NJ Politics and me, and art.

In 2005, I had a solo show in NYC that went really well. Out of 80+ works, 65 or so sold and it got a ton of press coverage. I was riding high as the show closed and started to be de-installed, and I stopped by the gallery to say hi. As I stood in the gallery, a woman I’d never met before approached me; she was carrying one of my framed works. “What does this mean?” she said, holding the work up. I was confused and unsure what sort of answer she was looking for. She immediately got testy with me: “Look, I just bought this and it has a lot of words on it and I’m just not going to read it. I just want to know what to tell people when they come over. Just tell me what to say?”

You don’t let one obnoxious person derail your dreams of art world stardom that you’d fantasized about since you were a teen, but this conversation stayed with me for quite a while, still popping into my head fairly regularly even today. I had long ago made peace with the idea that there was a good chance I was going to spend my life as an artist making luxury items for wealthy people; I was ok with that, sort of, but it depended on a scenario where the rich person actually sort of liked the work I was making and that it had some meaning to them. Or, you know, that they thought it was pretty and went well with their sofa — hey, I’m ok with that, too. I could accept a variety of scenarios. I was caught off guard by the collector who couldn’t even be bothered to look at the thing they just spent a couple of thousand dollars on. This was one stereotype of art world persona I couldn’t really stomach.

I mean, artists have always wrestled with this sort of thing and it’s just part of the business. I knew this, and so I stuck around and continued to show the watercolors and paintings I’d made. But I kept feeling this disconnect between my life and my work. I’d go and work on my art for hours and hours and then walk outside and see Jersey City falling apart before my eyes — unchecked gentrification, crumbling public schools, violence in the streets. I’m not a social worker or a politician. I’m not even one of those artists who thinks art should be “for the people” or some trite nonsense like that. “Populist art” is almost always kitsch, which I have no interest in creating. But this disconnect — it haunted me.

In 2012, I mostly switched my practice to working in fibers. This essentially meant starting my career over, but I was cool with that. Fibers felt more connected to reality, somehow. I could be out in the community with my knitting rather than holed up working on watercolors. I also loved the connection between fibers and traditional American craftmaking, and even learned a bunch of techniques that are starting to die out (this is a subject for a whole other post). It was a start.

Viral image I made for social media; relates to tax giveaways to real estate developers in Jersey City.

Around 2015 or so, I got active (after promising myself I would never do this as long as I lived in the state of NJ) in attending city council meetings, paying attention to the school system, and organizing community events (I am probably best known in my neighborhood as The Chili Cookoff Girl). It was satisfying. I started making props for different protests and designing images for social media that related to local issues that I cared about. It’s incredibly hard to get the average person’s attention focused on local politics, so I was interested in exploring how art might be able to help with that, even in a fleeting kind of way.

A really weird protest we did in front of City Hall with schoolkids, pinatas shaped like buildings, and a whole lot of candy.

In 2017, right at the end of a long local election cycle, I was in the midst of organizing a holiday craft fair and looking for a way to generate some press to help differentiate ourselves from that hundreds of other holiday craft fairs out there. I also was frustrated and annoyed at how the election was shaping up, and how hard it was to break through and communicate with people in a city like this. Add to this: I had just, for some reason, purchased an embroidery machine.

In 2017, a mistrial was declared in a lengthy court case in which Senator Menendez was accused of accepting bribes. When the ruling came out, the Senator then proceeded to hold a press conference in which he gave a now legendary speech threatening revenge against his political enemies. Not only was this a wonderful little nugget of NJ politics history happening in front of my eyes, it was also largely assumed (never confirmed) that enemy number one he was referring to was Jersey City mayor Steve Fulop, whose administration I have loads of issues with. The whole situation was funny and weird and very, very New Jersey, and I had the idea to make up some iron-on patches with the quote on it and give them to my friends as gifts, maybe sell a few at the craft fair.

Well, you can’t have a craft fair table with one item on it, so I also knitted a hat:

This hat contains a quote (“This is the kind of shit motherfuckers go to jail for”) from a Fulop admin member that was accidentally recorded and subsequently leaked to the press. (For more on that story, go here.)

I also made another patch, this one a tribute to (then) Jersey Journal reporter Terrence McDonald:

Terrence was probably the best chance Jersey City had at an actual functioning democracy and was known for asking some really hard questions of our elected officials.

And a few other Menendez patches based on the same press conference.

Anyway. I posted images of the hat and the patches on social media and things blew up. Demand for these things was like nothing I’d ever seen before and basically my life became around the clock patch sewing and hat knitting. If you’re from outside of NJ, you might not realize how much local politics here are like what hometown sports are like in a normal state; I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response but I was.

What got me was the audience. There was this whole un-tapped-into audience of people in NJ who in many cases were not normally interested in art. Maybe they didn’t even see what I was doing as art. Who cares? Something I was making was connecting with people in a real way. That’s all that really mattered to me.

Sometime shortly after this, David Wildstein, who was then just starting his site New Jersey Globe, reached out to me and asked if I’d consider writing for him. The pitch was that I’d write about the intersection of art/aesthetics and NJ politics. How could I say no? I’ve since written a number of articles for him and here are some of my favorites:

Visual analysis of the NJ11 Congressional race

Is the MacAuthor/Kim mailing racist?

