other, and we show who we are. We show the compass of where we want to go and who we want to be. We made everything free and downloadable which is why it started moving and moving and showed up in Jackson Hole and people made clothes out of it and quilts out of it and projected it on buildings. People did do the newspaper thing. They took it to the parade route which the original-
Hank Willis Thomas
They took it to Berlin.
Aaron Huey
Yeah, this was when we knew it was actually working. The morning of the Women’s March somebody texted a picture, this picture, of the Brandenburg Gate surrounded by the work and we said, “We didn’t send anything to Berlin.” And then the next picture was from Brazil and the next picture was from Kenya and the next picture was from Peru and the next picture was from the Philippines. And then it went into the Capitol and on and on and on and on.
Hank Willis Thomas
That picture reminds me of another decentralized movement that brought itself to the Capitol.
Claudia Peña
What one is that?
Aaron Huey
Yeah. There’s definitely some slides in the slideshow of other kinds of decentralized movements.
Claudia Peña
Let’s see those.
Aaron Huey
They’re after this, but I want to come back to that. I want to come back to the other decentralized movements. Do you want to talk about the way you all hacked space with his project?
Hank Willis Thomas
Sure. I am so much more interested in us than I am the past.
Aaron Huey
Alright. Let’s do it then.
Hank Willis Thomas
When I look at this billboard, which is from 2016, actually I’m in love with the past. I just lied.
Claudia Peña
I know. I was like, “What is he talking about?” I guess it’s for the stage.
Hank Willis Thomas
No, it’s like… I feel like right now is not about what we did before. I feel like right now is what we do today. We need to know what happened before, but we’re in an era of mass distraction like no one has ever, ever experienced.
Claudia Peña
Yeah.
Hank Willis Thomas
Looking back is important but looking forward is critical. It is hands on the wheel, eyes wide opened, foot on the gas, and pay attention. What our president, our past president, and some might argue our current president, have done is they co-opted our fears that are deep down, probably generational trauma, and weaponized them to promote skepticism, fear, anxiety and frustration and then in various ways act that out on our neighbors which means they were acting it out on ourselves and each other. One of the things that made me recognize that I was falling for the trap, which I continue to, was when it got to the end of the 2020 election Eric, hey Eric, and Wyatt Gallery from Four Freedoms and our friend John Santos, we were looking at this concept of Make America Great Again and recognizing that the past five American presidents had used this term of making America great again, and somehow now one of them, through his capacity to kind of wield our attention, made it his own and made it mean something that no one really actually tried to dissect.
The media, for all of the billions of dollars that was spent never asked, “When was America great for more people than it is today?” I believe the answer is always never. This is the moment that we’re greatest. If you wanted to be nostalgic or romantic and pretend you could perhaps say it was the Civil Rights Movement when everyday people of very little means recognized that the moment was now and the weapon was love and that they could, through their dignity and their beauty, stand up to the injustice of the state and actually create a model for how we can actually make change which is together in peace, regardless of what’s coming at us.
Claudia Peña
No, but what made this interesting was that everybody was mad. Don’t you remember how everybody, no matter what their political side, was mad at this billboard?
Hank Willis Thomas
There were some death threats. The governor told us that we were race baiting. The governor of Mississippi, which is kind of funny, but for me the proudest moment was when CNN put this up on their website and it says, “Mississippi residents are unsure of billboards intent,” because everything… You get confused looking at CNN. Is it like the WWE or a boxing match? It’s like, “So-and-so slams so-and-so.” It’s very… And they’re like, “People don’t know.” We believe that good art asks questions. The beauty of that is that’s where the decentralizing happens. Where everyone has their own answer to the question. No one ever asks, “What is America?” We think about America as this small portion of the North American continent, but it is the contents and the continent as Alfredo Jaar pointed out in his amazing work, is larger as a land mass than these imaginary lines that we so fiercely protect.
I also want to point out that this is a young person, a young John Lewis not knowing what would be before him, not knowing if he would live past that moment, and that he actually carried what he called the good trouble and the beautiful trouble on for generations.
Claudia Peña
Good trouble.
Hank Willis Thomas
This is a work by Bayeté Ross Smith. So at Four Freedoms what we do is we just walk up to amazing people and say, “Would you put up a billboard of something that you care about?” This is Xaviera Simmons. And we find people like Ai Weiwei and we work with billboard companies and different just people who have space who recognize that public space should not just be about selling products, it can also be about inviting people into ideas. This is Eric’s billboard. Who am I to tell the story?
Aaron Huey
These are spaces we got with permission. They’re kind of nice but I like the permissionless ones.
