My second book, The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas, is out in the world and available at last! This illustrated travel guide is a celebration of the West Coast’s historic highways—perfect for both the avid traveler and the armchair explorer. Chock-full of unusual facts, hidden history, and Americana, The Best Coast is an offbeat road trip guide that tells the story of the diversity and depth that created the West Coast we know and love today—both the ever-changing present and vestiges of the past for those who slow down to look. A labor of love more than two years in the making, The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas contains over 400 full-color illustrations inspired by my sketchbook drawings created on my many road trips up and down the coast, as well as 99 hand-drawn maps and hundreds of hand-drawn lettering vignettes and illustrated icons.
The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas (Illustrated Adventures Along the West Coast’s Historic Highways) Published by Sasquatch Books ISBN 978-1-63217-174-0 Paperback, 224 pages Release date: April 9, 2019
My amazing local bookstore, King’s Books, can ship a signed copy anywhere in the world! Simply place your order online (either in the previous link or by clicking the King’s logo above), and in the “order comments” box mention that you want a signed copy, and whether or not you want the book personalized to a specific name.
Looking to buy a signed copy directly from me?
I will also be stocking and selling signed copies of the book, but because I don’t really have the infrastructure to store huge quantities of books and ship them all over the place, I’ve made the decision to only sell books myself to local customers (either at local events or direct from my studio when folks can pick up their copy in person), and leave the long-distance orders to King’s Books. This has worked really well with my previous book, and it helps support both King’s and my own business! You can find a list of my upcoming events here, or if you’d like to contact me to arrange pick-up, you can find my contact info here.
Thank you for all your support, and happy reading!
In exactly one week, The Best Coast will be here! To celebrate the book’s publication, we’ll be holding the big launch party at my amazing local bookstore, King’s Books. I’ll be giving brief remarks about the process behind the book, showing some of my original paintings, and of course, signing books! We’ll also have a drawing for prizes, including signed books, art prints and other goodies. Here’s the skinny:
Best Coast launch party
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 7 pm, free! King’s Books 218 St. Helens Ave, Tacoma, WA More info about the event here
In the meantime (or if you’re not local), check out the latest Miss Adventure podcast, where Mary and I talk about the process behind The Best Coast. We get into some of the nitty-gritty details of creating the book, including some of crazy stats behind this thing: like the fact that there are over 400 full-color illustrations in the book, 99 hand-drawn maps, over 100 hand-lettered type treatments, and well over 100 illustrated icons. (That pile of illustrations above, cut out of giant Moleskine books, is more than six inches thick!)
Coming up later this week, I’ll be featured on the We Art Tacoma podcast as well, where I chat about the book with host Erik Hanberg, along with musings on ten+ years of being a working artist in Tacoma, and how the arts community here has grown and changed over the years.
And one last thing: there’s also just one week left to get in on our Instagram photo contest, where you can win a signed copy of the book! You can read all about it on my IG post here; you have until 11:59 pm on Tuesday, April 9 to post your photos.
When I was putting together my book proposal for The Best Coast (and later when I started the process of building the book itself), I imagined its illustrations to be an extension of my sketchbook drawings. After all, I’ve spent so many years documenting my travels in my sketchbooks that they’ve become an integral part of how I think, how I see the world.
But while the sketchbook is an ideal medium for capturing images out in the field…
…it didn’t lend itself very well to the finished illustrations that appear in the book. For one thing, I had to design each page spread around the text of the book; the amount and proportion of real estate allotted for each illustration was entirely dependent on the text content and length. For another, my travel sketches usually span an entire page spread in the sketchbook; things like gutters (the center fold) and book stitching would be distracting if they were reproduced in The Best Coast. And besides, the sketchbooks I use are pocket-sized—not exactly ideal for large, full-spread book illustrations.
Still, I wanted to preserve the overall look and feel of my sketchbook drawings in my book illustrations. Not only was that style of drawing what I was largely known for as an artist, but I also just loved the quality of the line work and watercolor in those little sketchbooks, and wanted to reproduce it as closely as I could. The sketchbooks I most often use are the Moleskine brand—the paper inside is actually terrible for watercolor (not a material I’d recommend for beginning watercolorists!), something akin to painting on a manila folder. But I’d been working with that paper for so many years that I knew how to wrangle it, and I also knew that if I chose some other paper for my book illustrations, I’d have to master a different learning curve to achieve results I was happy with.
Luckily, I did a little research, and discovered that Moleskine makes the exact same sketchbooks I use in much larger sizes! So I bought a bunch of them and carefully cut the pages out of the binding.
And just like that, I had the exact same paper I was used to working with, on a much larger scale (and without those page gutters to worry about). I could just spread out in my studio and get to work without any interruption.
Some of the illustrations in my book are straightforward re-workings of my sketchbook drawings, while others are new and completely different. But it felt so good to work with the same materials that I take out with me into the field—that made it easy to transport myself back to the time and place where I got to capture each location in person. As a result, The Best Coast is every bit of an extension of myself as my sketchbooks are.
