Vote! Art Drop
Vote Climate Candidates pink variant , 1 of 100, by Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., 2024
HAVE YOU HEARD? THERE'S AN ELECTION COMING UP SOON IN THE USA.
Yes. Just 2 weeks until election day here in America. We think voting for climate candidates is perhaps the #1 thing regular folks like us can do to slow down global warming. And a dream project has come together last minute to help put one of our favorite voting non-profits over the hump. We've commissioned renowned, activist letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. to create a piece for us inspired by voting for climate candidates.
Amos Kennedy in his Detroit printshop, 2021. Photo by Garrett MacLean.
I'm a huge admirer of Amos's bold, colorful, and brave equality & justice activism. Not to mention the bold and brave colors on his prints. And his life itself is an inspiration. Amos quit working as an AT&T systems analyst in his 40s to become a printmaker. Using hand-set wood and metal type, Amos builds up layers of text on a Heidelberg letterpress to create artworks that he describes as "bad printing". The end result is a totally unique hybrid of political graphics and abstract expressionism.
Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. demonstrating printing techniques. Photo by Virginia Humanities.
For this new print for us, Amos has stacked a text layer cake consisting of the title of Rachel Carson's seminal book Silent Spring, the words "Save The Environment", the names of our past charity partners, quotes from Chief Seattle and Lao Tzu, and topped it all off with a Rachel Carson quote.
each layer of the print, photos by Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.
The finished poster has a deep three-dimensional quality. Like the wisdom we're reading is just a few of the untold words set down by humans. I can imagine the quote on top flying on by us and another quote emerging to the top from the word soup below. In person the colors which range from pinks to blues to greens to yellows to shimmering silvers are deeply rich. So fun and beautiful and important I can't even believe it!
versions of the finished print
Amos has personally hand-printed 100 of these for us. They are 19" x 12.5" on 21pt chipboard. And literally no two are the same. Each one is a unique, type-driven artwork. The quotes in some copies are clearly readable, in others they coalesce into a chocka-block modern design. We even have a few with patterns behind the simple quote. There's no telling exactly which one you'll receive! These pieces are truly artworks. Amos Kennedy’s prints are in numerous library, museum, and private collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress. And for a minimum donation of $100, you'll receive one as a gift. You can donate right now on the home page ➡️ FUNCTIONALMAGIC.ORG or in the form below. Domestic shipping is included. These will ship by late November.
WE THINK THE ENVIRONMENTAL VOTER PROJECT IS JUST THE SORT OF SMART, HANDS DIRTY, FRONT LINE NON-PROFIT THAT DESERVES SUPPORT
All proceeds and any donations above the minimum made for one of Amos's prints will go to The Environmental Voter Project. They're a non-partisan non-profit with a unique approach. Rather than convincing people to care about climate change, it identifies people who already do, but don't consistently vote, and works to get them to the polls. Long-term. Evidence based. This is the kind of work that can really move the needle. Click through and check them out. I know we're all deluged with donation requests this time of year, but this is one that can really amplify your dollars.
Soyuz-1
I DON'T KNOW WHERE THIS SPACESHIP IS GOING BUT I LIKE IT
Happy fall fellow climate activists! Reminder. We want to celebrate your hopeful climate art at the top of this newsletter. You can send it to me at andy@functionalmagic.org. There's only one rule: be inspired by solutions to global warming - not problems caused by climate change. Otherwise, anything goes. If we feature your art, we'll send you your choice of one our available prints.
This month we're featuring a painting by Bridget O'Brien, a Canadian-American painter living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. The painting is oil and pastel on a 300 lb piece of recycled steel. Bridget says, "it will rust and deteriorate over time". Here's a pic of the original piece of steel.
I dig the equations in the foreground combined with the pre-existing markings. The exhaust clouds from the rocket really draw me in. And if the Earth is in the background, where is that rocket leaving from!?
Bridget told me via email, "What inspired me to make this work is the Soviet rocket Soyuz-1 manned by cosmonaut Vladimir Kamarov in 1967. Soyuz-1 was built hastily and therefore extremely dangerous, to the point where Kamarov knew that the man who piloted that spacecraft would unquestionably be incinerated upon reentry. The Soviet Government refused to address the issues on the spacecraft and would not budge on the date of launch. Kamarov and his friend Yuri Gagarin were both assigned the rocket - one man would fly the mission.
