Artists Shine Light on Trump, GOP Atrocities in Emotionally-Charged New Billboard, Street Art Campaign

The billboards are going up in Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Phoenix, Arizona – all so-called “battleground” states for this years presidential election. Using their talent as street artists to draw attention in public, this group of billboards is grabbing the attention of passersby with aesthetics as well as content.

In a campaign funded by Collective Super PAC, the SuperPAC affiliate of The Collective PAC, a number of street artists as well as artists from other genres and practices are lending their individual skills to remind potential voters what has already been done – with a warning that four more years would march us straight off a cliff, in their opinion.

Artists Shepard Fairey, Nekisha Durrett, Nate Lewis, Rafael Lopez, Robert Russell, Rob Sheridan, and Swoon each take on their variation of the messages on topics like police brutality, racism, hate speech, immigration and the Coronavirus pandemic. Some are simply dedicated to controversial statements made by Trump and others on his team.

“Our message is simple: Remember what they did and vote them out,” says organizer Robin Bell, whose known for his projections on the façade of the Trump Hotel.

For Shepard Fairey, it was the irony that this spring and early summer Trump was trying to solve our problems with police brutality with, uh, police brutality.

“My art piece is a reminder that while the American public was protesting in the streets, in record numbers, against racism and police brutality, Donald Trump was encouraging police brutality against the protesters, reinforcing the very same problems within law enforcement and the criminal justice systems the protesters were demanding to be reformed,” says Fairey. “This image implies that the police are supposed to be peacekeepers, not warriors, and that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of social justice and the wrong side of history!”

The images are stark, sometimes shocking, but then so are the times they are documenting – and street art is often holding a mirror up to society. “Life imitates art, and the images we see have a direct impact on our democracy,” says Quentin James, Founder and President of The Collective.

As the economy continues to deflate and the Greater Depression is waiting to be triggered by a crash, not only will we see more street art, we’ll depend on it as tea leaves to read about ourselves and hopefully remember what we all did (and didn’t), so we can learn from it.

The RemememberWhatTheyDid campaign is a project of Artists United for Change.

To sponsor a billboard and/or to register to vote click HERE

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