Category: Behind the Scenes

November 4, 2022

Devotional Labor

We’ve all been inundated these last months with news headlines about inflation, “quiet quitting,” and an absolutely religious devotion to the economy. Meanwhile, reality contradicts the sensationalism. Oil companies and grocery monopolies see record profits while we pay dearly for the essentials. Employees push back on the idea that they must sacrifice all to employers that see them as replaceable cogs, and some turn to an age-old organized labor tactic called “work to rule.” And the pandemic inspired our leaders to prioritize the stock market over the very lives of workers, families, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Billionaires became even richer during the pandemic, fattening up on the fruits of our labor while the rest of us fight over the crumbs. Fed up with it all, we turned to the patron saint of American laborers, Frances Perkins, and found a fitting quote that doesn’t mention labor at all:

Feminism means revolution and I am a revolutionist.

Before we committed it to paper, we sat with that quote for a while. After all, in fourteen years of producing our Dead Feminists series, we have intentionally steered clear of using the term feminism, letting the words and deeds of our historical women mark them as feminists instead. But given the current obsession with gender displayed by politicians, the courts, the media, and society at large—overturning Roe v. Wade, a slew of anti-trans legislation and violence, and vast numbers of women and caregivers of all genders leaving the workforce during the pandemic—it felt like now was the time to drop the F-bomb. After all, if the powerful feel such a need to exert control over us, then feminism must be an incendiary force. And just like society itself, the feminist revolution is built, brick by brick, on a foundation of work.

Frances Perkins might seem an unlikely icon of the revolution—she wasn’t a celebrity, or a sex symbol, or a martyr. But it’s impossible to understate how much we owe to her work, her many years sitting at a desk and drafting documents. We have Perkins to thank for the minimum wage, Social Security, work-hour limitations, workplace safety regulations, employee injury compensation, unemployment benefits, anti-child-labor laws, disability income, and more. It was her pen that sketched out our social safety net, her papers that formed the pillars of our labor laws, her cornerstone that supports our firewall of financial protections. And it was labor—and labor tragedies—that inspired her deeds.

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a garment sweatshop located on the top three floors of a ten-story building near Washington Park in Manhattan, caught fire. Using a then-common practice to prevent theft and unauthorized employee breaks, the exit doors leading to two of the stairwells were locked. (Some historians have asserted that the doors were also locked to prevent union organizers from entering the factory floor.) The foreman, who had the key, escaped as soon as the fire broke out and left the workers behind. Within three minutes, the only unlocked stairwell was inaccessible. Fire ladders only reached the seventh floor, and the two working freight elevators couldn’t keep up with the elevator operators’ brave rescue attempts. The fire killed 146 garment workers—including 123 women and girls, most of whom were recent immigrants of Italian or Jewish heritage. Sixty-two of those killed died by jumping out of a window or falling from the single flimsy fire escape, which collapsed.

Since it was a Saturday, there were many eyewitnesses on the street below, including a young Frances Perkins, who at the time ran the New York office of the National Consumers League. City officials formed the Committee on Public Safety in the aftermath, and appointed Perkins its head. She conducted investigations and enlisted the help of powerful lobby groups like Tammany Hall to pressure the state legislature to enact reforms. Their joint efforts led to the creation of a commission to investigate factory conditions, and by 1913 the legislature had passed 60 new labor laws, making New York State the most progressive in the union for worker’s rights. These laws shortened the work week, mandated building fireproofing, alarm systems and emergency exits, guaranteed better access to food and toilet facilities for workers, and limited work hours for women and children.

Just over 20 years after the disaster, newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Perkins to his cabinet as Secretary of Labor. When she accepted the position, she presented FDR with a long list of social programs that she wanted to fight for—when he agreed to back her agenda, she replied, “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before. You know that, don’t you?” What followed, starting in the first hundred days of FDR’s presidency, was the establishment of approximately 69 New Deal agencies and programs that the press labeled with the derogatory nickname of “Alphabet Soup.” These initiatives, known by their acronyms, became FDR’s biggest accomplishment and his legacy—yet few know of the women’s work behind them. Perkins did the groundwork and legislative legwork, and many of the programs were inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts before she became First Lady. In 1927 she co-founded Val-Kill Industries, an artisan factory and collective to support traditional craftspeople, in upstate New York. The program became a prototype for the New Deal program as a whole, and provided the framework for some of Perkins’ initiatives.

Each one of the New Deal programs was downright revolutionary, and even now they remain some of the few barriers between prosperity and poverty for many Americans. Yet today we take them for granted, even as conservative politicians try their hardest to dismantle them. Many voters are still more worried about the economy than democracy or even bodily autonomy, while sitting GOP Senator Mike Lee was caught on camera saying it would be his “objective to phase out Social Security” and that he’ll “pull it up by its roots.” These shenanigans are not a new deal: in her time, Frances Perkins was accused of being a communist, and in 1939 she was the first Cabinet member Congress ever attempted to impeach. Though the proceedings were dropped due to lack of evidence, and Perkins went on to serve for the full 12 years of his presidential term, FDR never spoke in her defense. (This is an excellent reminder that we need to speak up for ourselves: your vote on November 8 is essential to push back against the efforts—in Congress and in the courts—to take away our rights.)

Being left high and dry by FDR couldn’t have surprised Perkins, whose professional persona was constructed around neutralizing men’s hostility toward her. She took notes on her male colleagues and filed them in a red envelope labeled “Notes on the Male Mind.” She wore a daily uniform of plain dark suits, zero makeup and smart hats. (She especially liked tricornered ones—a bit of subtle revolutionary flair?) This matronly look had a purpose: she believed that men, particularly in politics, only accepted women colleagues who reminded them of their mothers. She said, “I tried to have as much of a mask as possible. I wanted to give the impression of being a quiet, orderly woman who didn’t buzz-buzz all the time… I knew that a lady interposing an idea into men’s conversation is very unwelcome. I just proceeded on the theory that this was a gentleman’s conversation on the porch of a golf club perhaps. You didn’t butt in with bright ideas.” Instead, she saved those bright ideas and wrote them into federal policy.

In our latest broadside, Devotional Labor, we reference both the social scaffolding Perkins built—with a nod to her family’s brickyard business—and the revolutionary nature of her work. We used metallic inks throughout for an industrial feel and to enhance the print’s bold, graphic shapes. The design and 1930s color scheme is an homage to the famous posters of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which, like Val-Kill Industries before it, put unemployed artists back to work during the Depression.

Books (Please)! In All Branches of Knowledge, by Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1924

Many of those WPA poster artists were in turn influenced by revolutionary posters and other political propaganda from around the world (including, a bit ironically, the Soviet communists).

Often these historic propaganda posters have a whiff of religion about them, particularly those that feature a central feminine figure. Though some are depicted for their attractiveness, many of these are presented as saints, selfless mother archetypes, or even goddesses.

Posters from before 1950 with this theme all center white women, but later propaganda from around the world often followed the same playbook: women as warrior-mothers, farmer-goddesses, standard-bearers. Notably, many of these displayed anti-American sentiment (see some of the Vietnamese posters above). And many were created by sympathetic artists in allied countries—like the Angola piece made by a Cuban artist, or the Chinese poster in the lower right that says “American imperialism, get out of Africa.”