"Kamarov volunteered to pilot the craft, sacrificing his life to save his friend Yuri’s. (that's Yuri on left, Vladimir on the right) This story to me represents kind of what Octavia Butler’s seminal work Parable of the Sower gets at beautifully - defense of the defenseless, the inconceivable awe of space exploration, self sacrifice for a greater world."
Whoah. Love it.
WHO ARE YOU? WHERE'D YOU HEAR ABOUT US?
We made an anonymous 2-question survey. Got 30 sec to fill it out? If yes, please click the button. We're a tiny, all-volunteer non-profit and we need to spread the word about our work as efficiently as possible. Figuring out where you like to hear from us is a big part of that. Appreciate it!
I DON'T REALLY BUY THAT IF YOU PUT YOUR DREAM OUT THERE THE UNIVERSE WILL PROVIDE BUT SOMETIMES STRANGE THINGS DO MAKE ME WONDER
As you may know, I'm a phan. Which means I go to a lot of Phish concerts (163 and counting). Illustrator Jim Pollock has been making gig posters for the band for nearly 40 years and his designs are heavily associated with the Phish experience. I've got a couple of classic Pollocks hanging on my walls.
He recently did a little screen-print for Phish's charitable foundation Waterwheel. Just look at this guy! It's an LED! As soon as I saw it I realized Jim must do a piece for us. So I reached out on the contact form on his website. But, as is often the case with those website contact forms, I got no response. Cut to ... 2 weeks later. I'm on the field at Dick's Sporting Goods Park in Denver, a hallowed venue for the band, waiting for the show to start, and sitting there about 20 feet away was Jim Pollock.
I'm introverted by nature. But obviously, I had to go and meet him. I could hear Alie Ward in my head telling me to "cut bangs". So I walked over and introduced myself and told him about Functional Magic. He was delightful! And liked the idea. But apparently he's slammed at the moment. Here's hoping we can talk him into it in 2025. Maybe the universe does provide?
ARTIVIST ANIMALS PAL IS SET TO LEAVE THE LAUNCH PAD
s I mentioned last month, we've got a new design by illustrator Kaia Sauter on deck. We're putting it on a T-shirt & it is all set to go via Kickstarter. We've decided to hold off on launching it until November to coincide with the holidays etc.
One of our supporters is the fantastic earth-first clothing company Toad & Co. And now they've generously donated some of their dead stock women's Ts to the campaign. So instead of them going to a landfill, we're gonna screen-print our new design directly on to them. And they're tie-dyed! We'll be printing regular unisex shirts as well on blanks from sustainable manufacturer Econscious. Keep it under your hat for now and stay tuned.
THANKS FOR READING
Functional Magic is an all-volunteer, donor-supported non-profit. You can keep it going by making a donation, buying a print, or simply keeping in touch via this newsletter. Thanks for being a part of this work!
Stay connected. Cultivate. Engage. Empower. Electrify. And keep on imagining the future you want to create.
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Clarke’s Third Law
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming hugely influenced me when I started up this non-profit in 2021. It was perhaps the reason I even began this project at all. And so, I named the non-profit the “Drawdown Design Project”. But after our first run of prints, I received a nice but firm email from a lawyer at Project Drawdown requesting I change the name. And so, it was time to brainstorm…
This quote by the sci-fi author of novels such as Childhood’s End & The Fountains of Paradise is what really led me to think about the name “Functional Magic”. Because, as described on the TV tropes website, functional magic is magic that works. I think of functional magic in movies and comics like a technology. Like a science. The way Dr. Strange creates glyphs with his hands or Hermione Granger has to say the right words + flick her wand just so.
But functional magic is not only "sufficiently advanced technology". To me ancient technology also seems like magic to us moderns. Ancient climate solutions like wildland protection, sustainable forest management, & regenerative agriculture are also a kind of functional magic.
And as pulp horror author Nathan Waard pointed out on our site last month, art itself is a kind of magic. Activist art is a functional magic.
