26 images in alphabetical order, each with a handlettered word or phrase related to community organizing against a background of colored pencil markmaking, followed by accompanying text explaining the idea
This year for the 100 Day Project, I decided to use what I have learned about community organizing in a daily markmaking and handlettering practice. This is the first of what will be four different versions of the alphabet by the time I complete the 100 days.
I will be in conversation with Mari Tapia, sociologist and educator, on February 17th from 12pm-2 at the Minnesota Street Project (1271 Minnestoa Street, SF) as part of the Clarion Alley Mural Project’s Manifest Differently programming. Come for our conversation on the Origins and Persistence of Manifest Destiny, check out the amazing art exhibition mounted by the project after and stay for the panel On Sovereignty at 3pm. This is a free event.
I’d heard about the 100 Day Project a while back—the idea was developed by Lindsay Jean Thomson as a tool for moving forward on creative projects or practicing a new creative skill. I liked the idea of it but have an intense day job that regularly means 45-50 hour work weeks, so have been hesitant to take it on. But I’ve been studying and practicing how to draw comics (See Lynda Barry’s Making Comics and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for two great inspirations as well as Alec Longstreth’s class on Autobiographical Comics on Domestika for lots of practical advice) and I decided that maybe making one panel a day might be a doable goal. Of course, within days I realized that while it was a doable goal, it was still totally overwhelming. The terror of the blank page and empty mind. LOL. Anyway, thanks to brainstorming with a friend and the realization that I should iterate around a theme, I got over that early hurdle. I still don’t know if I’ll make it through the 100 Days but I’m gonna ride these crow wings as long as they will carry me. ;) See the Comics tab for the full run of Crow Comics.
I haven’t posted here since the summer of 2021. I took a full time job as a community organizer in the Fall of 2021 and a lot of my creative work happens in that job. Also that job requires a level of creativity and intellectual rigor and passion that I’m not sure I could have imagined beforehand. I maintain my personal art practice in the early morning before my day job begins. That work is more about play and skill building and experimentation. And joy.
Graphic made by Kristen Snow
In collaboration with Margaret Ernst and Kristen Snow with the national Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Cultural Workers, and creators of the White Artists for Racial Justice website, Alexis Macnab and I, from SURJ at Sacred Heart/San José, are co-facilitating this workshop series is for artists and organizers who want to gain skills and experience using art as a way to practice courage, commitment, and leadership in social justice work. SURJ believes that it is white people’s responsibility to organize other white people to dismantle white supremacy, because it is white people who historically and still today benefit from white supremacy. The Art and Culture Work working group at SURJ at Sacred Heart has been facilitating creative skills workshops since 2017 as part of our organizing.
By the end of the three part series, participants will have both designed and implemented their own Make Art Make Justice workshop in their communities. This intensive will share all the tools you need to develop, plan, and run your workshop, and discuss ways that practicing art with your members strengthens and uplifts organizing work for the long haul. Register HERE.
This workshop series is for you if:
You are an artist interested in engaging with, or sparking, justice work in your community
You are new to organizing and want to learn about it from the point of view of artistic process
You are an experienced organizer and want to develop more leaders in your organization, and find ways to strengthen engagement, retention, and relationships in your org
All workshops online! Accessible from anywhere!
Part 1 - Sunday, July 25 1-3pm PT
In this session we will give an introduction to the Make Art Make Justice model of art-based workshops for white anti-racist organizers, and share some recent case studies and resources developed by our chapter’s Art & Culture Working Group. Participants will get to know each other and start to build cohorts of support in order to start planning your art-based social-justice event.
Part 2 - Sunday, August 8 1-3pm PT
This will be primarily a working session where participants will have a chance to try out techniques, share tips and successes, and work through questions in the process of developing their Make Art Make Justice workshops. Drop-ins welcome, but this session is intended as a time to address specific ideas generated by work from the previous meeting. There will also be discussion and tool-sharing around turn-out, information gathering, and follow-up for your event. Following this session, you will have everything you need to run your own workshop in your community or organization!
Part 3 - Sunday, August 22 1-3pm PT
The final session will be a showcase of your Make Art Make Justice event. Participants will share “plusses and deltas” on what you learned in the process, and the impact it had on you, your community, and your work. There will be further discussion and resource sharing, and a chance to learn from everyone in the workshop on how to make all of our organizing more (he)artful!
