Art for Democracy is a public art campaign by artists Lena Wolff and Hope Meng that encourages people to vote for meaningful reasons related to social and environmental justice – for reproductive freedom, for the planet, and democracy at large. Each election cycle, thousands of physical posters are shipped across the United States where they circulate for free in communities, in addition to the installation of related billboards and free downloads that are used in creative ways from coast to coast to boost civic engagement.
Lena Wolff an artist, craftswoman, and activist for democracy who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Her work extends out of American folk-art traditions while at the same time being rooted in minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Lena’s broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based works, frequent collaboration, and public projects. In 2017, she formed Art for Democracy, beginning with an anti-hate poster in the Bay Area, followed by the widespread national public art campaign to boost voter participation. Over the last two decades, her work has been presented in galleries and museums across the country and collected by ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Arts Commission, Alameda County Arts Commission, Cleveland Clinic, University of Iowa Museum, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, among others. Her work can be found at Sarah Shepard Gallery and Haines Gallery.
Hope Meng is a San Francisco-based visual artist and designer whose work in both fields explores the boundaries of our written language. For the past 15 years, Hope has been running her own design studio specializing in branding and custom lettering. Her work in design has been featured by organizations like Graphis, Adobe, Creative Mornings, and the Letterform Archive. Hope is now focused on her art practice, which exists at the unlikely junction of typography and textiles. Hope creates sewn fabric compositions using a typographic system that she developed, based on the visual language of American quilt patterns. Hope has exhibited at several galleries and museum shows, including Hella Feminist at Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Scalehouse Gallery in Bend, OR. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California. She has a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts (2007) and a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley (1998).