Some of the most interesting of these depict women who aren’t sexy or divine, but sturdy, strong, common, “everywoman” laborers. Everyone has seen Rosie the Riveter, but these posters also celebrated careworn farm matrons and burly industrial mavens. By alluding to this pantheon of heroines in our broadside, we also wanted to reference the other meanings of the word “labor.” There’s the labor of childbirth and rearing—the work of literally creating the next generation of workers—and the labor pains of birthing a movement, of course. But we also acknowledge the unpaid, heavily-gendered work that also underpins our society: caregiving, household economics, and even emotional labor.

Perkins herself was devoutly religious: raised Congregationalist (the modern church that evolved from the Puritans who settled New England) by a conservative family who was horrified by her early suffragist leanings, she joined an Anglo-Catholic church at age 25 and adopted the name of Frances upon her confirmation. Later she brought her Anglo-Catholic sensibilities to her membership in the Episcopal church. So we’ve added a dash of religious iconography to our letterpress devotional. Perkins’ portrait is adorned with a “halo” of alphabet agency acronyms on a blue ground that references religious icons and early-church mosaics. She stands on a silver layer of mighty pens, which form the foundation for the pattern of hammers that support the brick-and-mortar design above.

To help bolster women and feminist workers in every kind of labor, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to 9to5, a non-profit that fights for workers on many fronts: equal pay, affordable housing, paid sick and family leave, workplace sexual harassment, raising the minimum wage, and more. We are making a second donation to the Frances Perkins Center to help support the historic Perkins Homestead and preserve Perkins’ legacy. We are supporting both organizations via Action Grants from the Dead Feminists Fund.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

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Devotional Labor: No. 33 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 169
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Frances Perkins (1880 – 1965) was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston, but spent time throughout her life at the family’s homestead in Newcastle, Maine. The saltwater farm was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014, and includes remnants from the Perkins’ 19th century brickworks business. Frances graduated from Mt. Holyoke, and became active in the suffrage movement while attending graduate school at Wharton and Columbia. She led the New York office of the National Consumers League, and witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. As a primary investigator, Perkins’ efforts led to the enactment of some of the first national workplace health and safety laws.

In 1933 Perkins became the first woman appointed to a presidential cabinet, serving as Labor Secretary for Franklin Delano Roosevelt until 1945. She played a key role writing New Deal legislation, enacting an alphabet soup of agencies and programs known by their acronyms: CCC, WPA, NLRB, FLSA, etc. As chairwoman of the President’s Committee on Economic Security, she led the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, to ensure old-age benefits for workers, unemployment insurance, and aid for mothers, children and disabled people. Perkins declared: “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.” Perkins continued fighting for social and economic justice, serving under the Truman administration on the Civil Service Commission, then teaching until her death. President Carter renamed the US Department of Labor headquarters the Frances Perkins Building in 1980.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in honor of the foundation of labor upon which our society is built. 169 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

March 6, 2022

Knowledge Trust

It’s been awhile, we know. In fact, we haven’t released a new Dead Feminists broadside in over a year—that’s the longest we’ve ever gone between releases, and International Women’s Day felt like the right time to come back. Despite our radio silence, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes. We’ve pivoted several times, embarking on several broadside ideas and then changing our minds (or postponing those ideas for later) as current events seemed to flash before our eyes. Before long there were more issues at hand than we could possibly touch upon with one broadside: the January 6 insurrection, a constant flow of pandemic mis- and disinformation, new voter suppression laws around the country, secretive court dockets, a resurgence in banned books, and the suppression of teaching our true history under the specter of “critical race theory” (a legal subject that has nothing to do with K-12 curricula). And then it dawned on us: we could touch upon all of these things with one broadside, if we found the right quote. Enter educator, activist and suffragist Nannie Helen Burroughs:

Education and justice are democracy’s only life insurance.

And then, while we were literally on press, Russia invaded Ukraine, and President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman to sit on the US Supreme Court. That’s when Nannie Helen Burroughs’ words truly hit home with us: without those two pillars of our society, our democracy and freedom will crumble.

Burroughs was one of many Black suffragists working in the late 19th century, often overshadowed in suffrage history by white women. She contributed to the movement through the circles of education and religion with grassroots efforts: writing for a Baptist newspaper in Philadelphia, founding the Women’s Industrial Club to teach vocational skills in Louisville, and working as secretary for the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention (NBC).

The NBC gave her the platform and traction she needed, and in 1909 she created an industrial school in Washington, DC, under NBC auspices. The school was funded almost entirely from small, individual donations from women and girls.

At the National Training School for Women and Girls, Burroughs created a curriculum focused on teaching vocational skills.

To Burroughs it was crucial for women to be self-sufficient wage earners, so classes included cooking, millinery, domestic science, and more. There was even a print shop on campus. And every student had to pass an African-American history course taught by Burroughs herself, who was determined to teach them the truth about their country.

By 1928 she had expanded the campus to include several buildings, and the school welcomed students from all over the US, as well as the Caribbean and even Africa.

Burroughs devoted the rest of her life to the National Training School, while still supporting the NBC and Black women’s clubs (who have been a major force in voting rights activism for the past century and a half). Other prominent figures took note of her work, including National Association of Colored Women president Mary McLeod Bethune and Black history scholar Dr. Carter G. Woodson. In the above photo, taken c. 1958, she’s pictured with a young Thurgood Marshall. Just a few years later, he would become the first Black justice to sit on the US Supreme Court.

For our latest broadside, Knowledge Trust, we wanted to honor Burroughs by highlighting education as the foundation of our democracy. Our design is chock full of vocational underpinnings, with grid lines and pen strokes that reference the penmanship workbooks common in 19th century curricula.

It’s also festooned with democratic symbols, from a calligraphic eagle, to signatures that resemble the Declaration of Independence. The lavender ink honors traditional suffrage purple, while the deep green (also a suffrage color) evokes the muted color scheme of American currency. In the background is a coin marked with E Pluribus Unum, representing grassroots activism and the coin-by-coin donations that built the National Training School. On the coin is a Black woman standing in a pose reminiscent of both the goddess Columbia (an allegorial figure frequently referenced in early American politics and propaganda) and the Statue of Freedom—a bronze female figure that stands atop the cupola of the United States Capitol building. An enslaved man, Philip Reid, was integral to its construction, and, by the time the statue was completed in 1863, was himself finally a free man. Our freedom figure wears a liberty cap, another 19th century symbol modeled on the Phrygian caps that the ancient Romans granted to enslaved people upon their emancipation. (The Statue of Freedom was also designed with one, but the man who oversaw the construction of the Capitol— Jefferson Davis—objected to the liberty cap and had it stricken from the design).

Even Burroughs’ portrait acknowledges the power of the pen, with her likeness rendered as a single-stroke copperplate doodle.

There’s one more design reference in there: a nod to the 19th century engravers and typographers who turned something so prosaic as insurance company documents into ornate works of art.

To help insure the next generation of students and voters, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to She the People, a non-profit focused on reaching and enfranchising women voters of color. In light of the situation in Ukraine, we will be making a second donation to Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights to aid the people fighting to save their own democracy there. The UAF Urgent Response Fund for Ukraine supports women, trans, and nonbinary activists on the ground by providing flexible funding and security support. We are supporting both organizations via Action Grants from the Dead Feminists Fund.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

Knowledge Trust: No. 32 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 190
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Nannie Helen Burroughs (c. 1879 – 1961) was born in Orange, Virginia and moved with her mother to Washington, DC after her father’s death. As a student at M Street High School, she met activists Mary Church Terrell and Anna J. Cooper. After graduating with honors, she moved to Kentucky to work for the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). At NBC’s annual meeting in 1900, Burroughs’ speech “How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping” gained national attention and inspired her to co-found the NBC auxiliary Woman’s Convention (WC), the largest Black women’s organization in the United States. Here Black women could exercise their labor and organizing power independent of male membership and white women suffragists. Burroughs served the WC for over 40 years, first as corresponding secretary, then as president.

