Thesis

     As activist letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. shares in his 2024 interview with the Letterform Archive, “What I realized at the time—as I got older—is that everything you do affects you, and you don’t know how much it affects you at the time you do it.” Art and politics have always been intertwined in my lived experience. My childhood memories are peppered with flashes of drawing on our trailer floor during live news coverage of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998, the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the Y2K scare on New Year’s Eve in 2000, the 9/11 Attacks and ensuing War on Terror declaration in 2001. The political satire of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show dominated my teenage years, along with songs like American Idiot by Green Day, This is the End by Anti-Flag, and Invalid Litter Dept. by At the Drive-In. Shepard Fairy’s 2008 Hope poster depicting Presidential Candidate Barack Obama haunts every recollection of the first General Election where I was old enough to vote. In 2011, my first full-time job as a graphic designer involved researching social advocacy topics like sexual assault prevention, drug demand reduction, and youth suicide prevention to design informative outreach products for our program coordinator clients. I remember what I was doing during the outbreak of each climate-related weather event, mass shooting, lockdown, demonstration, and insurrection. Because during these incidents, I was working. The expectation was to keep designing while violence with political aspects in its inflection, articulation, and response played out in the background.

     My motivation to embark on this journey is also the title of feminist activist Carol Hanisch’s 1969 paper, “The Personal is Political.” To separate aesthetic works from the climate from which they are produced is to change their nature, because the works exist due to the environment that fostered them. To use an earlier example, in 2004, bisexual singer and songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day wrote the lyric in the song American Idiot, “Well, maybe I'm the f*ggot, America / I'm not a part of a redneck agenda,” because of his experience as an out queer man in Texan President George W. Bush’s America informed his aesthetic expression. The album American Idiot itself is a pop-punk rock opera with themes and recurring characters based on the Bush Administration’s policies, becoming numb to institutional violence, and the disillusionment of American youth. It could not exist in the same way without the Administration, the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War, or the experience of being aware during these events. Just as my artwork now cannot exist in the same way without the political sensibilities and aesthetic explorations that have overlapped, combined, and shaped me.

     It is with this spirit that I start what I have jokingly dubbed my, “Angry Girl Art Project.” I seek to represent how all forms of power contribute to the varied experiences of Americans. Art history and art theory contribute to methods of making artworks that are grounded in purpose and thought beyond aesthetic pleasure. Researching political systems and current events in the United States allows me to civically engage these topics and create a dialogue. Examining historic movements and responses to patterns by those on either end of power imbalances help me to better document and contextualize the present. Deepening my knowledge of intersectional feminism allows me to use my privilege to draw attention to the experiences and consequences of choices made by those that are not affected by those decisions.

     This mission only deepened when I attended the Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research hosted by Boise State University in July 2025. During a campus tour with my TRIO McNair Scholar cohort, I was introduced to the Albertsons Library where a selection of artworks were on display from the traveling Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate art exhibition. The artworks were created from White Supremacist reading materials and featured many artists who utilized the books in several ways, from paintings to sculptures to fibers. The piece I had the largest reaction to was from sculptor Billie Lynn, who in her artist statement said that reading the materials made her want to wash her hands. She brought the books to her University of Miami classroom, and asked her sculpture students to assist in washing each book in water. After the paper returned to a pulp state, each was formed with love into a new sculpture.

     She has no idea, but Billie Lynn ripped my heart out, washed it, reformed it with love, then handed it back to me with a challenge to follow suit. Lynn demonstrated in the most visceral way that the utility of political art illustrates not only what is happening, but how we witness and process it, and perhaps why we allow it to change us as a result. How in the era of algorithmic configuration, the materiality of a physical object may capture more attention than a digital one. How political art not only documents fact but emotion, and reminds us that the individual experience within the collective is influenced by discourse, action, and legislation. It serves as a reminder that while the American public is certainly not a monolith, we do have many things in common. Many of us care about similar issues while disagreeing on the best route to their solutions. Representing these thoughts through the aesthetic transcends language barriers where the meaning itself changes based on who is consuming it due to their conditioning, experiences, and presuppositions. This powerful cycle of creation, consumption, and humanization endlessly fascinates, infuriates, and humbles me equally, and I hope that I can walk in Lynn’s footsteps.

     Much like Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., who left his corporate position at age 38 to become a letterpress printer, I didn’t realize how these artistic and political experiences affected me at the time either. Creating research-based political art at age 36 feels like the piece that has been missing in my life. One that I hadn’t considered before, yet, can’t imagine not pursuing.

     With my heart cracked open, tears streaming, and every single one of my teeth bared, this witch begins her hunt.