Claudia Peña
Aaron likes to do everything without permission.
Aaron Huey
Yeah.
Claudia Peña
If it’s with permission it’s boring.
Hank Willis Thomas
I like people to have to have lawyers to take stuff down. It’s much more fun.
Claudia Peña
We should not depend on lawyers to do anything good, y’all.
Aaron Huey
This is kind of in between. This is in between permission/no permission. In between.
Claudia Peña
Where’s this one?
Aaron Huey
This was in Los Angeles for Indigenous People’s Day.
Hank Willis Thomas
Here’s a question that comes up a lot. Can we go back to that?
Claudia Peña
This one?
Hank Willis Thomas
When we talk about conversations about our ancestors and relatives who protected this land for generations, where many of us are coming to awareness about our need to be more conscious and maybe even be in conversation with that reality that we’ve been able to ignore for generations. Where is the center, in your opinion, Claudia, of the conversation about the millions of living Native Americans and the role of responsibility for us in this moment?
Claudia Peña
Was there a question in there somewhere?
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah. Where is the center of-
Claudia Peña
In thinking about Native rights?
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah, because I’m also looking… Claudia’s representing some of her ancestors in her-
Claudia Peña
Oh, that’s fun. Where do you think this dress is from, Hank?
Hank Willis Thomas
I would assume it’s from… Not Guatemala.
Claudia Peña
Good. It’s from Iran.
Hank Willis Thomas
But you do have ancestors.
Claudia Peña
And who would have guessed that, right? Because it looks like it might be from Central America.
That’s part of the reason I wore it is because the relationship between textiles and beauty and art, it’s global, right? We think that there’s things that are specific to this geographic space and that might be true for some aspects of what people are creating, but there’s also a global conversation that’s taking place at any given time.
One time we were in Peru and there were some textiles that we found there and then I went to Northern Thailand and the Hmong folks had almost exactly the same designs and the idea that some Hmong folks that were living in the northernmost part of Thailand would be visiting Peru and learning about what the makers are doing there, probably not. But there’s this global conversation that takes place just by being one because we’re all connected.
Hank Willis Thomas
You’re answering my question. I was at this amazing conversation 10 years ago and it was about indigenous rights and the visual landscape. There became the huge tension between the people who were still representing the indigenous populations and their kind of occupied territory and the descendants of indentured servants and slaves and who had the kind of moral compass. What I was fascinated with was all of a sudden the power structure that we usually call at the center, white supremacy, was not important. Then there was a struggle over who was the authentic voice of truth in the struggle.
Aaron Huey
That was within that last piece. That was a conversation piece about black indigenous power together. What made this piece work was it wasn’t going to be enough to have two or three words at the bottom of some iconic imagery. When you look at any of these with the AR app it’s a conversation. Their voices start and it animates and the communities are speaking with and to each other. It adds that layer of journalism because without that, the complexity of that conversation, then it’s flat. It doesn’t work.
Hank Willis Thomas
I do want to hear your thoughts on this… My question.
Claudia Peña
The center of that. Okay. Everybody has indigenous roots, that’s one thing that people have to remember. The fact that we’re here, finally in a moment in the United States where people are recognizing the importance of land acknowledgements, of recognizing who were the traditional land stewards of any particular space that you’re in, and ensuring that people are giving proper credit to stuff that is borrowed or inspired by or remixed by but acknowledging that this may come from this group of people, this tribe or folks that are coming from these different cultures. All of that stuff, I think, is really important in terms of raising consciousness. The center is always raising consciousness. Learning, having those conversations, asking the right questions, not making assumptions.
We had a conversation recently about the use of spirit animal. This is a big debate right now about whether or not it’s appropriate to use the word spirit animal because it degrades the actual relationships that many indigenous tribes in this nation and across the world have with the animal world and some people sort of take offense, like, “Well, I’m not trying to use it in a derogatory way I’m just trying to use it in the way that I mean.” What does it mean to show solidarity? What does it mean to show allyship? All of those questions are conversations that we should be having together as opposed to sort of just making assumptions.
Hank Willis Thomas
I think that’s kind of what I’m learning is just like, each one teach one discourse. This way in which maybe… It goes back to what I was saying centers you. I mean, centers me and centers you.
Claudia Peña
And centers you.
Hank Willis Thomas
Each of us has this capacity. I was talking to someone last night who was talking about this relationship between hierarchal power and vertical power. Next slide. And where we once used-
Claudia Peña
This is a great slide to have on this … Keep going.
Aaron Huey
Is this the one you wanted to get to?
Hank Willis Thomas
Sure. Go ahead.
