This week, our student blogger, Sophie P., discusses her experience creating a campaign poster of her own!
The right to vote is one of the most important ways that an individual can impact their community directly, and this personal power has never been of more consequence than in the election this November.
In honor of this historic election, this trimester, high school art teacher Ms. Rowland assigned her classes a project in which each student would create their own campaign poster about a subject they are passionate about. Without any requirements on content, medium, or color, art students were able to use their creative abilities to send a public message on important issues facing our country, or another country today.
Drawing on political history, social justice issues, current events, and knowledge of the election process, Ms. Rowland’s high school art classes put together their projects using a wide variety of materials, including pencil, watercolor, collage, and digital media, in order to portray their messages on a multitude of subjects, such as the importance of voting, international leaders, and the role of women in STEM.
After doing this project and observing many of my classmates’ work, I realized how difficult it really is to come up with a clever, understandable, and persuasive poster that has a clear message. Anytime you go on social media or watch the news, you see hundreds of political cartoons and witty images, and the messages always seem so clear and obvious; “of course, that symbol should represent that public figure,” you say to yourself. However, when it is actually your turn to create the visual - coming up with a topic, message, symbol, catchy phrase, color scheme, and more - the task begins to seem a lot more daunting.
The assignment really made me see some of the political and social issues that I feel passionate about from a different perspective, as I was forced to look, often into the past, for creative ways to express ideas that are present today. I found myself drawing connections between issues that plagued certain communities historically and the problems that we struggle with today, both while planning my project and executing it.
Despite the difficult topics that are tackled in posters and the media, the process of creating my own campaign poster unexpectedly created a sense of hope, as I realized that anyone can have the power to make a difference, even if it is simply with something as small as a high school art project. Whether it is something as small as a class president campaign, or something as large as solving systemic social injustices, we all have something to say, and our freedom of speech along with our right to vote is our voice and our way to have a real impact on our community.
Here are some of the final results:
My project
Kaan Y. '22
Eesha M. '23
