This memorial fund hopes to transform the way American history is told
A new $250 million memorial fund wants to remake American monuments in the next five years, and honestly, they just might do it. Also in this week’s issue:
Trump’s hospital image-making seeks to project strength at all costs
A massive FLOTUS portrait exhibition is coming
Notes on campaign design: The Working Families Party gets a rebrand
Yours,
Trump’s hospital image-making seeks to project strength at all costs
Two official White House photos taken minutes apart. Credit: Joyce N. Boghosian/White House
President Trump’s four-day hospitalization for Covid-19 was not a good look just weeks before Election Day, but ever the image-conscious politician, Trump sought to counter program his visuals.
Trump released “proof-of-life” photos and videos, and produced made-for-TV moments meant to show him as healthy and active. Even as Trump’s doctors offered conflicting information about his health and the White House outbreak grew to infect more than a dozen people and counting, Trump aimed to project strength.
Projecting strength is perhaps the No. 1 rule to understanding how Trump sees his public image. It’s not unlike what Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and other authoritarians that Trump praises do: they work to create an image as a strong, masculine leader. Putin does it with shirtless horseback riding photoshoots and Trump now does it with photoshoots meant to show him busy at work and definitely not sick.
The two photos above taken Saturday and released by the White House stood out as particularly staged, showing Trump at Walter Reed’s Presidential Suite. The photos were taken just 10 minutes apart, according to photo metadata first noticed by Jon Ostrower, and in the first photo, Trump appears to be signing his name to… a blank paper.
While still infected, Trump returned to the White House on Monday and took off his mask in front of the cameras. In a social media video, he used hyper-masculine language, telling supporters to not let coronavirus “dominate” them and said, “maybe I’m immune, I don’t know.”
This memorial fund hopes to transform the way American history is told
Mural painted by artist Amy Sherald in 2019 as part of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Credit: Steve Weinik for Mural Arts Philadelphia
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced Monday that it will donate $250 million over five years as part of the “Monuments Project,” an ambitious initiative to “reimagine and rebuild commemorative spaces and transform the way history is told in the United States.”
The money will be distributed through grants to either fund new monuments or contextualize or relocate old ones, and the project defines “monuments” broadly. They’ll allow for other forms of memorials, like historic storytelling spaces, installations, research, and educational programs put on by scholars, artists, and others.
“Monuments, memorials, and other commemorative spaces convey both individual narratives and national values,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said in a statement. “This effort will further ensure that the many communities that have shaped the United States have greater opportunity to see themselves in the fabric of our remarkable American story.”
The first major grant for the project is $4 million for Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based public art and research studio.
A massive FLOTUS portrait exhibition is coming
Credit: Annie Leibovitz for Vogue
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced a forthcoming exhibition titled “Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States,” that will be the largest-ever showing of first lady portraiture outside of the White House.
The exhibition is set to feature 60 portraits of first ladies, plus dresses and other ephemera. Items will come from the museum’s own collection, as well as on loan from the White House, the National First Ladies’ Library, the State Department, multiple presidential sites and libraries, and private collections.
Items will include clothing worn by Mary Todd Lincoln, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nancy Reagan, and the Milly dress Michelle Obama wore for her portrait by Amy Sherald, according to ArtNet. There will also be a video installation of photographs by photographer Annie Leibovitz. Though we don’t know which photos will be included, Leibovitz has photographed first ladies including Hillary Clinton, Obama for the cover of Vogue in 2016 (above), and even future FLOTUS Melania Trump while she was pregnant, in a gold bikini, and standing on an airplane ramp in 2006.
“The portraits included in this exhibition visualize the difference between these women, revealing fascinating details about the worlds in which they moved and the historical moments in which they lived,” curator and National Portrait Gallery senior historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw said in a statement.
The exhibition is scheduled to open November 13 and run to May 23, 2021. I can’t wait for this!
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This art installation outside the White House marked the pandemic death toll
Credit: Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty
To commemorate the roughly 200,000 American lives lost to Covid-19, the group Covid Survivors for Change set up 20,000 empty chairs — one for every 10 deaths — on the Ellipse south of the White House for a memorial Sunday that was broadcast live online.
Singer and former U.S. Ambassador for Health Dionne Warwick spoke at the memorial about inequality.
“This pandemic has not hit everyone in the same way,” she said. “Brown and black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and Americans with disabilities have been disproportionately hurt by the twin public health and economic crisis of Covid-19.”
You can view more photos of the exhibition here.
The Face with Medical Mask emoji is getting a timely update
Apple’s iOS 14.2 will have an updated Face with Medical Mask emoji that looks much happier. The new design is in fact the Smiling Face emoji, now wearing a mask. ☺️
The release is expected sometime this fall, and follows a similar change made to the emoji on Samsung devices earlier this year, according to Emojipedia. This update reflects the new, modern meaning of the face mask as something we wear even when we’re not sick, and follows other emoji changes made to adapt to shifting social attitudes, like expanded gender and skin color options, and platforms changing their Pistol emoji from a firearm to a water gun.
Notes on campaign design: The Working Families Party gets a rebrand
Credit: The Working Families Party
The Working Families Party, a progressive political party founded in 1998 by a group that included labor unions and community organizations, announced a new visual brand identity on Monday.
The logos use the typeface PF Venue Condensed, which was picked as an homage to the “I Am A Man” signs used in the 1968 Black sanitation workers strike. The identity’s color palette — which gives me vintage Phoenix Suns vibes, by the way, and I love it — was chosen to purposefully not look like the color schemes used by the Democratic and Republican parties. The colors were inspired by Catholic nun and pop artist Sister Corita Kent, whose work covered topics like social justice, poverty, and racism.
Credit: The Working Families Party
The party’s symbols include a “Compass Rose” star icon, chosen to symbolize a guiding star for the party’s commitment to equality, and a wolf, which party members began adding to their social media profiles last year as an emoji signifier. 🐺
To me, this identity really fits in with recent trends in progressive visual culture. Candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren recently used tall condensed typefaces, and the 1968 strike is a popular reference point for progressive designers. The bright colors the party will now use are reminiscent of Kamala Harris’ presidential branding and part of a larger move away from political design dominated by red, white, and blue.
Visually, the new WFP brand identity refuses the confines of typical American political design. It presents a new look that’s colorful, exciting, and a little bit throwback, but it still fits within the modern style of progressive politics.
One more thing…
While helping to pack food donations in St. Paul, Minnesota on Saturday, Jill Biden held up an eggplant, and it’s perfect. 🍆