Claudia Peña
Hierarchical power…
Hank Willis Thomas
Well, this idea of traditionally there were experts. There were people who knew certain things so that those of us who didn’t know could say, “We trust that person and therefore we can have some stability.” One of the things that’s happened in the past decade, more consciously, is this vertical power where it’s more like, “I trust you because you are my peer and I trust people that you trust.” While democratizing it actually reshapes the center of these discourses.
Claudia Peña
Right, it kind of used to be authority and now it’s more relationship based.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah.
Claudia Peña
Aaron, tell us about this.
Aaron Huey
This is a weird one. In the realm of space hacking some of the frontiers are now in the metaverses. Running vaccine campaigns in places like Second Life or Decentraland where people are spending large periods of their time.
Claudia Peña
Let’s talk about some of the other decentralized movements.
Aaron Huey
Yeah, we talked a lot about our role in some of these movements but over the last decade Occupy, our friends at Justseeds and some of the iconic work they’ve made. Go back to the last one. I like this one because it uses the All Cops Are Bastards language here and under here it says, “The authority fears the brush and the pen,” it’s the same in Cairo in 2012 and in Libya as it is now. … Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter.
But as we talk about all the beauty and all the great changes that we hope are coming from these decentralized movements, there are simultaneously a lot of other decentralized movements using art and imagery.
Hank Willis Thomas
From the Tea Party to the Boogaloo Boys.
Aaron Huey
Yeah, literally the Boogaloo Boys. A militia, they literally have meme warfare divisions that are creating hundreds of thousands of pieces of art and creating new iconography out of white supremacist signs and joining together with Qanon and appropriating Sesame Street. The one of Trump is an official Trump tweet from 2015 as tipping his hat to white supremacists. Appropriating Smokey the Bear for the Boogaloos and symbols from our past for all these things like Qanon. And the aesthetic is so strange. I like going from that aesthetic to what’s next because Wide Awakes was born out of the chaos of the meme wars and of the sickness.
This was the ultimate because the art was joy and it’s why I fell in love with it.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah, this was a… This is a collaboration that was kind of our first true acknowledgement that everything we’ve done individually as people but also as organizations was useless if we could not actually come together and that everyone has a super power and that if actually acknowledge our super powers and aren’t afraid of them we can actually, perhaps, build off of that to make something great. We were inspired by this 19th century movement, abolition movement, that actually brought someone who was a relative nobody to becoming the President, his name was Abraham Lincoln. He was not a staunch abolitionist. He was someone who actually was a middle of the road person who basically… These people in this decentralized movement who wore cloaks and carried capes, who recognized that they were responsible for the crimes of their nation, could come together in their own disempowered ways and gain power through collective sharing and promoting of these ideas.
Aaron Huey
Yeah. And there was no one flag and there was no one eye. Everybody made whatever came out of their heart for this one.
Hank Willis Thomas
We were all the I in team. What happened for me in this… We started to wear cloaks and we really were an active hive mind where everything everyone said, and that meant everyone, like literally who we were talking to, mattered and was important. And that when we stepped in the process of actually allowing yes to be okay and actually allowing failure to be okay and fault to be okay we were able to do so much more. The contrast between Wide Awake and being woke was Wide Awake was acknowledging that we are the problem.
Aaron Huey
Yeah. Woke felt like a burden and Wide Awake felt like a party. That’s why I loved it.
Claudia Peña
And this slide, what is it showing us?
Hank Willis Thomas
All these strangers who just decided to co-op this idea and make it their own.
Claudia Peña
Which was exactly what the invitation was.
Hank Willis Thomas
What’s happening, I think, in the next few weeks… We actually launched a holiday, which is October 3rd, which was the date of the largest abolitionist march in American history in 1860.
Last year tens of thousands of us across the country started to kind of go out into the world with this idea and that’s going to hopefully be a new kind of rallying call.
Aaron Huey
October 3rd.
Claudia Peña
There’s Aaron Huey holding a flag.
Aaron Huey
There was even a Navy. We had a Wide Awakes Navy.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah. The greatest moment of my life other than having a daughter was, going back one slide, was when there were 40 or 50 boats in New York Harbor waving these flags, encouraging people to vote and artist, Duke Riley, literally just called all these people and people sailed up from Annapolis. There were some Trump boats also. This was not a pro-Biden thing, this was a pro-voting thing. But the idea that everyone could actually be able to participate in this. You can participate in our democracy by encouraging others to vote if you don’t have voting power and encouraging yourself to just put yourself out there.
Claudia Peña
That’s all the time we got, y’all.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah.
Claudia Peña
Thank you so much Hank and Aaron. Mostly thanks to y’all.