In 1907, funded by donations from women and children, Burroughs opened the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, adopting the motto “We specialize in the wholly impossible.” To develop “the fiber of a sturdy moral, industrious and intellectual woman,” students learned vocational skills to become self-sufficient wage earners. Burroughs’ African-American history class was a graduation requirement. She served as school president until her death. The former Trades Hall, now a National Historic Landmark, today houses the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in gratitude to the Black women who have insured our democracy’s future beneficiaries. 190 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

October 29, 2020

Weave the People

We are less than a week from Election Day, and just six weeks following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We are still in shock, mourning her loss. The grief is compounded and exacerbated by the continuing twin pandemics of COVID-19 and flagrant racism enflamed by the current administration. We started the Dead Feminists series in 2008 as an urgent response to an ugly, divisive election—as artists with access to the power of a printing press, we had something to say. Upon RBG’s death, many women reached out in search of our reaction—after all, we had all been hoping against hope for months that she could hold on—a stitch in time to save nine (justices). Still, we hesitated, stunned and overwhelmed. Many of the women we feature are relatively unknown, with quotes that we joyfully amplify in print to tie to issues of social justice. We just weren’t sure we could add anything to the conversation by putting yet another RBG-themed illustration in the world.

But the Republican push to nominate and confirm Amy Coney Barrett was the tipping point. This third nominee of the current administration has been rammed through despite the overwhelming disapproval of the populace, and zero support from Democrats. It deliberately upsets any balance in the Supreme Court and threatens Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, marriage equality, immigrant rights, and many other long-since settled laws and norms supported by the majority of voters. The notion that Barrett, who has RBG to thank for the career doors opened for her, will take her place specifically to shut those doors again on her fellow Americans, is disgusting and disturbing. Her complete evasion of confirmation questions and the rushed nature of the hearings—all while the public was in the midst of voting—gives us much to fear, especially if (when?) the outcome of the election will be determined by the Supreme Court.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, “We the people.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Our 31st broadside honors Justice Ginsburg and especially her work on behalf of women. She spent much of her legal career as an advocate for gender equality and women’s rights, winning many arguments before the Supreme Court. She advocated as a volunteer attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and was a member of its board of directors (and one of its general counsel) in the 1970s. Ginsburg was hired as the first director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1972. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served until her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993. Between Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement in 2006 and the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, Ginsburg was the only female justice on the Supreme Court. During that time, Ginsburg became more forceful with her dissents, notably in 2007’s Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion was credited with inspiring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law in 2009, making it easier for employees to win pay discrimination claims. “To turn in a new direction, the court first had to gain an understanding that legislation apparently designed to benefit or protect women could have the opposite effect.”

Justice Ginsburg took pains to make clear that the Constitution did not require ignoring all differences between the sexes. “Inherent differences between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration,” she wrote, “but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.” Any differential treatment, she emphasized, must not “create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.”

American pop culture latched on to Ginsburg’s passionate dissents and sense of style, dubbing her “The Notorious R.B.G.” Most recognizable were the iconic collars she wore over her robes (although Justice O’Connor was known for wearing them, too). “You know, the standard robe is made for a man because it has a place for the shirt to show, and the tie,” Ginsburg said. “So Sandra Day O’Connor and I thought it would be appropriate if we included as part of our robe something typical of a woman.” Her first court portrait features a rather plain white collar worn by French justices, but in later years they became more elaborate. The favorite in her vast collection was a delicate French jabot made in South Africa (which she wore to Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 2005). She wore different collars to reflect different legal opinions, including her famous “Dissent Collar,” black and studded with sharp-edged rhinestones. “When a justice is of the firm view that the majority got it wrong, she is free to say so in dissent. I take advantage of that prerogative, when I think it important, as do my colleagues.”

RBG’s collars are the most obvious point of entry for depicting her life and work visually—as evidenced by the veritable mountain of recent art made about her in recent years. But though much has been said and done along these lines already, we were deeply interested in the symbolic nature of each of her collars, and that is what most inspired our broadside. Handmade textiles (garments, gifts, tapestries, heirlooms, religious vestments, etc.) historically come imbued with symbolism anyway, with stories and significance worked into every stitch—and RBG obviously understood this. Her collars got more ornate and symbolic over time, and her use of them spoke volumes, even when she remained silent herself (she even wore her Dissent Collar the day after the 2016 election!). These collars became shorthand for “Notorious R.B.G.”, and a rallying symbol for the people who loved her. They became the thing we all latched onto to say farewell to her when she passed. The fact that Ginsburg died on Erev Rosh Hashanah (the eve of the Jewish new year) only heightened her cult appeal, catapulting her into legendary status. Jewish tradition holds that those who die on that day “are the ones God has held back until the last moment [because] they were needed most and were the most righteous,” wrote Nina Totenberg of NPR, just after RBG’s death. Such a righteous person is called a “tzaddik,” a Hebrew word that shares a root with the “tzedek,” the word for justice. May her memory be a revolution.

Our 31st broadside is both simple and complex—just like the underpinnings of our democracy. For the first time ever, we’ve printed the piece in just one color, an intentional choice to underline the solemnity of our collective loss. And right now, as we see it, the choices for our nation are laid out in stark black-and-white. We are holding our collective breath for an election that will resoundingly confirm the country’s desire to darn, repair, and salvage (selvedge!) our nation into a democracy that isn’t moth-eaten and full of gaping holes.

Within the simplicity of our color scheme, our design is incredibly intricate, inspired by historic lacemaking methods and other “women’s work:” knitting, tatting, and bobbin lace. (Not to mention the endless possibilities to reveal our bias for textile puns.) The words of RBG’s quote are connected by one long, fraying thread, looping and weaving itself into a collar in the shape of a delicate safety net below the linked hands of little tatted thread people. This represents our democracy—which was also hand-wrought and stitched together over the course of centuries, whose weft has become warped of late, and which could easily unravel with continued assaults. The lettering of the final words of the quote mirrors the original handwritten script of the preamble of the Constitution.

And more, our collar evokes RBG’s “Tzedek Collar,” one she debuted in 2019. This collar was designed by Michigan artist Marcy Epstein and gifted to Ginsburg in recognition of her human rights work. Inspired by historic Belgian lace, the collar includes beading that references sacred Judaic geometry, and three Hebrew letters: tsade, dalet, and kuf, (צדק) which form the word “tzedek.” This represents the Jewish tenet of “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” (Justice, justice you shall pursue)—the phrase that Ginsburg had on display in her judge’s chambers. Those same three Hebrew characters are woven into our broadside, below the scalloped hem and above Ginsburg’s name.

Much like the impetus to create this print, our choice of the title was the result of community input. We had several options, but we remained undecided on Selvedge Our Democracy and Weave the People. So we decided to thread the needle and put it to a vote on social media—one vote per person, no Electoral-College or shadow-docket SCOTUS shenanigans. Weave the People won by a landslide.

