We can’t let the fossil fuel industry get away with profiting off the coronavirus while our communities are suffering.

Right now, people across the country are coming together to tell Congress that they need to prioritize #PeopleNotPolluters. Together we’re saying: #NoBigOilBailout!

You can help by sending a personal message to your Member of Congress on social media telling them to support #PeopleNotPolluters and oppose any efforts to bailout Big Oil and other polluting industries.

(Click here for a list of all the Twitter handles of Members of Congress)

Together, we can keep the pressure up on Congress to demand #NoBigOilBailout and a recovery effort that benefits #PeopleNotPolluters.

#PeopleNotPolluters Art

To help you turn up the heat on Congress, artists from across the country have come together to make some incredible #PeopleNotPolluters Art!

Check out the images below. We hope they inspire you to make your own art and use it in your activism.

Here’s an idea: make your own piece of #PeopleNotPollutersArt and send a photo of it on social media to your Member of Congress or another decision maker.

Use the #PeopleNotPollutersArt hashtag so we can check it out and share it with the world.

(You’re also welcome to download the images below and use them for any non-commercial purposes. Please be sure the credit the artists when you do).

A big thanks to David Solnit and the Justseeds Artists Cooperative, a decentralized network of 29 artists committed to social, environmental, and political engagement, for pulling together this project.

Crystal Clarity

Crystal Clarity is a NYC born Brooklyn based artist, illustrator , muralist , and educator. She has contributed to countless community mural initiatives across the city and internationally with a deep focus on youth, women , and incarcerated communities. Since 2014, she has broadened her visual strategies to amplify direct actions and mass mobilizations with intention to support black brown and indigenous leadership across our many struggles. 

Website: crystalclarity83.com
Instagram: @msclarity83

“Being an artist, being any person in NYC right now is terrifying. We are the epicenter of the states and the world in COVID casualties. The communities that are suffering the most are the same as always: black, brown, indigenous and immigrant people who are the frontlines of climate change, pandemics and victims of the cruelties of insane wealth and resource inequalities. How can you justify resourcing corporate polluters during a global pandemic while our people are struggling to find basic safety gear, food and housing?”

– Crystal Clarity

Aaron Hughes

Aaron Hughes is an artist, activist, organizer, teacher, and Iraq War veteran based in Chicago. His multidimensional creative practice operates in a diversity of spaces and media as he seeks out connections, poetics, and moments of beauty in order to construct narratives and meaning out of personal and collective traumas. He uses these narratives in the development of projects that expose and deconstruct systems of oppression and dehumanization. In addition to his work with Justseeds, Hughes works collaboratively with a range of artists, veterans, activists, and art organizations and projects including Iraq Veterans Against the War, Warrior Writers, emerging Veteran Artists Movement, Dirty Canteen, and Prison & Neighborhood Arts Project.

This graphic is about lending and hand and reaching out to one another especially those most impacted by pollution and climate change. It is about bailing out one another and not bail out the fossil fuel industry that is destroying the planet. 

– Aaron Hughes

Fernando Martí

Fernando Martí is a printmaker, community architect, writer and poet based in San Francisco. His etchings, linocuts, screen prints, and constructions explore the clash of the Third World within the heart of Empire, and highlight the tension between inhabiting place / reclaiming culture, and building something transformative. He brings his formal training in architecture and urbanism to his public projects, including his altar ofrendas. Fernando studied architecture and urbanism at UC Berkeley, and has taught design studios at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. Today, he works on housing issues as co-director of San Francisco’s Council of Community Housing Organizations. Originally from Ecuador, he has been deeply involved in San Francisco’s community struggles since the mid-90s, creating art for and with many local organizations, including the SF Print Collective, the Center for Political Education, PODER, and the SF Community Land Trust. His art and poetry can be found in an occasional ‘zine entitled Amor y Lucha and on his Facebook Notes. One of his biggest frustrations is keeping his houseplants happy.

Josh MacPhee

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY (InterferenceArchive.org). MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People’s History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade (AntumbraDesign.org). His most recent book is An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production. He can be contacted via josh (at) justseeds.org

These graphics are just a simple attempt to visually put people on top of polluters, to create a visual hierarchy to reflect the real one: human life and community is more important than profits.

– Josh MacPhee

Paul Kjelland

Paul Kjelland is an interdisciplinary artist, art builder, and project organizer. He has worked on a wide range of projects to support local, national, and international social and environmental justice organizations and movements. His current projects include public education art builds with the Art Build Workers including strike prep for UTLA in LA and OEA in Oakland, Co-founder of the Riverwest24 in Milwaukee, artist and organizer with Voces de los Artistas- an art affinity group for Voces de la Frontera, and art based health interventions with young men who have traumatic spinal cord injuries resulting from gun violence.

This graphic was based on a photograph by Joe Brusky. The young people in the photo provided this statement:

This banner drop, outside of WE Energies’ Public Service Building in Milwaukee, states the need for a renewable energy future for Milwaukee. The People’s Climate Coalition, a culmination of various activist groups and intergenerational leaders, demand that WE Energies move to 100% renewable energy by 2025. MKE volunteer artists & activists, with the support of the group Art Build Workers, created the banners during two full day art builds.

Sanya Hyland

Sanya Hyland is an illustrator, printmaker, and letterpress printer based in both Boston, Massachusetts, and Mexico City, Mexico. She has been a proud member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative since 2015.

In these anxious times, we must stop those that would take advantage of our pain and isolation by pushing through more egregious plans to degrade Mother Earth and our communities! 

– Sanya Hyland

#PeopleNotPolluters Artists

How we make collaborative art together during pandemic: 16 social justice artists each created one letter and combined into a “PEOPLE NOT POLLUTERS” “Virtual Banner.”

You could organize your friends to do the same!