We like tattoos. We like stickers. But we really like making buttons. So much so, for an entire year, we did a ‘Button of the Month’ that was relevant to that month (Shirley Chisholm in March for Women’s History Month or a quote from artist Ai Weiwei for Asian Pacific Islander Month). We gave them away online. There were cool shops and galleries in LA that had them at their registers. But then Covid-19 happened in March 2020 – and that was that.
Even as the threat of Covid went away, we never quite got back to the full throttle energy of cranking out buttons every month (and to be honest, it was a lot of work to distribute). But whenever the opportunity presented itself, we’d always think, ‘We should do a button for that!’
The buttons you see here are highly situational and specific to a particular moment or project.
There’s a full fleet of Octavia E. Butler buttons, for example, because we initiated and mounted an entire project around her called Octavia Fest. There’s one inspired by our work last year on a project called ‘Summer of Resistance,’ the first of ICE Out of LA moments back then. And two that came as collateral to our large-scale art installation WE | BE | GOING: An American Tapestry.