Weave the People: No. 31 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 220
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed from hand-drawn lettering and illustrations on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

In honor of Justice Ginsburg’s contributions to the rule of law, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to the National Women’s Law Center, via an Action Grant from the Dead Feminists Fund. The NWLC fights for gender justice—in the courts, in public policy, and in our society—working across the issues that are central to the lives of women and girls.

UPDATE, 11/30/2020: We are now completely sold out. Reproduction postcards of the original black design are available in the shop. Thank you for your support!

UPDATE, 11/16/2020: We now have a one-print-per-person limit for what remains in the gold edition (see below), in order to make what remains in the edition available to as many people as possible. Thank you for your understanding!

UPDATE, 11/11/20: The edition sold out almost instantaneously—in twelve years of doing this series, this has never happened before! We are floored, and SO thankful for your support. Because this print has had such an overwhelming response, we have made an unusual decision. For the first time ever, we have printed a second, alternate edition, called Re-Weave the People. We normally never reprint our editions, and have very strong opinions about the practice and the risk of devaluing prints for our collectors. Because of this, we’ve set up some ground rules about this new edition:

• The broadsides are printed in gold ink, instead of black—both to differentiate them and to symbolize the preciousness of our democracy
• Still letterpress-printed by hand, still limited-edition, same paper, same price
• Gold prints are signed, but not numbered
• Gold prints are instead labeled with “APG” (“artist proof – gold”)
• There won’t be a third edition of this broadside (though postcards will be available in late-November)
• We will not be doing reprints for any of our older broadside designs

We released the first 150 prints in the gold edition, along with a few remaining APs (artist proofs) of the black edition left from cancelled orders, on Wednesday, November 11. The remaining gold prints will become available on Monday, November 16.

The best part, for us, about doing this second edition is that we get to celebrate the Biden/Harris victory and make more donations! We watched in awe as Stacey Abrams and her fellow Georgia organizers turned their state blue for the first time in decades—despite some of the worst voter suppression in the country (which cost Abrams the governorship two years ago). So in honor of their work, and in hopes that they might have success in the January run-offs, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to the New Georgia Project—a nonpartisan effort to register voters in the state of Georgia, particularly women voters of color, who are disproportionately disenfranchised there. But Abrams is far from alone in this work, and our democracy needs defending on the national front, too. So we will also be donating to the Brennan Center for Justice, a bipartisan nonprofit that fights on many fronts: defending our elections, strengthening the courts, battling gerrymandering, ending mass incarceration, enfranchising every American, and more. Both donations will come in the form of Action Grants from the Dead Feminists Fund.

Colophon reads:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020) was born Joan Ruth Bader in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and married Martin D. Ginsburg. She became a mother before starting law school, first at Harvard and then at Columbia, graduating co-first in her class. President Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980, where she served until her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993. Later in her tenure, she became more forceful with her opinions. Her dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was credited with inspiring the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for employees to win pay discrimination claims. Ginsburg spent much of her career as an advocate for gender equality and women’s rights. She made clear that the Constitution did not require ignoring differences between men and women, but that any differential treatment, must not “create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.”

Ginsburg’s judicial dissents received attention in American popular culture, which earned her the moniker “The Notorious R.B.G.” Her trademark of wearing feminine lace collars over her robes enhanced this persona—which became more elaborate and symbolic over the years. A yellow jabot marked her approval, while her famous dissent collar (which she wore the day after the 2016 election) was black and spiked with rhinestones. In 2019 she debuted a collar that combined Belgian-style lace with the word “Tzedek” woven in Hebrew, signifying the Jewish tenet of “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” (“Justice, justice you shall pursue”). Despite her heroic efforts to hold on through terminal cancer, she died before a progressive President could appoint her successor. RBG’s death in this tumultuous year may unravel the progress made during her tenure. Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, as we attempt to reknit the fragile safety net that supports our democracy—and which now hangs by a thread. 220 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

August 26, 2020

Truth or Consequences

Today, August 26, 2020, is Women’s Equality Day — and also the 100th anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, when it became the law. We chose this anniversary to release our 30th Dead Feminists broadside: our series began with suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, after all. Yet we knew back in 2008 that Stanton was a problematic choice. She, and most white suffragists, deliberately excluded their Black peers, and resorted to racist rhetoric in their campaigns to further distance themselves from civil rights efforts of the day. When the vote was won — supposedly for “all” women — racist legislation and loopholes effectively disenfranchised many women of color for decades to come. Even today, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on the books, women everywhere, particularly Black women, face breathtaking voter suppression and barriers to enfranchisement.

We keep returning to this historical and contemporary inequality through our work on the Votes for Women exhibition at the Washington State History Museum (WSHM). Again and again we are reminded that the victory of the women’s suffrage movement was incomplete, and will remain so until the day that voter suppression and disenfranchisement are ended. We also wanted to tell a more complete story of the Black women behind the suffrage movement — so our research (and output) for both the museum and our broadside overlap in many places.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.
– Ida. B. Wells

For our 30th broadside, we feature the words and work of a Black suffragist, to tell the story of the marginalized women who fought for the rights of every woman, regardless of race or class. As we spent nearly a year developing the design, the meaning behind our print changed and evolved.

Our broadside was initially intended to mark the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States, and simply tell the story of Black suffragists and how their work resonates today. As 2020 unfolds, however, our print has also come to represent the twin crises of the pandemic and worldwide protests in response to police brutality and extrajudicial murders perpetrated against Black people. These crises have highlighted and exacerbated the systemic racial inequality already present in American society — as well as the responsibility of white women to use our rights and privileges against this injustice.

Civil rights activist, investigative journalist, suffragist, and community organizer Ida B. Wells is heralded as one of the mothers of intersectional feminism — referring to a term coined in 1989 by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, gender, and class often overlap to complicate issues of inequality. Wells devoted her entire life’s work to this intersection, fighting for women’s rights and racial justice along multiple fronts.

As a suffragist, Wells was active in the women’s club movement, particularly after she relocated to Chicago from the South. In 1893 she founded the Women’s Era Club (later renamed the Ida B. Wells Club in her honor), and in 1913, in response to an Illinois law that allowed women to vote in certain elections (though not for all), she co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago with Belle Squire. The club focused on expanding voting rights for all women, encouraging civic engagement among Black women, and electing Black Chicagoans to city offices. Two years later, the Alpha Suffrage Club played a major role in electing Oscar DePriest as Chicago’s first Black alderman.

In 1913 the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)—the famous suffrage group whose early leaders included Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Carrie Chapman Catt—planned a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The event drew suffragists from around the country to demand universal voting rights. A delegation from the Alpha Suffrage Club, including Ida B. Wells, also attended the march. The day of the march, the head of the Illinois NAWSA delegation told the Alpha Suffrage Club members that they wanted “to keep the delegation entirely white” and instructed all Black suffragists to walk at the end of the parade in a “colored delegation.” Wells waited with spectators until the parade was underway, and then stepped into the white Chicago delegation as they passed by.

Above: NAACP map published in 1922, showing lynchings in the U.S. between 1889 and 1921.

