VOTE!

A new 2024 VOTE campaign is in the works! This year, we’ll ship tens of thousands of updated posters to circulate for free across the US, in addition to installing billboards in swing states in partnership with SaveArtSpace ahead of the election. Stay tuned for images! Please make an early (tax-deductible) donation to make the project possible!

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

The VOTE posters are part of a broad public art and civic engagement project by Bay Area artist Lena Wolff that initially began in 2017 in response to the rise of right-wing anti-democratic leadership in the United States. Recent posters and related visuals for the 2022 midterms were made in collaboration with multidisciplinary designer Hope Meng. The series encourage people to vote for urgent and timely issues — for reproductive freedom, gun reform, trans rights, the planet, and democracy at large.

Thanks to donations by the public and small grants awarded by the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, the visuals circulate for free ahead of critical elections by volunteers in towns and cities across the country. To date, over 100,000 of the VOTE posters have been distributed in over 100 cities, in 25 states in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Since their release, the posters have been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, and the San Francisco History Collection at the SF Public Library.

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HOW THE PROJECT WORKS

After fundraising, we send posters to volunteers in critical states who distribute them for free in their communities -in libraries, shops, community centers, and to GOTV organizations. The posters are non-partisan but they urge citizens to vote for meaningful reasons related to social and environmental justice.  Because we don't name candidates or a party on our posters, they are easy to place in public and commercial spaces. Free downloadable images are also made available for independent printing and to share on social media.

PROJECT HISTORY

In 2017, Lena first enlisted the help of graphic designer Lexi Visco to create a poster for the City of Berkeley that was made in response to an overall climate of aggressive political division and rising xenophobia after the election of Donald Trump. Following a series of violent demonstrations and counter-protests in the center of the city sparked by far-right groups aligned with white supremacy, the duo created a public poster for residents and shop owners to hang in their windows that simply read, “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate.” Printed initially in a batch of 20,000 by the local union print shop Autumn Press, this series was subsequently adapted and reprinted over 200,000 times for 10 Bay Area cities.

These posters are still visible in storefront windows and people’s homes today. 

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On the heels of the widespread reach of the United Against Hate posters, Wolff and Visco teamed up again ahead of the 2018 midterm elections to create new posters to boost voter engagement. 20,000 posters from this series were printed and shipped for free to over 15 states in early fall 2018. When they landed in cities across the country, poster distributors set up free public pick-up locations on porches, at libraries, independent bookstores and other accessible spaces.

Ahead of the critical 2020 election, Wolff and Visco paired up once more to redesign the VOTE posters with the addition of new text, typefaces and colors.

Graphically the 2020 series included the use of spare visual symbols drawn from Wolff’s collages that reference nature and American quilt patterns, representing iconography that speaks to hope. Typographically the posters incorporated the introduction of two new typefaces; Martin, designed by Tré Seals of Vocal Type Co., described as "a non-violent typeface inspired by remnants of the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968,” combined with Pirelli, designed by Jungmyung Lee (of Jung-Lee Type Foundry) and Karel Martens.

30,000 of the 2020 VOTE posters were printed at Community Printers in Santa Cruz, California in September and shipped in bulk boxes to over 100 cities in states across the country.
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The 2020 project took on other formats beyond physical printed posters. 25,000+ postcards to voters were printed in the Bay Area alone and free downloadable files of the posters and postcards were made available for independent printing that were used in creative ways all across the country. People printed versions of the posters and wheat pasted them on walls throughout several cities. Billboards were adapted to scale and placed in rural Wisconsin in October 2020 and the Berkeley Art Museum projected images of the posters on their outdoor projection screen in the weeks leading up to the election. The Orlando Weekly printed the posters on their front page so that mini-versions of the posters could be cut out and placed in windows.

People from across the country sent and posted images of the posters being used to boost voter engagement from New York to the West Coast.

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ABOUT Lena Wolff, Hope Meng & Lexi Visco

Lena Wolff is an interdisciplinary visual artist, craftswoman and activist for democracy. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s, Wolff’s visual art practice extends out of folk art traditions, while at the same time being connected to minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, and feminist art. Her broad but interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based pieces, embroidery, and public projects.

Since the 2016 presidential election, Wolff has generated several new projects that contribute to public dialog and civic engagement. In addition her widespread poster series, in 2020 she raised over $200,000 for BIPOC-led grassroots voting organizations with the project Dine for Democracy. Her work has been presented in galleries and museums across the United States and has been collected by The Alameda County Arts Commission, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Cleveland Clinic, One National Lesbian and Gay Archives, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, The San Francisco Arts Commission, The University of Iowa Museum and The Zuckerman Museum of Art, among others. She lives with her wife, artist, teacher and illustrator, Miriam Klein Stahl and their daughter in Berkeley, California.

In 2019, November 12th was named Miriam Klein Stahl and Lena Wolff Day in the City of Berkeley by Mayor Jesse Arreguin for their work that merges art and civic engagement.

Hope Meng is a designer who believes in the power of letters to communicate through both their content and their form. She is the designer behind Monogram Project, and the artist behind TEXT/TILE Studio. Hope lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Lexi Visco works with what she identifies as a birdhouse model of graphic design. Through people, community, and place, she inhabits modes of research, collaboration, deconstruction, and rebuilding. With these models of engagement she makes publications, drawings, sculptural objects, and identity systems, which are shared across publics and fields of distribution. She is based in Berkeley, California.

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Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to circulate the VOTE posters far and wide across the U.S. in recent years! Very special thanks to Lisa Cole for helping to organize the 2020 fundraising efforts and to Ranil Abeysekera, Lauren Anderson, The Berkeley Art Museum, Masami Chin, GOTVmoms, Lisa Wong Jackson, Rumi Koshino, Steven Malk, Clare Nolan, Jean Packard, Miriam Klein Stahl, Jessica Williams and all who supported the effort. We couldn’t have pulled this off without you!