Proposed logos for the Chris Christie Institute of Public Policy

I kept making patches here and there and in 2019, my tribute patch was to City Clerk Robert Byrne. I was on a panel discussion about intersectional feminism at a gallery in NYC when I got a text letting me know every member of the JC City Council, which was meeting at the same time, was attending the meeting wearing a Byrne patch. Things were getting weird, but I like weird.

Around this time, I created a line of Jersey City merch, designed to show an alternate view of the city than what is constantly beamed out from City Hall. My shirts and tote bags featured scenes from the West Side (Downtown is usually the public face of JC), a tribute to our massive feral cat population, and a caricature of notoriously corrupt and endlessly fascinating former Mayor Hague.

Also 2019, I created a Fiverr listing offering to perform magic spells to help people’s political careers. There’s loads of magical spells offered on that site, and I was pretty upfront about not having any clue what I was doing and that I’m not a witch or religious person at all. People bought a few and I thought I’d have a real chance to keep adding more and more bizarre rituals I could perform to influence elections… until Fiverr kicked me off their site for election tampering. I probably could have fought that, but honestly that’s about as good an ending to a performance piece as I could have asked for.

This is more or less how things continued up until 2020, with me writing for NJ Globe, making weird patches, and continuing to make my own work as well. Balancing it all, along with teaching full-time, was becoming a drag and I was getting burned out. My New Years resolution for 2020 was to quit local politics (in terms of going to meetings, working on campaigns, etc) entirely and just make the occasional art piece on the topic and write for NJ Globe.

And then 2020 hit and everything went sideways. When the coronavirus first started making the news — we’re talking the early days here, when it seemed far-off and not like a big deal — I thought it would be fun to buy some fake Louis Vuitton fabric and make some “high end” masks. This idea was flawed in that it’s probably easier to buy a human child than it is to buy fake fabric online; still, I wound up buying some kind of cool cloth and then making some masks. They sold instantly. And then demand exploded.

I had people emailing me begging for masks, and I was hearing the most extraordinary stories. There were so many people who desperately needed masks (the single moms of disabled kids who were also caring for their elderly parents really got to me) but were also being laid off or were otherwise financially unstable. I came up with a plan to make masks available to self-identified low/fixed income people for free (including postage for contactless delivery), and to help pay for all that fabric and postage, I sold a certain amount at the regular price of $20/each. Working around the clock, in about a month I made over 300 masks and gave away the vast majority of them to strangers in need.

I again found myself burning out, and so I “retired” as a mask maker, and helped train a few local artists who agreed to make some available to low/fixed income people. They’re now continuing this really great project and getting masks out to people who need them.

I intended to just get right back to making my regular work, but on Easter Sunday, I was walking around the neighborhood just feeling helpless and sad. The idea of going back to making work just for this small audience of wealthy people who might or might not care seemed heartbreaking after realizing what kind of impact making things and getting them out to people could have.

I started making mail art — just some brightly designed envelopes and quickly made watercolors I sent to friends who I knew were also struggling through this time. Then I opened it up to strangers, and tweeted out that anyone who wanted one and sent me their address, I’d send them something. One of the things I learned from making masks and giving them away is that people who know you are often hesitant to take something for free from you, so I also listed on my store that for 50 cents I’d mail you some art. I got an incredible outpouring of response, and I kept hearing from people that getting that envelope in the mail really helped to cheer them up.

So I decided to take this a step further. I offered “mail art subscriptions” — $20 for the month of May, with the promise that I’d send subscribers as many things as I could possibly make during that month. I limited this to 20 people (my studio rent almost equals 20 x $20 so that seemed right) and the subscriptions sold quickly.

Hand-drawn envelopes getting ready to go out.

I love working within the constraints of this media. What’s reproducible, fits into a envelope and will make it through the mail in one piece, and can be sent to 20 people all at once without our local mailman killing me? It’s a big challenge but it’s fun.

Working on fulfilling these subscriptions has been an almost full-time job for the last couple of weeks, but I keep getting feedback that it has really made a difference to the people who are getting them. That absolutely makes it worth it. If I can make something that gives someone a break from being crushed from the world or just make them feel like there’s something else out there than the everyday drudgery — what better role can art play than that? And how much more of a political artwork can you have then one that helps to sustain people during a time when we’re all getting destroyed by politics? Maybe I can help to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe. Probably not, but it’s worth a try, for sure.

One of the things mail art subscribers got as part of their subscription.

This is where I’m at right now, at the middle of May in 2020. I will likely extend the subscription service to continue through the lockdown, but I’d feel better about committing to that if we knew how long the lockdown was going to be or if we had any guarantee that the post office will exist in a few weeks. We don’t know either of those things. So I’m just winging it and making things up as I go, which seems like a healthy response to the way the world is right now. I’m also starting to reconnect with my fiber works; I just started knitting a new banner like these. I feel more a part of my work than I have in a long time, like I’m really in this work in a way I’ve been struggling with. For the first time, I’m really defining “my work” as all these weird little side tangents as well as the “real art.” This seems like a good thing.