If you want to share about this event in your networks, here is the landing page for it: https://www.whiteartistsforracialjustice.org/events.html
The 1500 Stories podcast cracks open the uncomfortable subjects of money and economic class. 1500 Stories is an art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the United States. Since I founded the project back in 2015, over 700 Americans, people living in very different economic situations, have opened up to the project about their lives. In each episode, we’ll hear people share openly about things Americans avoid talking about--things like money, and debt, their economic struggles, their worries and their hopes for the future. AND something Americans DEFINITELY don’t like to talk or think about--economic class. If you want a peek inside the kinds of experiences people usually don’t share in polite conversation, listen to 1500 Stories. Listen to the trailer now for the first season of the 1500 Stories podcast. The podcast launches its first full episode on February 11 and episodes will drop on the second and fourth Thursday of the month. Season 1 includes a three episode mini-series about how Americans think about middle-classness and a four episode mini-series about farm work and rural life. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, Radio Public, and coming soon to Spotify, Radio.com or Player.fm. You can help support the podcast and my ongoing creative work (which has been entirely a labor of love above and beyond my day job) by becoming a patron, by leaving a review on your podcast app, and by sharing both the podcast and my Patreon link in your social networks.
I created a bunch of shareable graphics to honor and reclaim democracy. Democracy—government of, by and for the people—isn’t real unless and until we make it real through our organizing, unionizing, striking, volunteering, protesting, testifying, emailing/writing/calling our electeds, phonebanking and, of course, voting. So every day between now and Election Day, I have been making one post in my social media feeds to celebrate democracy and encourage informed voting. If you need help registering to vote, visit iwillvote.com. If you are have any problems voting or suspect any kind of voter suppression, please call 866-OUR-VOTE or visit https://protectthevote.net/, both of which are non-partisan. You can also sign up there to be an election protection volunteer. If you need help understanding what’s on your ballot (ours in 111 pages long and I find it very daunting even though I spent my twenties reading acacemic jargon!), visit Ballotpedia. If you want to get more involved, consider joining one of our local organizations to phonebank about statewide initiatives during election season. And finally, if you would like to join the Festival of Democracy, reach out to me directly for access to a folder of shareable graphics.
1500 Stories is a digital storytelling and collaborative art project about economic inequality in the U.S. I first conceived of the project back in 2015 and in the last 5 years, over 700 stories have been contributed to the project. Thank to support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and beautiful work by the Design Action Cooperative, a worker owned design and communications firm, the project has a gorgeous new website designed to give you a sense of widening economic inequality and to humanize that gap through stories. The website features just a few of those 700 stories, in audio, video, text and visual arts formats (with many more to come!) and is a wonderful resource for exploring what it’s like to live at different economic positions in the U.S. In this time of isolation and polarization, this is an opportunity to connect with lives very different than your own!
There are many things I find terrifying about the time we are living through. As someone who has been trying to raise awareness about economic inequality through my 1500 Stories project for years and years now and as someone for whom teaching about inequality is literally my day job, the economic devastation that so many are experiencing, including my own students, is at the forefront of my mind alongside the health risks, suffering and loss of life. I know that everyone is facing different circumstances economically right now. Some of us are suffering more than others during the COVID-19 crisis and will not get the help they need from the stimulus package. And some of us are receiving money even though our income has not been affected. If you fall into this second category, this message is especially for you. During this time of uncertainty we are holding two sometimes contradictory thoughts: how can I protect myself and my family and how can we help people who have been systematically excluded from resources? I think of this as the share versus hoard dilemma and as you can imagine I come down pretty firm on the the share side of that dilemma. While we may be afraid of scarcity, I am asking you to act from your courage and generosity rather than your fear. How can we make the world we want to live in? How can we take care of one another and of the most vulnerable members of our community? In this time of terrible challenge, there is something you can do. I don't know about you but my feelings of powerlessness contribute to my anxiety and I find it very helpful to BE helpful right now because that is what keeps me sane and cuts down on the insomnia that has returned with a vengeance.
I and others are pooling our stimulus checks (or donating anyway if we make too much money to receive a stimulus check) to give directly to folks who are left out of the federal safety net. And we’re working with Sacred Heart Community Service to make it happen. We can make this money meaningful by sharing it with those most vulnerable in our communities. You can redistribute justice by making a donation at https://donate.sacredheartcs.org/COVIDcheck
Please share with others if you feel so moved. P.S. I did the graphic design for this flyer.
The Euphrat Museum of Art will be holding special Saturday hours from 10am-1pm on March 7th, and I will be in the museum to serve tea and cookies to visitors in my interactive installation about voting rights 100 years after the suffrage amendment. This installation is part of an exhibit called Women Pathmakers, featuring works by pathbreaking artists such as Hung Liu, Jennifer Mondfrans, Rupy C. Tut and Jessica Sabogal. You can read the San Jose Mercury News’ coverage of the exhibit here. My installation features portraits of voting rights activists Ida Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Charlane Oliver painted by Johanna Foster, whom you can read more about here. The Women Pathmakers exhibit is up until March 12, and normal museum hours are Monday through Thursday from 10am-3pm.
