For Freedoms and Monacelli announce the organization’s first ever monograph, For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here?, ahead of the 2024 election. By Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, Wyatt Gallery, and taylor brock. The First Monograph Surveying the Hundreds of Nationwide Billboards by Artist-led Organization For Freedoms, marking one of the largest Public Creative Collaborations in American History (2016 - 2023).
Publishing in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? is the first comprehensive volume to celebrate more than 550 artist billboards created between 2016-2023. By appropriating an advertising medium normally used for political campaigning during election seasons, For Freedoms continues a long tradition of artists re-imagining billboards as a space for nuanced inquiry about advertising, popular culture, and American life. These billboards emphasize the For Freedoms mission to model how art can urge communities into greater participation and action, foster nuanced discourse, and they demonstrate how the organization has transformed public commercial space into a showcase for visual art on a large-scale.
Organized chronologically, For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? is divided into seven sections that commemorate the organization’s socially prescient campaigns—Make America Great Again; Bring People into Play; Visionary, Not Reactionary; Provoke Bigger Questions; Build, Do Not Destroy; Listen Until We Hear; and Bridge Binaries—and incorporates contextual introductory texts for the billboards that follow. Featured artists include Derrick Adams, Sadie Barnett, Gina Belafonte, Sanford Biggers, Cassils, Shepard Fairey, Theaster Gates, Jim Goldberg, Shyama Golden and Tanya Selvaratnam, Guerrilla Girls, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Rashid Johnson, JR, Christine Sun Kim, Jesse Krimes, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Marilyn Minter, Koyoltzinlti Miranda-Rivadeneira, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Gordon Parks, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Maggie Rogers, Kamal Sinclair and Takaaki Okada, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Ai Weiwei, among many more. The book also surveys important partnerships with organizations and movements over the years including AAPI Solidarity, Landback.Art, INDIGENA, NDN Collective, Times Square Arts, XQ Institute and brands including Converse.
Additional contributions include essays from Rujeko Hockley, the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Nadya Tolokonnikova, the musician, artist, activist, and founding member of Pussy Riot, as well as interviews with artists and collaborators, and behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the organization. Exquisitely packaged and heavily illustrated, the book features a unique horizontal format and several gatefolds to better exhibit the billboards, as well as a variety of artworks and in-situ photographs from across North America.
As part of the launch of this book, For Freedoms will curate a series of programs featuring artist-led public events and a nationwide billboard campaign intended to inspire civic participation through imagination and community in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.
