You Are Now Entering a Democracy Reimagined

A conceptual artist who has used images, installations, and sculpture to draw attention to social issues, Thomas wanted to share with Peña an idea for a performance piece: he and a few other artists would launch a super PAC (a political action committee, like those used by candidates for office). What did she think? “I said, this is a terrible idea, you’re going to get yourselves into trouble,” Peña recalls telling Thomas, citing complex funding regulations. “Hank said, ‘Cool, we’re doing it.’” 

Founded by Thomas and Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, all artists with collaborative practices, For Freedoms began as an election-year civic engagement project that quickly gained momentum as a nonpartisan, anti-partisan, unifying force at the intersection of art and politics. “For Freedoms is a call to action for people who are creatively inclined to become civically engaged,” is how Thomas has described the organization. 

Such a simple summation belies the scope and ambition of the nonprofit’s accomplishments and goals. Working with a vast, interconnected network of artists, institutions, activists, scholars, thinkers, community organizers, and other partners, For Freedoms has realized hundreds of projects, activations, events, installations, and educational and public programs intended to create opportunities for more people to participate in meaningful dialogue about pressing social issues and the democratic process.  

“I couldn’t beat them, so I joined them,” says Peña, who was named executive director of what she calls the “small but incredibly mighty organization” in 2020. By then she had already collaborated with For Freedoms on such projects as its 50 State Initiative: In an effort to use art to create a more nuanced public discourse, more than 300 artists were commissioned to design billboards that were displayed in all 50 US states ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.   

So far, For Freedoms have produced 654 billboards tied to election years as well as campaigns with AAPI, Indigenous, and climate activist groups. An eagerly anticipated book documenting these works, scheduled for publication in 2024, will be “a way to show the conversation around who For Freedoms is and why we exist,” says Eric Gottesman, a co-founder of For Freedoms says.

Making clever use of the language of advertising, the billboards are a form of large-scale creative messaging that is hard to ignore, but their impact as works of art is difficult to determine. “We have some data that shows people were impacted,” such as whether they were more likely to vote after seeing one says Gottesman, but for him, the better measure of success is qualitative. “Inevitably, every time we put something out, somebody is upset or offended, and not all of those people reach out, but some do send a note.” Peña responds personally to everyone who does, thanking them and offering to meet. “And 90 percent say yes, I want to have this conversation,” she says.  

“Our interest has always been to inspire dialogue,” Michelle Woo, one of the co-founders of For Freedoms says, “and as long as people get there, it doesn’t much matter to me whether they thought they were looking at a piece of art or not.”

Among the best known of the For Freedoms billboard artworks are the revisions of Norman Rockwell’s 1940s depictions of ordinary Americans living out the “Four Freedoms” described by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress—freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from want and fear. Where Rockwell’s America was white, straight, and Christian, the For Freedoms tableaux were recast by Thomas and Emily Shur to reflect the American populace in its true diversity of faiths, ethnicities, and families.    

In 2020, the group announced a slate of new Four Freedoms: Awakening, Justice, Healing, and Listening, devoting an entire year to each of these “thematic invitations.” After Awakening in 2020, they were gearing up for pandemic-era-appropriate Healing in 2021, says Woo. But then the January 6 attack on the US Capitol happened, and “people were in the mood for justice. We felt we needed to be responsive to that,” continues Woo, who also stresses that these themes overlap and are not limited by the calendar.   

Healing and Listening, the invitations for 2023 and 2024, respectively, are intertwined in their public programming—and their personal experience. “As it did for so many organizations, the pandemic impacted our ability to function,” Peña explains. “And so we were going through a healing process ourselves.” Through that process, she continues, they realized that there are “endless modalities” that lead to healing, and “they all have something to do with listening.”    

Healing and the concept of “visual listening” are the basis for “Listen Until You Hear,” an exhibition co-presented by For Freedoms and the photography museum Fotografiska New York City. The show, on view in fall 2023, considers the work of six artists. Among them is Cannupa Hanska Luger, an Indigenous artist whose Midéegaadi videos depict him performing traditional Native American dances against digital backgrounds of the Great Plains of North Dakota while wearing regalia he made with repurposed materials. The videos and the regalia are part of the artist’s larger Future Ancestral Technologies project, an ongoing series of works in various formats that includes We Survive You, his billboard for the LANDBACK/ For Freedoms campaign in 2021.   

Another repeat collaborator is Washington, DC–based Nekisha Durrett, one of a dozen artists who contributed to “Messages for the City,” a public art campaign co-organized by For Freedoms, Times Square Arts, and other nonprofits that featured messages of solidarity in support of health care and essential workers in New York during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Across the city’s five boroughs, large-scale, artist-designed PSAs like Durrett’s Frontline Workers: We See You! were displayed on kiosks and screens typically dedicated to advertising. 

In June of this year, the artist teamed up again with For Freedoms, which sponsored a weekend-long series of events celebrating the completion of Durrett’s Queen City, a permanent public artwork in Arlington, Virginia. 

Durrett’s project brings to light the forgotten story of a lost community. In 1942, citing eminent domain, the US Department of War razed the African American neighborhood of Queen City for the construction of the Pentagon. “The goal for me was to create a space where this community could be remembered,” says Durrett, whose monument is a thirty-five-foot-high brick tower that visitors can enter. Hanging inside are 903 teardrop-shaped ceramic vessels, each representing a displaced Queen City resident. One of them was William Vollin, who was twelve years old at the time. At an event during opening weekend, Vollin joined Durrett and Thomas at the Rubell Museum DC for a conversation in which he shared his recollections. “Queen City is very much alive in him,” says Durrett. “And I want it to be alive for others as well.” 

The Queen City activation was an opportunity to uplift what Peña calls “an incredible” and “necessary” project by an artist in the For Freedoms network. The strength and depth of those connections made For Freedoms possible in the first place, she adds, and accounts for its success. In 2024, their network of artists and cultural institutions will grow and extend to include democracy protection and voting rights organizations. Peña hopes these groups will cross-pollinate in mutually beneficial ways at the second convening of the For Freedoms Congress. Still in the planning stages, the multi-day ideas festival will offer workshops, actions, and programming to galvanize and empower attendees to transform the idea of democracy into practice.   

The network is strong, but the work is not easy. As a collaborative, multivocal organization, For Freedoms includes “lots of different voices, unlikely voices, voices that people don’t necessarily want to hear from” to move projects forward, says Peña. “Sometimes we argue. But that’s an important part of the work, right? We insist on that collaborative approach, and I think that’s why we make pretty awesome things.”