Hite presents For Freedoms exhibition

This March, the University of Louisville’s Cressman Center for Visual Arts is hosting work by the artist collective For Freedoms. The group is the first artist-run Super PAC (“Political Action Committee”), an organization that raises money in support for or against a political cause, but cannot directly support a candidate.

As part of the Cressman Center’s “New Monuments” series, the exhibition will display For Freedoms’ Make America Great Again billboard, a large-scale work that superimposes the slogan from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over a well-known image from the Selma, Alabama “Bloody Sunday” civil rights protest. This was one of many billboards that For Freedoms installed all over the US during the last presidential election (including in nearby Lexington, KY) in order to provoke conversations about art and political action. The work is part of a larger national campaign that investigates the relationship between art and speech, aesthetics and politics, and design and propaganda. For this iteration of “New Monuments” the Cressman Center will be reimagined as a campaign headquarters, and the exhibition will be punctuated by Thursday presentations that grapple with many of the For Freedoms’ themes (please visit http://louisville.edu/art/exhibitions for a schedule).

For Freedoms was founded by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, and now also includes a core team of five — Elizabeth Baribeau, Michelle Woo, Taylor Brock, Emma Nuzzo and Evan Blaise Walsh — and a growing network of over 140 contributing artists and hundreds of institutions nationwide.