Here’s Michelle Obama posing for her official portrait

The behind-the-scenes photo of the former FLOTUS cleared my skin, unclogged my pores, and cured my anxiety. A new book about the creation of and reaction to the Obama’s portraits includes photos from the artists and was co-written by National Portrait Gallery curators. Also in this week’s issue:
Impeachment docs signed by Trump are up for auction
Thank goodness for campaign brand guides
Here’s how some meme accounts responded to Bloomberg’s #sponcon
Yours,
P.S. For Presidents Day, the Yello Twitter account tweeted out presidential portraits from the NPG. You can
check out the thread here
, and be sure to peep one of the images of President Trump the museum already has in its archives.
Here’s Michelle Obama posing for her official portrait

Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of the Obamas have inspired viewers and drawn record crowds, and now their art has its own book. “The Obama Portraits” looks at “the making, meaning, and significance” of former President Obama and Michelle Obama’s official portraits and comes with the above two-in-one reversible dust jacket. Amazing.
The book includes behind-the-scenes photos from the artists, including this incredible shot of the former first lady posing for her portrait in a Maryland garden on October 2, 2017.

Credit: Photo courtesy Amy Sherald
Here’s Sherald working on the portrait and Wiley posing with 44:

Credit: Photos courtesy Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley
“No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever,” a guard said who saw a woman drop to her knees and pray in front of the portrait of the former president, according the book’s description.
Published by Princeton University Press in association with the National Portrait Gallery, “The Obama Portraits” was written by NPG curators Taína Caragol and Dorothy Moss, director Kim Sajet, and Duke University professor Richard J. Powell.
Impeachment docs signed by Trump are up for auction

Yup, that’s Trump’s actual signature on a copy of his impeachment report from the House Judiciary Committee. The day Trump was impeached, a man attended his rally in Battle Creek, Mich., and asked Trump to sign a copy of the document. “He happily complied,” wrote the man, Jonathan Moore, in a notarized letter of provenance about the signed document.
The autographed impeachment report is now up for auction, with bidding currently at $17,000.
Sailors busted for wearing “Make Aircrew Great Again” patches

Credit: eBay
A number of U.S. sailors who went to hear Trump speak last May in Yokosuka, Japan, and wore patches playing off his “MAGA” slogan were told they were suspected of violating Pentagon policy barring service members in uniform from making political statements.
The sailors didn’t intend to make a political statement with their “Make Aircrew Great Again” patches, according to investigation documents obtained by Military.com through a Freedom of Information Act request. Still, they broke Defense Department rules and “appropriate administrative measures” were taken.
A bird’s eye view of America and the world

Google has released a series of 1,000 high-res satellite images from Google Earth, and they’re stunning. One of my favorites is this view of the U.S. Capitol. You can look through the images here. There are a lot of great shots from around the world, and especially from the American West.
Thank goodness for campaign brand guides
Warning: You might find the content of this tweet from the Biden campaign national press secretary disturbing.
Thank goodness for brand guides, AKA the visual style guides for how organizations use color, typefaces, etc.
That Harriet Tubman card actually shows her making a sign for love, artists says

OneUnited Bank, the largest black-owned bank in the U.S., announced a limited-edition Harriet Tubman debit card designed by artist Addonis Parker last Wednesday. Online, people wondered whether Tubman was doing the “Wakanda Forever” salute from the film “Black Panther.” According to Parker, she’s not.
Parker told Yello in an email that Tubman is actually shown making a sign language symbol for love and that he created the painting, titled “The Conqueror,” two years before “Black Panther” came out. He said he “wanted to capture the essence of love and power in one image.”
“Looking past the critics and false accusations, I stand by anything I have ever created for public consumption,” Parker wrote. “It means a great deal to me to have a platform, given by God, to use for a great cause.”
Parker is an ambassador for OneUnited and has created work for them before, including a 550-square foot mural in Miami titled “Thunder & Enlightening” that features artistic symbols about freedom, activism, and racism.
Here’s how some meme accounts responded to Bloomberg’s #sponcon
We entered a new age of digital political advertising (or something) last week when former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s campaign ran sponsored posts on at least 20 meme accounts on Instagram (you can see a running list of accounts that posted for the campaign on the Fader).
The Daily Beast previously reported the campaign was offering micro-influencers $150 to post about Bloomberg. These particular meme account posts were organized by a new company called Meme 2020, according to the New York Times.
But not every meme account was cool with the Bloomberg #sponcon (sponsored content), including @teenagestepdad, who posted the above image of burning Bloomberg bucks and the caption “DEMAND MORE OF YOUR MEMES.”
The format for the Bloomberg posts showed imagined DM conversations between Bloomberg and meme accounts, like this. Critics turned the format into memes of their own, including Jesse McLaren, who used it to hit Bloomberg for his support of stop-and-frisk:
@thefatjewish wrote that he was asked to participate in the campaign but turned it down. “I grew up in New York City so I can tell you firsthand, Bloomberg is a colossal sh*tbag” and “total hoe,” he wrote. He called it a “dystopian black mirror simulation” that was “too much.”
The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to questions about how much it paid for the posts. In a statement to Yello, senior national spokesperson Sabrina Singh said, “While a meme strategy may be new to presidential politics, we're betting it will be an effective component to reach people where they are and compete with President Trump's powerful digital operation.”
I wrote here for membership subscribers about what the Bloomberg campaign’s #sponcon tells us about the future of political ads.
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