Visitors to the artist reception having tea and conversation about voting; Jen Myhre and Johanna Foster in the background. Photo credit: Elizabeth Mjelde
Suffragist Tea Parties (2020)
Come out to the Women Pathmakers exhibit at the Euphrat Museum of Art opening at 6:30pm on January 23rd and see my installation. The first women's rights convention in the U.S. was planned over tea, and later feminists both sold tea to raise funds for the suffrage movement and used tea parties both as fundraisers and to politically organize other women in a time when it was rare for women to congregate in public. In honor of the hundredth anniversary of the women’s suffrage amendment, Suffragist Tea Parties is an interactive installation that asks participants to think about and discuss their relationship to voting today, and confront in a major election year both the ways in which voting rights remain vulnerable and how American democracy has always been incomplete. Because it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that women of color fully reaped the rights bestowed by the women’s suffrage amendment and because voting rights remain tenuous for communities of color, the installation features portraits of Ida Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer and contemporary voting rights activist Charlane Oliver (painted by Dr. Johanna Foster with mats collaged by Sophia Foster-Palmer). At the public museum events, I will be present to serve tea and facilitate discussions about voting and democracy.
I just listened to storygatherers in Wisconsin share how moved they were by the vulnerability and intimacy of their interviews with people for the 1500 Stories project, and they are contributing roughly 50 new interviews to the collection. Your donation can help us edit and share these stories with wider audiences. 1500 Stories is a collaborative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. Volunteers and students in Wisconsin, New Jersey and the Silicon Valley have contributed over 600 interviews to the project, as well as hundreds of documentary photographs. If you believe in the power of stories to build connections and empathy, consider spreading the word in your networks about our Giving Tuesday campaign.
When I left home as a scholarship student at a university thousands of miles away, my best friend gave me a book of twenty Frida Kahlo postcards, each of which she had stamped and addressed with her own address. And that act kicked off a postcard exchange that has lasted for three decades. And because she gave me those postcards, I have sent my friends and family postcards both when I travel and when I find one I like in a bookshop or boutique. Some of these friends have felt obligated to send me postcards back. I have kept them all. A new and recent friendship was cemented when he asked for my snail mail address via text and I received a postcard from him the following week, before I had even disclosed my fondness for them. 2019 has been a year of postcard making. To cope with climate despair, I started collecting botanicals on hikes and printing them, most commonly on postcards. I both gave some of these away blank and wrote messages on others and posted them.
Botanical 2019, monotype
This spring, I started a series of little activist self-care postcards, using linocut—things to inspire the community organizers and teachers and social workers I know. I both gave these away and sent them through the mail.
People Power postcard, 2019, linocut
This summer when I had a chance to travel, I decided to bring only my most portable art supplies and packed a stash of markers and blank postcards. And while I did buy postcards at various stops, I also started making little watercolors of places I visited and putting them in the mail.
World’s Largest Tree, 2019, watercolor brush markers and ink
So imagine my delight when I happened across this book by accident on a display at my local public library:
https://thamesandhudson.com/the-world-exists-to-be-put-on-a-postcard-artists-postcards-from-1960-to-now-9780500480434
It opens with these passages: “One of the pleasures of artists’ work with postcards is that, being made of non-precious material, they invite handling, ask to be included in our lives, picked up and turned over and puzzled about, shown to friends. The inexpensiveness of production encourages artists to experiment in their design…Egalitarian is the vital word concerning postcards. Until recently postcards were part of everyone’s life, displayed on the mantelpieces of urban flats and pinned to the walls of artists’ studios. They have influenced the creation of radical new works of art…Artists still work with, and on, postcards, cutting, scraping, collaging, painting, embroidering and erasing to make unique pieces.” That phrase “until recently” points to the ways in which texting and social media have supplanted the postcard. In my day job as a sociology instructor, I sometimes ask my students to make postcards that are visual statements from canonical texts in sociology, such as C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination:
Student postcard, 2017
I ask them to mail these postcards out as acts of civic engagement to a recipient of their choice. When we do this activity, most students have to be taught how to address a postcard, where to find stamps and where to put the stamp on the postcard. So, Jeremy Cooper is quite right to imply that postcards are no longer part of everyone’s life. In addition to all of the points Cooper makes about their accessibility, their potential disappearance from everyday life also drives my interest in postcards as a genre. It is perhaps not an accident that this year I have doubled down on my own lifelong postcard obsession? practice? Even if you do not make your own postcards, I would encourage you to pick one up now and then, write a short note on the back and pop it in the mail. You will bring a moment of delight to its recipient.
