COVID-19 continues unabated, and the question is: how to get people to change their habits for their own safety? One artist thinks one way might be through art.
Colorado Artist and former Texan Erin King saw a call-out from a company named Amplifier asking artists for their help to do just that.
"And I got this idea, you know, my native Texan instincts kicked in,” she said. “And I'm like, 'Y'all just need to wear a mask' you know? And I was like, 'Let's just mask up and git 'er done!'"
Git 'er done is a cowboy saying — pretty much "C'mon, let's take care of business."
"Yeah, no big deal. Get 'er done. Roll up your sleeves!" she said.
So her first poster showed a stereotypical redneck wearing a face mask and above him, "All Y'all Can Be Heroes" in text. It was catchy. So she made two more, with Loners and a Deviants themes, playing on societal stereotypes, but in ways allowing people to relate. The company that made the call-out to artists liked what she produced.
"The three that I submitted to Amplifier, they ran with all of them. So they've used them in part of their bigger global campaign," she said.
They are encouraging you to repurpose them however you want.
"You can download the artwork. You can print it. You can put it on your social media," King said.
And here's where it really gets interesting. Her work and the work of several others were displayed in a very interesting way.
"My artwork was featured in London on Oxford Street,” she said. “They were doing this projection series where they would take all of these pieces of artwork and put it onto all the building windows."
The art was projected at night onto all the windows of a several-story building. Her tongue-in-cheek posters were greeted warmly, which was a relief.
"I'm so glad somebody else is trying to have a sense of humor about this, because it is really tough to, like, find things to laugh about right now," she said.
Humor is in short supply right now, but it can cut through like little else can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g3yAEYiFf8&feature=youtu.be&t=40
Jack Morgan can be reached at Jack@TPR.org and on Twitter at @JackMorganii.
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