When I mentioned all this to Nathan after receiving his post last month, luckily for us he had more to say. His response somehow combines Ursula K LeGuin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Huey Lewis.
From Nathan:
That quote by Arthur C. Clarke is from Clark’s Three Laws. There were two others:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
There are things you can do. The possible.
And there are things you cannot do. The impossible.
But you cannot know the impossible. You can only know the possible and the not possible yet.
When you go past the limits of the possible, it's magic!
(I guess you could have called the non-profit Scientifically Understandable Sorcery but SUS isn't a good acronym.)
Clarke's words address a subject of great interest in art and religion and science: belief. For example, in stories we refer to the "suspension of disbelief," the audience's willingness to go along with a fantastical tale, an agreement to believe in the truth of it, temporarily. Religious people speak of faith, a belief without proof. And we all "have faith" to a greater or lesser degree. A belief in friends and family, a belief in our own abilities, a belief in a collective desire to do the right thing. We don't always have evidence for these beliefs.
Science flips that script: we gather evidence and, over time, come to believe in certain explanations for what we see in our world. But "believing the science" is also a kind of faith: a faith borne out by our experience with the progress of science and technology over millennia. It's really a belief in ourselves.
Without that innate belief in ourselves—which we develop as little children—we could do nothing as a species. All of our accomplishments, past, present and future, begin with a belief in ourselves that says… We can do hard things. We can boldly go past the limits of the possible. We can do magic!
I wonder what percentage of Americans believe in magic? When I ask Google about it, the AI tells us "In a 2021 survey, 21% [of US adults] believe in spells or witchcraft, with women being more likely to believe. Additionally, 83% of US adults believe in a soul or spirit, and 81% believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world." Or, as speculative fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin put it:
This line is from Le Guin’s ethnography of the Kesh, a "people [who] might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California," from her novel Always Coming Home. A theme of the novel is that we are always returning to our ancient selves, across time. The Kesh, although they live in a distant post-apocalyptic future, have far more in common culturally with the ancient inhabitants of their home than us modern types.
Indigenous people all over the world still remember something that the modern era has forgotten. Human beings are not distinct from Earth, any more than trees and bees and bears. We are Nature, even if we behave like we are above or beyond it. And so among the mysteries of ancient people, like the Nazca lines or the pyramids, there is much that has been forgotten about caring for our world. This ancient science is functional magic to us; something that we can do if we believe.
Political Art & Lip Kissing
Lately I’ve been pondering a quote from author and podcaster J.F. Martel’s book Art in the Age of Artifice. And I've decided its wrong.
Lately I’ve been pondering this quote from author and podcaster J.F. Martel’s book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. And I've decided its wrong.
Our prints so far are certainly political and moral. Does this mean they’re not art? Perhaps they’re not behind-the-velvet-ropes Art with a capital A. But they look like art to me. And I think to make political art, especially without being polemical, is a brave act. Even a liberating one. Especially now. But I want an opinion from someone smarter than me about these things, so I reached out to pulp horror author and self proclaimed “spectator and word-counter” Nathan Waard to get his take. - Andy
Here is what Nathan had to say:
“Martel’s statement is provocative, since it appears to be wrong on its face. Most of us can conjure up a political artwork we find both galvanizing and beautiful, from Picasso's Guernica to Keith Haring and Barbara Kruger and Shepard Fairey to the ad-hoc site-specific de-installations of Black Lives Matter activists.
Art liberates by an absence of the political and the moral? Martel is wrestling with how, in a world of hyper-messaging, in which our psyches are bombarded by total marketing, maximum media, ideological pornography and retail propaganda from every vector, all of which dresses suspiciously like art—how can we restore to ourselves art's incantatory, exalting sublimity? That numinous blade that cuts to the very soul?
There is magic in art that produces astonishment, and—above all—recognition. Whether we stand in a cave looking at thirty-thousand year-old paintings or in the Louvre or in the mural-covered alleyways of San Francisco's Mission District, we feel the brush in our hand. Time collapses into the collective unconscious, which is all of us. We feel the stillness and silence of vision, vision that sees through the ages and sees us as we see those before us, and after us.