As someone who has really come to appreciate how political organizing can work on the level of local democracy, it is super gratifying to know that folks on their way to testify at a city council meeting might take a look at some of the works from my ongoing series of cyanotypes about the joys and sorrows of modernity. In November the works will move to the main branch of the San Mateo Public Library. Visit https://www.cityofsanmateo.org/1624/City-Hall-Exhibits to learn more about San Mateo’s Art in Public Places program.
This news from from the Belle Foundation came at the tail end of a two week long bout of the flu in which I was questioning my life choices and what it means to pursue a second shift of artmaking on top of my day job as a sociology instructor. I feel so so grateful for the encouragement that this grant represented to me and am using the grant to develop my printmaking practice and hire an animator for my historical documentary called The Spider Web that is currently in post-production. Since the letter from the Belle Foundation, I also was one of 26 inaugural fellows nationwide awarded a 2019 Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learning Societies Community College Faculty Fellowship, which I will be using to begin reading and analyzing the now 600+ interviews contributed to the 1500 Stories project in order to develop a public sociology podcast about the lived experience of economic inequality in the U.S. It is ridiculously exciting to be facing the prospect of having the time to delve into the stories collected by volunteers in New Jersey, Wisconsin and the Silicon Valley. You can read the abstract for my Mellon/ACLS project here.
Peace Lilies, failed print collage, 2019
I finally had a couple of days off recently and I spent them in the forest. I brought only art supplies that had nothing to do with any of my ongoing projects, just to play. Amongst other things, I brought a stack of failed prints, some scissors and some collage glue. In addition to the kindergarten-like joy of cutting and pasting, it also felt really really good to turn failures into flowers.
How can we thrive, and not just survive, in the Silicon Valley? Join the 1500 Stories Project in partnership with Silicon Valley Rising and the Tech Workers Coalition for an evening of community building around economic inequality in the Silicon Valley. Come share your work stories, meet others in your community and discover ways to make a difference. On Thursday February 28, 2018 from 6:30-8:30pm in the theater lobby at Mexican Heritage Plaza, we invite you to In This Together: Working in Silicon Valley. 1500 Stories is a collaborative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. 1500 Stories is honored to partner for this public forum with Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition that works to reduce occupational segregation and income inequality by raising wages and creating affordable housing, and with the Tech Workers Coalition, a coalition of workers and organizers in and around the tech industry working for social justice, workers’ rights and economic inclusion. Visit 1500stories.org, https://www.siliconvalleyrising.org/, and https://www.techworkerscoalition.org/ to learn more. These forums are made possible by support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities (www.calhum.org); views expressed at the forum do not necessarily represent those of Cal Humanities or the NEH. Contact jennifermyhre@1500stories.org with questions and RSVP at https://www.facebook.com/events/295751351085449/
If you believe in the power of stories to build empathy across our differences, consider making a donation to the 1500 Stories project. 1500 Stories is a collaborative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. So, far we have collected nearly 500 stories from people living at different economic positions in the Silicon Valley, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Your donation can help us share those stories with the world! If you aren’t ready to donate, you can still become advocate for the project by sharing the Giving Tuesday campaign within your social networks. Go to:
https://www.givecampus.com/schools/FoothillDeAnzaFoundation/1500-stories
In honor of the upcoming election, the collaborative team behind Berning Love, a romantic tragicomedy about the search for love during the waning days of the Bernie Sanders 2016 primary campaign, decided to release the film publicly one year after its television debut on PBS in Vermont. We the makers hope that it inspires you to increase your civic engagement, get involved in your community and also, next week—GO VOTE! For information about what’s on your ballot, check out Ballotpedia.
How can we thrive, and not just survive, in the Silicon Valley? Join the 1500 Stories Project and Sacred Heart Community Service for two evenings of community building around economic inequality in the Silicon Valley. Come share your story, meet others in your community and discover ways to make a difference. On Thursday October 11, 2018 from 7-9pm in the Learning Center at Sacred Heart Community Service, we will share our experiences with economic vulnerability. We will deepen the discussion on Thursday October 25 from 6:30-8:30pm in the Visual and Performing Arts Center at De Anza College, exploring our Silicon Valley dreams and doubts. 1500 Stories is a collaborative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. and is honored to partner for these public forums with Sacred Heart Community Service, a leader in addressing the root causes and consequences of poverty. Visit 1500stories.org and www.sacredheartcs.org to learn more. These forums are made possible by support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities (www.calhum.org); views expressed at the forums do not necessarily represent those of Cal Humanities or the NEH. Contact jennifermyhre@1500stories.org with questions.