Perhaps best-known among Wells’s work was the decades of investigative journalism work she devoted to researching and exposing lynchings. In 1909 she addressed the National Negro Conference, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which she co-founded with W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey. In defining lynching, Wells said to the group, “First: lynching is color-line murder. Second: Crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third: It is a national crime and requires a national remedy.” Between 1883 (the start of Wells’s data collecting) and 1950, more than 4,400 people had been lynched, with incidents in nearly every state of the Union. More than 4,000 of these were men, and 3,000 victims were Black (most lynchings of white and non-Black people of color occurred in the West and Southwest)—99 victims were women. Furthermore, as much of the data modern historians and sociologists use on lynching was uncovered by Wells herself, her statement was nothing short of revolutionary at the time. For decades, apologists for lynching and other extrajudicial murders held up rape and the “protection of women” as a justification. Yet according to a 2019 academic paper, a 1913 analysis of Wells’s data showed that while about a quarter of lynchings to date were supposedly in response to rape, only about two percent of Black men convicted of “major offenses” and imprisoned were sentenced for rape. Meanwhile, imprisoned whites at the time had much higher levels of rape convictions, suggesting that white offenders benefited from the legal system, while Black people accused of a crime were simply executed without arrest or trial. Furthermore, lynching was a key form of voter suppression and intimidation in the South: a 2017 study found that lynchings there reduced Black voter turnout by 2.5 points.

Judging by the news of late, we are still very far from finding a “national remedy” for this ongoing miscarriage of justice. In June of this year, four Black men were found hanging from trees in three different states—each death was ruled a suicide, despite the protests of the men’s families and national media attention. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, first introduced in Congress in 1918, still hasn’t managed to be passed into law—nor have subsequent bills based on the original. The most recent version of the bill (the 2020 Emmett Till Antilynching Act which passed the House by a 410-4 vote) has been held up in the Senate by one man: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. He refused to honor his fellow senators’ wish to pass the bill by unanimous consent. As a result, lynching is still not a federal crime (or federal hate crime, as the Emmett Till Antilynching Act would classify it) in our country.

On top of that, extrajudicial murder by authorities continues unabated. So far in 2020, there have been just twelve days in which nobody in America was killed by a police officer. By the end of July, already 558 civilians had been fatally shot by police—111 of whom were Black. In 2019 the National Academy of Sciences noted that being killed by police was one of the leading causes of death for young Black men in America. One in 1,000 Black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of the police—that’s about 2.5 times more than white men and boys. (For comparison, the CDC states approximately 1 in 8,000 Americans die in car accidents each year.)

All of this is in addition to the “everyday” inequalities and injustice Black Americans face, whether they are “illegal” or not: persistent segregation in schools and neighborhoods; pay disparity based on both sex and race; lack of generational wealth; unfair housing practices; worse outcomes for Black mothers in childbirth; targeted voter suppression; the list goes on. And 2020 has heaped even more onto the pile, with COVID-19 disproportionately hospitalizing and killing Black patients. Wells was right to tie racial violence and inequality to universal suffrage: the problems are intersectional, and so must be the solutions.

Our 30th broadside, Truth or Consequences, is designed in red, white, and blue, symbolizing the rights of all Americans. Wells’s portrait sits in a ring of light while celestial symbols (stars, moons, wings) represent the light of truth. Her quote is presented in purple, the traditional color of the women’s suffrage movement — yet our broadside is only printed in red and blue. The text emerges where the two colors overlap to create purple: without this intersection of colors, the words are unreadable.

Truth or Consequences: No. 30 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 193
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed from hand-drawn lettering and illustrations on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

To help continue Ida B. Wells’s legacy, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, via an Action Grant from the Dead Feminists Fund. The Society is focused on increasing the ranks, retention, and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of journalism and investigative reporting.

Purchase your copy in the shop

Colophon reads:
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862 – 1931) was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents and infant brother died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, leaving her to care for five siblings. At 21 she moved to Memphis, commuting by train to teach at a rural school. After refusing to give up her purchased seat in a first class car, she was forced off the train. Wells filed and won a lawsuit in 1884, but the state Supreme Court reversed the decision. The experience launched her writing career, and she bought into a small newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight. She began investigating the practice of lynching, calling it “a national crime [requiring] a national remedy.” By 1950 more than 4,400 people — most of them Black men, most in the South — were murdered, sometimes witnessed by crowds for entertainment. Wells published pamphlets filled with firsthand accounts and statistics, revealing a relentless regime of terror and oppression. In response, white mobs sent death threats and destroyed her printing press, forcing her to flee Memphis.

Moving north to Chicago, she also became a tireless worker for civil rights and women’s suffrage. In 1893 she founded the Women’s Era Club, a first-of-its-kind civic club for Black women in Chicago. She also co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club to focus on expanding voting rights for all women, and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, she and other Black suffragists refused to march in the rear, instead joining white marchers up front. Wells spent the rest of her life advocating for civil rights, equality, and universal suffrage for people of every race, class, and sex. She was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020, in recognition of her “outstanding and courageous” investigative journalism on lynching.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in honor of women who stand at the intersection of feminism and racial justice, interrogating inequality. 193 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

August 18, 2020

Votes for Women: 100 Years and Counting

It feels weird to start a blog post in any sort of “normal” way right now. Thanks to the pandemic, it’s hard to know what to say. It also feels weird to open this like the thousands of Covid-era emails we’ve all received this year, like so many parallel-universe pandemic Hallmark cards: “Hope you’re safe and well in these difficult times…”

But the terrible truth is, odds are that at least some of you reading this are not at all safe or well. Some of you may have been ill or hospitalized, or lost loved ones to the virus. Others of you may have lost a job (or your own small business) or you may be scrambling to make ends meet on reduced hours or a furloughed position. Still others of you are front-line essential workers: tending to patients, or serving customers in person, or dreading the start of a school year where parents and teachers have to make impossible choices and perform advanced risk-calculus daily. And at the same time, many of you may be members of a marginalized population—enduring the added risk and indignation and danger of being Black, Indigenous, trans, a person of color, or an immigrant in a nation careening full-tilt toward fascism, even more entrenched white supremacy and police brutality, and economic ruin. All while the global pandemic and rampant voter suppression target our marginalized friends and family in disproportionate numbers. Oh, and by the way, the administration is trying to kill the U.S. Postal Service while everyone’s just trying to send our rent check or a ballot by the deadline, or receive our benefits check or prescription medication in the mail, or run our thanks-to-Covid-mail-order-only businesses.

In other words… yeah. It’s a lot.

So where do any of us go from here? For Jessica and me, our work fuels us, and our collaboration sustains us. Working on the Dead Feminists series has kept us focused—and given us plenty to do. (Heaven knows there’s no shortage of issues to make broadsides about, right?)

Above: Alice Paul unfurls the suffrage flag she sewed to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment. She sewed each star onto the flag as each new state ratified the amendment, until the necessary total of 36 was reached. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Despite every curve ball the world (and specifically America) has thrown at us, we still have reason to celebrate today. On this day 100 years ago, Tennessee became the 36th and final state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended the right to vote to women in the United States. The Amendment didn’t officially become law until August 26th, but we wanted to mark today’s milestone, as well. It took almost eighty years for the women’s suffrage movement to win the vote, but their cause excluded many, and their victory was incomplete. Today we are thinking about women all over America—many of whom, despite constitutional “equality,” still don’t have fully equal access to the ballot box. Voter suppression and other barriers to suffrage still threaten our democracy, and disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and other women of color—denying them the vote that the Constitution is specifically supposed to protect.

