Hasta La Ideas

Valerie Pettis has just been selected as a winner of Poster for Tomorrow’s international competition advocating the abolition of the Death Penalty. Her poster, entitled “Legal Murder Is Not Justice,” was chosen from among 2094 entries submitted by designers worldwide as one of the ten most outstanding (the highest category of the competition). Pettis’s stark, black and white design replaces the Greco-Roman columns of a hall of justice with coffins.

Poster for Tomorrow is an organization that promotes activism through socially relevant design and is currently touring both the top ten and top one hundred posters in thirty-five venues across the globe.

However, the posters have sparked controversy and of the roughly one hundred countries originally scheduled to participate many have now declined. Clandestine exhibitions were mounted in many of these places, including Syria, China, Malaysia and Iran where promoters were beaten and jailed. Except for a single gallery in Los Angeles, major organizations headquartered in the United States, fearing controversy, have also withdrawn.

Images of the one hundred posters, and a list of exhibitions, can be found at www.PosterforTomorrow.org.

Acclaimed writer and educator Cornel West shares his thoughts of the state of the nation with an open letter to President Obama. It has just been a year since he took office and people have put him under a microscope since day 1. Yes, things could be better—but we would like to ask were people this critical of Bush this early on? Cornel’s poetry as always is critical and respectful, but a bit self-serving.

Circa the 2008 presidential election, VC presented an iconic poster series that examined some of the most pressing issues of our time. To mark the occasion, which sparked a fascinating dialogue amongst Visual Culturists, we’ve decided to pull it out of the archives, dust it off and place it back on display for the sake of exploring just how much progress, if any, we’ve managed to make since then. To view the original post go to “Freedumb isn’t Free”.

The Rolling Stone cover story, appearing on newsstands Friday, examines the issues testing Obama in his first year in office. The image above was created by Shepard Fairey the artist behind the iconic “Hope” poster.

“The future is unwritten.” In my illustration I make reference to Gilbert Stuart’s famous unfinished portrait of George Washington to capture the idea that, although we’re quick to judge, it’s too early to tell how Obama’s presidency will turn out. Hopefully Obama and all of us who have stood behind him will do everything we can to fill in our incomplete future the way we’ve pictured it.

This graphic chart visually explains the complexities of Iran’s political system which combines elements of democracy and religion. To view a larger example head over to Buzzfeed.