Artists react to USA Presidential elections 2020
By Sybaris Collection
Since November 3rd the USA elections kept underpressure the entire country. Actually the tension flowed over the mood of American people weeks before the presidential elections as it was the opportunity to take Donald Trump out from the White House. The art world reacted since then trough campaigns that aimed people to vote, and different artists and curators shared through their social networks some images reacting to the winning of Joe Biden on Saturday 7.
Reactions from the art world went from the most hilarious drawings to consider the long vote counting process as a performance. Curator for contemporary art at Moca, Klaus Biesenbach, shared an old image of Andy Warlhol with the American flag and he give it a new meaning in the current context. “Painting your own America! Such an incredible voter performance”, he said on his Instagram account.
It was mainly on Instagram where artists shared their reactions to the election and the eventual winning of Joe Biden through drawings or illustrations. Liana Finck, for instance, well known for her humoristic cartoons, posted a couple of drawings where the lines formed two popular profiles (a presiden and a country) for the entire world and the words: victim and squeeze. No more words were need it to turned their cartoons into a political satire.
Edel Rodríguez was even more direct and celebrated Trump’s defeat by posting an illustration of the controversial former president and the phrase “You’re Fired”.
Before the vote took place, several artist called American people to vote through different posteres designed for platforms such as enoughoftrump.org and planyourvote.org.
Poster has a very political sense as they are related to the social protest, and their message can reach a big amount of people. If social networks were the main platform to spread artistic images around the presidential elections of 2020, cover magazines are still the perfect place to make a political statemen. In 2016 Barbara Kruger design the cover of the New York Magazine with the word “Loser” in her iconic typograhy over the face of Donald Trump. This time, Kruger was more abstract with an imagae that announced the end of a very controversial era.