This historical and contemporary inequality has been on our minds for many months. Since last year we have been designing, writing, and curatingVotes for Women: 100 Years and Counting, the women’s suffrage centennial exhibition with the team at the Washington State History Museum (WSHM). Votes for Women traces the history of the women’s suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for voting equality for all Americans—all in an interactive voting game for visitors. As events have unfolded in real time—from voter suppression to the possibility of the first woman serving as Vice President—we’re updating content accordingly.

Thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic, WSHM has been closed to visitors since March, and the Votes for Women exhibit is postponed with run dates unknown. (As soon as the museum is safe to open again and we can confirm the dates, we’ll let you know. Even if reopening is a long time off, WSHM is committed to running the exhibit in full, one day, no matter what.)

In the meantime, we still have another important anniversary to commemorate. Next Wednesday, August 26, is Women’s Equality Day, and the 100th anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment. This is the day that women’s suffrage became officially legal in the United States, and we wanted to celebrate by giving you a taste of the museum show!

Join us for a conversation with WSHM staff on the development of the Votes for Women exhibition. You’ll get a look at the design of the exhibition (including the overall look we developed, based on Jessica’s collection of 19th-century metal cuts and ornaments), the premiere of our 30th Dead Feminists broadside, and a behind-the scenes look at the interactive game we created at the heart of the show.

In Conversation: Dead Feminists and the Creation of
Votes for Women: 100 Years and Counting

Wednesday, August 26, 7-8:30 pm
Talk broadcast through Facebook Live
You can follow the Facebook Event at this link,
or access the video on the WSHM Facebook Videos Page once it goes live.
(Please note, the video won’t appear in the list of videos until the event actually starts, so you may have to refresh the page to see it, if you get there first!)

Wherever this finds you, in whatever state of anger or worry or dread or even calm, please know that you are in our thoughts. We hope you are safe, and that the things you need are at your fingertips. And we hope that we can provide you with a small bit of entertainment and food for thought online in the coming week—even if we can’t see you in person right now. Many thanks for all your support.

October 28, 2019

Trees of Life

This season we are celebrating the efforts of young, live feminists like Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, India Logan-Riley, Isra Hirsi, Winnie Asiti, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, and many others. These young women are leading people of all ages and nationalities into the streets to demand decisive climate action from our world leaders. In solidarity with their efforts, our newest Dead Feminists broadside highlights the words of Africa’s “Mother of Trees,” Wangari Maathai:

Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.

Maathai dedicated her life’s work to restoring the environment in her home country of Kenya. Along with a tireless group of women followers, she planted millions of trees, disrupting and enraging a corrupt, authoritarian regime in the process. While her government was bent on resource extraction, the theft of public lands, and a kleptocratic program of personal enrichment (stop us if any of this sounds familiar), Maathai kept planting seeds—and held her ground.

I wanted my illustrations to be really graphic and bold, with strong, simple silhouettes—I ended up thinking a lot about Crockett Johnson’s illustrations in the midcentury children’s classic, The Carrot Seed. While the book wasn’t a direct or obvious reference, there’s definitely a link there (at least in my head!). Printing was the real challenge here, though. Jessica had some seriously tight registration to contend with, as well as the tricky business of printing delicate text and large flood areas in the same print run (without overinking or underinking either one!).

Color ended up being our other big challenge here. We mocked up many different color schemes, never quite happy with any of them. We wanted to avoid too-obvious tree colors like brown or leafy green, but going too far in the other direction just seemed…weird. Then it dawned on us to look at East African textiles for inspiration, and that made us approach the inking station with new eyes. We took those naturalistic tree colors and cranked the saturation up to eleven—and suddenly it all clicked.

Our 29th broadside is printed in the bold, joyful colors of kitenge fabric, which Wangari Maathai wore as her personal signature. Central to the design is an African baobab tree, also known in folklore as the tree of life. The baobab’s iconic stout trunk anchors the composition, with its roots forming Maathai’s name and a white baobab blossom framing her portrait. Elsewhere in the design are a baobab sapling and even a baobab seed (hint: look for a certain comma).

To symbolize the interconnected nature of the world’s biomes and climates, the tree is adorned with “fruit” (drawn to resemble the baobab’s pendulous hanging fruit) portraying a number of vulnerable and endangered Kenyan species, including the African wild dog, Grévy’s zebra, black rhinoceros, hirola (Hunter’s antelope), lesser kudu, and tree pangolin.

To help continue Wangari Maathai’s efforts, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to two tree-planting organizations. First up is Maathai’s own Green Belt Movement, which is continuing her legacy in East Africa. Closer to home, we are also contributing to One Tree Planted, an American nonprofit that plants a tree for every dollar donated (and also follows up over time to make sure the planted trees actually survive). We are supporting both organizations via Action Grants from the Dead Feminists Fund.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

Trees of Life: No. 29 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 176
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed from hand-drawn lettering and illustrations on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Wangari Muta Maathai (1940 – 2011) was born in the central highlands of Kenya, in a rural village. Unlike many girls her age she attended school, and was awarded a scholarship to attend college in the United States, focusing on biology. She returned to Kenya to earn a PhD — the first East African woman to do so. She joined the National Council of Women in 1976, working with women to plant trees. Through Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, more than 51 million trees have been planted throughout Kenya, reforesting the environment and improving the quality of life. Tree planting gave Maathai an opportunity to teach communities to protect their own interests, pursue self-government and regain a cultural foundation stripped away by colonial rule and government corruption. The Green Belt Movement grew with Maathai on the front line, fighting authoritarian abuses of power, land-grabbing, and illegal detention of political opponents. Kenya returned to a multi-party democracy in 2002 and Maathai was overwhelmingly elected to Parliament, also serving in the Ministry for Environmental and Natural Resources. In 2004 Maathai was the first African woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, honoring her lifelong commitment to democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. Her example inspires us to action: “It is the people who must save the environment. It is the people who must make their leaders change. And we cannot be intimidated. So we must stand up for what we believe in.”

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, with hope that our collective climate action will bear fruit for the planet. 176 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.

October 17, 2017

Estados Divididos

Well, here we are. Our book has been out for a year, and already (for us, anyway) it has transformed from a celebration of women’s accomplishments to a laundry list of battles in need of fighting all over again. The new president has been in power mere months, and already he and his toadies have singled out the most vulnerable among us to be blamed, excluded, punished, even crushed. As artists, we feel our path is clear, our work is cut out for us: the hard part is choosing where to start, upon which injustice to focus first. In the end, the oppressors chose for us, with a seemingly endless succession of outrages against Latino-Americans and Central-American immigrants: the border wall, ICE raids, the DACA repeal, Joe Arpaio’s tent cities and later pardon, the list goes on. And since nobody spoke truth to power like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who better to preside over this broadside?

Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?

Frida’s life story is the stuff of legends, and one that many of us know by heart. So rather than travel the well-trodden ground of her accident and illnesses, or her relationships with Diego Rivera and famous men and women of her era, we paid homage to Frida’s artwork instead. (Even our edition number is symbolic of Frida’s body of work: she created approximately 200 paintings in her lifetime.) Estados Divididos is largely inspired by two of Frida’s paintings.

The first is Self Portrait Along the Border Between Mexico and the United States, which she painted in 1932 in Detroit, while Diego worked on a mural commission there. It’s painted on tin, in the Mexican folk tradition of retrablos or devotional paintings. She signed the piece with the name Carmen Rivera, perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek response to the way Americans would have referred to “the wife of the artist.” Interestingly, Diego insisted that she was the real artist in the family, calling her “la pintura más pintor,” using both the feminine and masculine form of the word painter in reference to her prowess (and possibly her androgyny, as well).