Art makes us feel seen, even in the act of seeing. Even among the chaos of modern life, our eyes scattering across the planes of the visible before us, we catch glimpses of the thrumming realm of truth and beauty beyond the edifice. We collect them, like beachcombers, to remember that it's there.
And so art touches us deeply, because it connects us to our common humanity. That power, though, can also be invoked with a purpose. Not merely a species, we are also a polity. Not mere watchers, we are also moral actors. Our collective vision can be harnessed to these qualities to create movement, like a great transcendental machine.
We must decide what this machine will do. Its function. Being is one thing; doing is more.
Here is a philosophy, then, for a kind of functional magic.
Not merely political. Not exclusively moral. But a community of human beings, reaching through time, to recognize one another, and create, together, a vision for our future.
But do we know whether this kind of art works?
Did Fairey's Hope poster, as ubiquitous in its time as his breakout Andre the Giant sticker (Obey), elect Barack Obama? Did Guernica topple fascist Spain?
How about this one, a plastic bag produced by a branch of Britain's National Health Service handed out at London's Gay Pride in 1997.
A spoof of both Coke and Pepsi sloganeering, it might not rise to the level of Justice Potter Stewart's threshold test for obscenity, and it might not be so terrifying as to deserve the name propaganda, but we know art when we see it. Did this shopping bag stop AIDS in its tracks?
Do we really expect art to do these things?
Well, no. But also, maybe, yes? Art isn't going to stop climate change. People are. But, then again, art is people. That collective unconscious, speaking through the artist's brush, but directly to us, our polity, our moral center. It changes us, maybe just a little, but maybe in exactly the right way. It lives in us, adds fuel to our fire. And the light reveals to us a path forward.
What do you think? Can art in the service of solutions inspire us just a little, and maybe nudge us in exactly the right way to change us all?”
Breathe in Love
I've got folders full of posters from the past that inspire our project. It's astounding how many of these past campaigns have seen real world success since they were launched. Art like this truly is a part of creating change.
I've got folders full of posters from the past that inspire our project. It's astounding how many of these past campaigns have seen real world success since they were launched. Art like this truly is a part of creating change.
Here is one I just effing adore by PETER MAX:
BREATHE IN LOVE was created as a public-service promotional poster for the American Cancer Society in 1970. Peter Max is a German psychedelic and pop artist best known for his commercial work and his obvious influence on The Beatles' Yellow Submarine. This print has exactly the figurative quality we've aimed for in our prints. The colors. The collage. The freedom of it all. I just love it. Worth noting, from 1965 to 2024, the prevalence of cigarette smoking in the U.S. has decreased from about 42 percent to 11 percent.
I've also got folders full of quotes. All the ancillary tasks it takes to be in this fight can lead me to forget why we're doing this in first place. So I'm constantly going back through quotes and articles and essays by folks I admire to remind myself - if we can imagine an amazing live-able future, we can create one. Here's one of my favs from the 2021 Harper's essay Prayer For A Just War by author Greg Jackson.
This post went our as part of my June 2024 newsletter. That whole newsletter is archived here if you wanna see what we were up to then.
Functional Magic Radio
No one who’s ever met me would put “Andy Hall” & “marketing” in the same sentence. But here we are.
No one who’s ever met me would put “Andy Hall” & “marketing” in the same sentence. But here we are.
I truly believe the first step in the fight for a live-able climate is to win hearts and minds. And for that activists must combat the current climate narrative of sacrifice with a more accurate one of the abundance that clean electrification, regenerative agriculture, wildland protection, and climate justice will create. And IMO leveraging the talents of the world’s best pop artists is an untapped place to start. But how do we let you know about the work we are doing? How can we stay top of mind if the day comes when you can join in to help? Twitter is a shit show. Meta is dying and stealing artists’ IP. LinkedIn is the wrong audience. I think the best way is an old-school one. And yes you Gen X-ers out there like me, an email newsletter is officially old-school! So sign on up. We’ll never sell your info, share your info, or over-send. And once you hit that button it’ll be official - you’ll be a *gasp* climate activist.