Perhaps the best way to showcase our involvement in this year’s POLITICON is with this photo of Rosario Dawson, the influential actor and activist. A range of Big Bowl of Ideas’ services are evident in this photo: partnerships and programming, event production, artist collaboration, and product design, to name a few.

1) In the background of the photo, we see colorful chalk drawings and writing on Participant Media’s interactive #JustVote exhibition. Big Bowl of Ideas was responsible for the conceptualization, development and production of this exhibition, which featured chalk art by artist François Larivière and allowed Participant Media to engage with POLITICON attendees by encouraging them to express, in chalk form, why voting matters. By the end of the weekend, all of the walls were covered in chalk discourse, and Participant Media was quite pleased with the result. 

Check out these photos that show the evolution of the project from a sketch to POLITICON chalk masterpiece!

2) We also see Rosario holding an “All About The Tubmans” t-shirt, designed by Big Bowl of Ideas, and screen printed live at POLITICON by our friends Hit + Run, the originators of mobile screenprinting. The idea behind the shirt was to pay tribute to Harriet Tubman’s historic standing as the first woman and first person of color to appear on American paper currency. It’s about time! Big Bowl of Ideas created three custom designs for the Hit + Run team to work with, and the Tubman shirt was the most popular with both POLITICON’s audience and its special guests.

3) Also evident in the photo of Rosario is the amazing breadth of entertainment that graced the Democracy Village stage. A particularly special moment was a roundtable episode of MyPeoples.TV about the media and politics hosted by Rosario and featuring activists, media personalities and entertainers including Darnell Moore, Lizz Winstead, Lee Camp, Yahné Ndgo, Mustafa and Ramy Youssef. Other performers that took the stage included Andy Cobb, DJs Frank Foreal and Daisy O’Dell, the Get Lit spoken word crew, Woody Guthrie historian Darryl Holter and members of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe.

All in all, we had a great time working with the POLITICON team to bring Southern California a good and fun multi-partisan political event of the year! Thanks to all of our collaborators and supporters – we’ll see you next year!