The other painting that inspired our broadside is What the Water Gave Me, painted in 1938. This is the first Frida Kahlo painting I (Chandler) ever saw—and it has, in a way, haunted me my entire life, even as my understanding of it has grown and changed as I’ve aged. This painting is largely known as Frida’s autobiography: scenes from her life, both joyful and painful, as well as symbolic figures are combined in a tableau reminiscent of an allegory by Hieronymous Bosch. These scenes float in a tub of bathwater in which she’s soaking her battered, scarred feet: both her bath and her unflinching self-reflection are rituals both soothing and possibly agonizing.

We tried to channel that unflinching gaze of Frida’s when we created this broadside. We’ve highlighted intolerance toward Latino-Americans and Spanish-speaking immigrants before in our Adina De Zavala broadside, but whereas we mostly dealt in metaphor and veiled symbolism then—the gloves are off now. Every time we heard of some new cruelty directed towards Latinx populations, our fury and disgust grew, and we funneled that rage into the design itself. The lower half of the illustration comes right out and says it: faceless ICE agents in red MAGA baseball caps arrest and threaten and round up and brutalize people, while civilians rat out their neighbors, carry tiki torches, turn a blind eye to injustice, or sign executive orders with their tiny hands.

That said, our design is still filled to the brim with symbolism and layers of meaning, starting with the title. Estados Unidos is “United States” in Spanish, but we are anything but united right now—so our title is the Spanish translation of “Divided States.” Also, the bird taking wing is a quetzal—an ancient Mayan symbol of liberty and a more modern emblem of Central and South American culture. And because right now the whole world is upside-down, we’ve turned our paper upside-down, too. The deckle, that natural rag edge from the paper mold that you normally find at the bottom of our broadsides, is now at the top. (We think it gives Frida’s cloak a nice fluttery quality as her portrait presides over the composition.) The folksy, children’s-book illustration style contrasts sharply with the content of the lower half of the design. This is a jab at American exceptionalism and the fairytales we tell ourselves about who counts as “us” and who gets lumped in with “them.” That contrast of cheerful colors and serious subject matter is yet another nod to Frida’s life and work: she has frequently been referred to as “a ribbon around a bomb.”

The two separate color schemes represent two worlds: Mexico and what Frida called “Gringolandia,” peace and war, heaven and hell, tolerance and bigotry, freedom and captivity, friend and foe. Like a flag—or a war zone—the two full-bleed color fields are sharply bifurcated by a no-man’s-land of Whiteness, representing the border wall of white supremacy that has long since been erected in America. Yet if you follow Frida’s words and footprints, starting in the trouble below and heading upward, you’ll find a way through—a path across the divide.

In recognition of this challenging duality, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to two different nonprofit organizations. One is Border Angels, a San Diego-based organization that provides free bilingual immigration services and consultations, as well as migrant and day-laborer aid and outreach—including border rescue stations and desert water drops. The other donation supports Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a Seattle-Tacoma-based advocacy group that provides legal assistance to community members facing deportation. This is our second donation to NWIRP, acknowledging the very important and difficult work they tackle, especially in our hometown of Tacoma, at the Northwest Detention Center.

Purchase your copy in the shop!

Estados Divididos: No. 26 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 200
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico. Growing up in La Casa Azul, Frida would endure lifelong pain due to polio, a near-fatal streetcar accident, and more than 30 surgeries, including foot amputation. She began painting to ease the pain and combat the boredom of bed rest, often creating self portraits. Incorporating symbolism from her own life as well as Mexican popular culture, Frida declared: “I paint my own reality.” She was fearless in depicting the female form and experience, including pregnancy and miscarriage, and her tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera. Frida and Diego had a shared mexicanidad, an identity born of Mexico’s indigenous cultures and its colonial past, and a common dream of a liberated socialist country. After her wedding to Diego, Frida took to wearing the Tehuana style of dress, including long skirts, embroidered blouses and floral headpieces. Traveling with Diego as he took commissions in the United States, Frida was miserable in “Gringolandia.” Her self portrait on the border between the two countries contrasts belching smokestacks with agrarian themes, juxtaposing electrical wires in America with plant roots in Mexico. One of the most important 20th century artists, Frida’s paintings confront those issues that divide us more than 60 years after her death, including gender and cultural identity, feminism, politics and power.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring in opposition to racism, injustice, intolerance and walls of hate.

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April 23, 2017

A Leaf From Her Book

An absolute and constant motivation for us in creating the Dead Feminists series has been the opportunity to find and share the words and stories of women that people should know, but often don’t. While this might be considered teaching, a February trip to Farmville, Virginia, gave us the chance to be the students. We were invited by Longwood University Professor Kerri Cushman to learn more about the struggle against school segregation that began April 23, 1951 in Prince Edward County—long before the Montgomery bus boycott. On that day, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led her classmates to strike against conditions at their all-black high school. Her persistence convinced NAACP lawyers to take up the students’ cause, filing a suit which would become one of five cases included in Brown v Board of Education.

Barbara’s former high school is now the home of the Moton Museum, a National Historic Landmark. A reconstruction of temporary tar paper shacks built to house overcrowded students, and first-person accounts help visitors understand the extreme conditions that motivated students to strike. According to Barbara’s sister, Joan: “In winter the school was very cold. And a lot of times we had to put on our jackets. Now, the students that sat closest to the wood stove were very warm and the ones who sat farthest away were very cold. And I remember being cold a lot of times and sitting in the classroom with my jacket on. When it rained, we would get water through the ceiling. So there were lots of pails sitting around the classroom. And sometimes we had to raise our umbrellas to keep the water off our heads. It was a very difficult setting for trying to learn.”

As a result of the Brown decision, in 1959 the Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate any funds at all for the County School Board. From 1959 to 1964 Prince Edward County closed their public schools to avoid integration. While many white children attended segregated private schools, black children had to go elsewhere, attend makeshift schools, or forego years of formal education. In 1964, The Supreme Court in Griffin v. Prince Edward ordered schools to reopen, declaring “the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out.”

The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Richmond honors Barbara and the striking students.

As we considered how best to honor Barbara’s story in our collaboration at Longwood, we took inspiration from what motivated her to take courageous action: “It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for the students themselves to do something about it. There wasn’t any fear. I just thought — this is your moment. Seize it!”

We knew this project would be a little different from our other Dead Feminists broadsides–it would have to happen in a short visit, and we had the special opportunity to create a bigger collaboration and utilize handmade paper. Kerri and her students embraced the idea of making shaped paper that would reference the region’s history as a tobacco producer as well as suggest the shape and look of high school pennants. Kerri created custom paper moulds, and Chandler’s illustration worked to fill the space in both form and content.

We also created stencils (magnetic sheets cut to resemble leaf veins) and used actual cooked tobacco “juice” to stain each sheet of handmade paper. The five leaf veins represent the five school integration cases.

In addition to the gorgeous papermaking facilities at Longwood, there are plenty of printing presses. Kerri and her students created plates from Chandler’s illustration on site, and we handset the curved colophon. With ink mixed, we had two presses running and plenty of community members and students attending our working demonstration.

The shaped leaf was best handled through the presses by carefully mounting with painter’s tape on a carrier sheet.

