INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY WITH OBEY

OBEY AWARENESS LAUNCHES ‘DEFEND DIGNITY’ CAMPAIGN IN THE UK

Eight years ago, the artist Shepard Fairey made the iconic image that captured a period of HOPE in America. Today we are in a very different moment, one that requires new images that reject the hate, fear, and open racism that were normalized during the 2016 presidential campaign.

With that goal in mind, the Amplifier Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting art that leads to social change, reached out to some of the greatest activist artists working today to commission new work for our current political moment. Shepard, Ernesto Yerena, and Jessica Sabogal each collaborated with photographers to create a series of images that capture the shared humanity of our diverse America.

This art is meant to spark a conversation. What does WE THE PEOPLE—those three famous words in the preamble to the Constitution—mean in the 21st century? Amplifier will partner with organizations, schools, and everyday families to create spaces across the country where we can speak, listen, and share our answers. What started as a way to fund this goal with a Kickstarter campaign became something more. The posters and free materials created for this project for InaugurationDay and the history-making Women’s March were seen in images across the world of people who were willing to engage in meaningful political discourse on social justice, and to stand in solidarity for their beliefs.

In conjunction with the We The People program, OBEY Clothing will be offering Shepard Fairey’s “Defend Dignity” collaborative piece, based on a photo by Arlene Mejorado, as a t-shirt for a limited time. OBEY will donate 100% of the profits from the sale to the Amplifier Foundation through the OBEY Awareness program, to fund future arts projects for social change.

Amplifier Foundation is an art machine for social change and a visual media experiment dedicated to amplifying the voices of grassroots movements through art and community engagement. They do this by funding collaborations between those movements and contemporary artists so that their messages can reach a wider audience. Their goal is to flip artists into activists and observers into participants. From mass incarceration to Indigenous resistance movements, and climate change, we create collaborations between non-profits on the front lines and the journalists, artists, and storytellers that best move their messages through the world.

The “Defend Dignity” t-shirt is available on a first-come-first-served basis from OBEY Women’s priced at £35.00 get your hand on yours now.