What is a billboard for? Most often, it’s a space to advertise things familiar to the American imagination: Jesus, fast food, and the phone numbers of personal injury lawyers. In the digital age, when ads can be planted in an Instagram feed rather than a cornfield by the highway, the billboard is in decline, but it still has the peculiar power to get our attention—especially if it subverts expectations.
If you’re driving on Highway 147 in Durham this week, you might notice a new billboard that just appeared between Ellis Road and Briggs Avenue. It has red-white-and-blue regalia and a design that evokes the Pepsi logo, but there’s a much more unexpected message in the middle: “Yo Soy Válida,” which is Spanish for “I Am Valid.”
In the lead-up to midterm elections, it’s not unusual for sponsored political messaging to spring up. But the Super PAC behind this message isn’t the norm. The average Super PAC is partisan and has the sole intent of swaying voters toward or away from a particular candidate. But For Freedoms, the Super PAC founded by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman before the 2016 election, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan artist platform intended to “deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values.”
The name is drawn from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, later popularized by Norman Rockwell’s painterly visions of ordinary Americans carrying out the freedom to worship, to exercise free speech, and to be free from want and fear. Since 2016, For Freedoms’ $1.5 million campaign has rolled out a diverse set of public programs, from installations and exhibits to subway advertisements and lawn signs.
Among these, the most massive undertaking is the 50 States Initiative, which, since September, has been commissioning billboards by artists in all fifty states as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. The billboards include designs from artists such as Alec Soth, Carrie Mae Weems, and Marilyn Minter, centering on issues such as gun control, campaign reform, and gender equality. One billboard in Pennsylvania, by the artist Zoe Buckman, reads, “Grab ‘em by the ballots.”
Durham’s Stacey L. Kirby is the artist behind “Yo Soy Válida,” which was commissioned by 21c Museum Hotel, one of For Freedoms’ partners in the initiative. Kirby, a previous winner of the prestigious ArtPrize competition in Michigan, is no stranger to civic engagement. For more than a decade, her performance work and installations have used ethnographic research to explore topics around citizenship, belonging, and identity. (On October 13, she is staging an interactive pop-up show at 21c Durham called “Civil Presence,” which she says is in conversation with her billboard design.)
According to 21c’s chief curator, Alice Gray Stites, Kirby is a natural fit for the project. The message of the billboard, Stites says, is “an assertion of belonging, of being a citizen, which we hope will encourage everyone on any side of any aisle to participate in the election.”
Kirby says the decision to design a billboard in Spanish was inspired in part by Jennifer Dominguez, a Latinx high school student and artist Kirby met through the Durham Art Guild and Student U’s Creative Mentorship Program. (Dominguez, who has assisted Kirby in her studio and is on the Nasher Museum Teen Council, gave her artistic thumbs-up on the design). Kirby hopes the message will amplify and honor voices in the Latinx community during a particularly brutal and fearful period of U.S. immigration policy.
“Like any artwork, part of its function is to raise questions in people’s minds and to get them talking to one another,” Stites says. Until it comes down October 29, “Yo Soy Válida” will be doing just that for Durham Freeway commuters.