We completed the edition with a lot of help from Kerri and her amazing students, including talented and enthusiastic studio assistant Juan Guevara. Working together, we made it happen!

We also shared our work in Longwood’s gallery, including some very big steamroller prints.

We completely enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about Farmville, papermaking, the Moton Museum, and of course, Barbara Rose Johns, as we share her story. We hope “A Leaf From Her Book” honors her bravery as a young woman, but also her continued commitment to education, as shown through her work as a librarian until the end of her life in 1991.

Very special thanks to Longwood Professors Kerri Cushman and Larissa Fergeson–collaborators, teachers and hosts–for seizing the moment with us.

October 13, 2016

Song of Aloha

When we wrote and illustrated our new book, Dead Feminists: Historical Heroines in Living Color, it was important both to us and the publisher that we fill the pages with new content, rather than simply rehash the story of our previous broadsides. So it came to us that one great way to do that would be to have a new broadside appear in the book and in the world simultaneously. One of the biggest challenges of doing this (other than having to print the broadside ahead of publication and then keep the secret for months) was choosing who to feature, considering the fact that we’d be introducing the broadside to a brand new and much larger audience. We wanted to feature a woman who touched the world, and who reflected the world we had become.

We live in a global society, with different cultures mingling—and at times clashing—with a regularity we now take for granted. It is easy to forget the imperialist origins of globalization, where Western cultures sought to dominate and even extinguish the societies they encountered. Colonization of the Indigenous world has had far-reaching effects on both people and the environment, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. And who better to understand the ripple effects of colonialism than the queen of a colonized nation?

“E onipai’a . . . i ka ‘imi na’auao.” (“Be steadfast in the seeking of knowledge.”)
— Queen Lili’uokalani

Queen Lili’uokalani was the last monarch—and only queen regnant—of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Raised by traditional Hawaiian custom and a resident of a post-colonial country, she was fluent in the ways of both Hawaiian and Western cultures. Her reign was sadly brief—thanks to powerful foreign interests who refused to share the nation they had claimed for their own. Yet she devoted much of her life to preserving traditional art forms and recording them for others to study. Hers was the middle road—the road of survival.

For Indigenous women like Queen Lili’uokalani, there is no going back to life before Euro-American contact. Yet Lili’uokalani led a life that included and celebrated both the culture of her birth and the one imposed upon her later in life. Her example of sharing both traditions with future generations helps us all create a path forward. We are especially thankful to Alison Milham, a Hawaiian book artist who has extensively researched the Queen and who helped us fine tune our message.

Jessica and I have our own paths to walk when it comes to creating each new broadside in our series. In my case, I’m always eager to explore different historical eras and design styles. And Jessica is constantly looking to push the envelope of what’s possible with letterpress printing—she loves to experiment with different techniques, like the split-fountain inking on our Nightsong broadside, or the crazy metallics of Focal Point, or the large floods and knocked-out shapes of Title Nine Iron. This time we wanted to create a tropical rainbow, but rather than printing every letter in ROYGBIV separately, we puzzled out how to create an illusion of a full-color design with translucent, overlapping colors, which Jessica would print in just four passes on press.

Jessica’s job was extra tricky, since the different plates had to line up perfectly to make the illusion work. But my end of the process was confusing, too: since I do the original drawing in black and separate the colors by hand, I had to keep checking and re-checking to make sure I didn’t assign some blob of color on the design to the wrong plate.

Generally speaking, we usually print our colors from lightest to darkest. So this time we started with a deep saffron yellow—the color of royalty in the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and one symbolic of Queen Lili’uokalani’s reign.

Then we overlaid a hot-hot pink on top of the yellow, one that stood in both for tropical flowers and the blazing color of the sun setting on Hawai’i’s Indigenous rulers. Wherever the pink overlapped the gold, the ink mixed to create a fiery orange.

Next came a pass of cerulean blue. This part might seem confusing, because you can’t actually see any blue in the finished piece (though you can see it on press on the photo of Jessica above), but it’s an essential ingredient of our color scheme. Wherever the blue overlaid yellow, we got green. Where it hit that hot pink, a royal purple resulted. And where it touched any orange areas that resulted from the previous pass, a russet brown appeared.

Finally, we were ready for our last color, a rich black (actually, Jessica ran that last pass twice—the double hit of black made the ink nice and opaque) that brought everything together into harmony:

Our 24th broadside, Song of Aloha, depicts the lush flora and unique fauna of Hawai’i. Plumeria and hibiscus bloom, while leaves and fronds stand in silhouette in homage to traditional Hawaiian quilt motifs. At the center of the design is Queen Lili’uokalani herself, wearing a sash in royal colors, her signature brooch, a necklace of shells (from the extinct species Carelia dolei) and a Kamehameha butterfly in her hair. As a symbol of the vanished Hawaiian monarchy, every bird pictured is an extinct Hawaiian species—including the greater koa finch, the Hawai’i mamo, the Lana’i hookbill, the Hawaiian crow, and several species of endemic honeycreeper that now only exist as museum specimens.

Oh, and hidden in the design are ‘Iolani Palace and a line of music from Lili’uokalani’s famous composition, “Aloha ‘Oe.”

This piece marks the inauguration of the Dead Feminists Fund, to which a portion of our proceeds (and those of our new book!) will be donated. In honor of the power of women’s work, the Fund supports nonprofits that empower girls and women to create change in their own communities.

Song of Aloha: No. 24 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 192 prints
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Lili’uokalani (1838 – 1917) was the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Born into the royal family, she ascended the throne in 1891 via traditional election after the death of her brother. She reigned for less than two years, until Sanford B. Dole—backed by American business interests and the Marines—deposed her and dismantled the monarchy. Dole placed Lili’uokalani under house arrest and despite her formal letters of protest, Hawai’i was annexed by the United States in 1898 without due constitutional process.

Queen Lili’uokalani lived with one foot planted in each culture, embracing Victorian dress and Western mannerisms while working tirelessly to preserve traditional Hawaiian art forms. A prolific singer, musician and composer, her best known song was “Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”), written in both Hawaiian and English.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, knowing that the spirit of aloha can honor what we’ve lost and save what remains.

UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

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October 12, 2016

From print to page

Earlier we shared some sneak peeks of the chapter spreads, but now that our book is out we can tell you a bit more about how the book is structured.

Of course, we go into detail about the process and stories behind each of our broadsides, including a “director’s cut” of each print.

The great thing about the book format, though, is the ability to expand beyond the short colophons we include on each broadside. So each chapter goes in-depth about the women we featured and the social issues we highlighted with each broadside. Each story is anchored with archival photos and vintage ephemera to paint a more complete picture of these 27 women and their lives.

To tie everything together and reinforce our letterpress roots, the pages are peppered with vintage hand-set metal and wood cuts from Jessica’s incredible collection. Each one appears like an easter egg, linking our content to our process and bringing the past to life in the present.

Major thanks to our amazing editorial and marketing team at Sasquatch Books—every member of which is a fellow woman—for getting us to this point, and for continuing to support the Dead Feminists Fund through a portion of every book sale. And last but not least, thank you for supporting our series and our book. We hope that reading the book will be as rewarding for you as it was for us to write it.

See you tomorrow with more information about our 24th broadside!

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In Conversation: Dead Feminists and the Creation of Votes for Women: 100 Years and Counting

In Conversation: Dead Feminists and the Creation of
Votes for Women: 100 Years and Counting