As the midterm elections next week approach, a new public art initiative has tapped artists to fill billboards with pro-abortion messages across 14 cities in 12 U.S. states that are majority Republican. The project comes as abortion rights rank among the top concerns for voters in the upcoming elections.
Artist Michele Pred has partnered with Brooklyn-based nonprofit SaveArtSpace for a project dubbed “Vote for Abortion Rights,” which features work by 10 artists that were installed last month. The billboards will be on view until November 21 in a mix of urban and rural locales across the country, with a focus on states where abortion is already heavily restricted, including Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee, and Kentucky, as well as in places like New York.
Pred conceived of the ad project in May after Politico published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which would effectively strike down the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and ending the constitutional right to an abortion. (In June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a 6–3 decision in the Dobbs case.)
The project’s mission, Pred, who has also contributed a work to the campaign, told ARTnews, is to promote voting for abortion rights and healthcare access.
Selected from some 400 open-entry submissions, the artists commissioned for the campaign include Bud Snow, Holly Ballard Martz, Laney Baby, Lena Wolf and Hope Meng, Shireen Liane, Viva Ruiz, Wildcat Ebony Brown, and Yvette Molina.
Each of the works delivers succinct tag lines that riff on language used in political ads. In one billboard, located on a vacant street in Louisville, Kentucky, Ballard has arranged a pair of pink stethoscopes in the shape of a uterus against white bolded text reading “Abortion is Healthcare.”
Another, reading “Vote for Reproductive Freedom” in retro type-face, derives from a 2017 initiative project launched by Wolff and Meng to produce political posters in Nashville. In New York located at 12th Avenue and 46th Street, a blown-up photograph, featuring Pred’s 2018 work 1973, shows a vintage purse embroidered with the year that the landmark Roe v. Wade made legal across the U.S.
“A much larger audience sees or engages with a billboard,” said Pred, adding that special consideration was given to have the messaging be visible in regions that are not saturated with art spaces. “I feel like it’s very democratic.”
It is not the first time that pro-abortion messaging has appeared on billboards in the U.S. in recent months. In September, as part of his reelection campaign, California Governor Gavin Newson responded to Roe‘s overturning by renting billboard space in six Republican-majority states. The ads included pro-choice messaging and directives related to accessing abortions in his state. (Pred said she did not reference this campaign in the planning of her initiative.)
But the aim to convert advertisement space into public art pieces across conservative locales did not come without challenges. Some works were rejected by billboarding companies more inclined to conservative messaging. “It’s very hard to get political billboards up,” Pred said.
New York artist and advocate Viva Ruiz, pushed for a rendering of her 2015 piece, “Thank God for Abortion,” which doubles as a tagline for her related activism for reproductive justice, to be mounted in Phoenix, Arizona, a state in which she’d previously accessed two abortions. But New Orleans was the only location in which Ruiz’s piece was approved to be displayed on a billboard.
“We didn’t have that kind of control over the locations,” Pred said.
Following a wave of protests that swept U.S. cities after the Dobbs decision was released in June, Pred told ARTnews that she’s recognized a waning, particularly in coastal cities where legal abortions are still accessible, in public protests for abortion access across the country. “Now we’re in a place where that energy has been lost,” Pred added. “This is an emergency.”