One of the things I wanted to include in my book is Finders Keepers, a community art event and public treasure hunt in Lincoln City, Oregon. Every year for the last two decades, local artists have created hundreds of hand-blown glass floats and hidden them for beachcombers to find and take home—the name says it all: you find it, you keep it. The glass orbs are reminiscent of the old Japanese fishing floats that once drifted the Pacific regularly and washed ashore in the thousands (and are now an extremely rare catch)—beach “trash” of incredible beauty.
Finders Keepers was once limited to the offseason, to try to draw winter tourists to the region. It’s grown so popular (and even inspired knock-off projects like Tacoma’s own Monkeyshines tradition) that they’ve recently extended it to a year-round event. But that doesn’t mean that the floats are easy to find. I got absurdly lucky once—above is my treasure from a solo trip a few years ago—but with seven miles of shoreline within the town limits, searching for glass really is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Last year some San Francisco friends invited the Tailor and me to meet them for a long winter weekend in Lincoln City, so we could all comb the beach together. No dice, as it turned out, but the best part is that the treasure is always secondary to the hunt itself.
Our friends, though, had a brilliant idea: if we couldn’t find glass floats on the beach, why not make a few of our own?
I had never blown glass before, but since I live in a glassblowing capital, I’d always wanted to try it.
And I have to say, it’s every bit as mesmerizing to do as it is to watch. There’s something so satisfying about playing with molten glass, and trying to guess how the finished product will turn out.
We each topped off our floats with a medallion stamped with the place and year, and left them in the studio’s kiln overnight to complete the annealing (slow-cooling) process. (That part is crucial—years of searching for Monkeyshines in Tacoma has taught me that if glass isn’t annealed properly, the piece can explode into a zillion shards, even weeks later!)
The next morning we picked up our finished products, and left Lincoln City with the perfect travel souvenirs and friendship mementos.
As a bonus, I left with plenty of first-hand knowledge to use as book fodder, as well as a head (and sketchbook, and camera) full of imagery to inspire the illustration.
Since today is #WorldBookDay, I thought I’d share a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the cover design of my new book. And just like any part of bringing a book to life, creating the cover is a careful, detailed, and often lengthy process.
Designing a book cover is more of a science than an art—because the design has to be extremely hard-working, every part of the design has to be well thought out and carefully considered. Since it has to be eye-catching in every setting (at thumbnail size in a catalog, on a bookstore shelf amongst a slew of other titles, etc.) everything from subject matter to typography/legibility to color scheme is important. That’s a lot of responsibility to place on one image!
Thankfully, I had a lot of vintage inspiration to…well, draw from, as a starting point. Because the book encompasses many vintage roadside attractions and other historic icons, it made sense to reference vintage travel ephemera, at least in one of the three sketch concepts I developed for the editorial and design team at Sasquatch.
For the first concept (the one on the left in the above trio of sketches), I used vintage travel postcards as a starting point. We’ve all seen these things—they were absolutely ubiquitous for decades, and it’s easy to see why they’re so iconic.
I’ve even referenced them in my own work in the past—these are some greeting cards I created recently, combining original lettering with a mish-mash of some of my older sketchbook drawings.
For the second cover concept, I created a faux neon sign, based on the many, many examples I’ve seen and sketched on my road trips over the years. Thankfully, so many of these old signs are still around today that their unique “Googie” design style is still instantly recognizable to viewers of all ages.
And finally, I wanted to create a cover concept that at least gave a passing nod to another staple of vintage travel ephemera: the souvenir map. I have a major soft spot for these things (as well as a big personal collection of map postcards and even midcentury map tablecloths—as anyone who has ever attended Studio Tour will have seen!), and have referenced them over and over again in my work. And after all, this book is an atlas—there are nearly a hundred maps inside, so it made sense to at least try one on the cover. In the end, I kept the map part of my third cover sketch super simple, but the thought process behind it was still there.
Here are the three full-color cover concepts I sent to Sasquatch. And the winner was chosen pretty unanimously—everyone was drawn to the neon sign concept (including me!). The weird thing, though, was that unlike the cover process for Dead Feminists, this book cover went from zero to finished in record time. I was bracing myself for an endless number of revisions, color tweaks and do-overs, because that’s what it took last time to arrive at the right cover. So imagine my surprise when the Sasquatch team got back to me and said that they’d shown it to everyone from design to marketing to sales, and they’d all agreed that we’d pretty much hit it out of the park on the first try!
So that was it—I made a few tiny tweaks to the lettering of the subhead, and a few subtle color changes, and Bob’s your uncle. With Dead Feminists, we were still revising the cover right up until the book went to press. This time it was the other way around: the cover was done months ahead of time, and the book itself was being tweaked and edited until the last possible second. But that’s another story for another day…
Midterm elections are looming, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We knew right away that with this being an election year, we wanted to feature voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for our next Dead Feminists broadside. But before long we realized that Hamer could carry us down the rabbit hole, with seemingly endless social issues to investigate through the lens of her life and work. Which should be the focus for our broadside? Where would we even start? We could have chosen any number of things, just based on Hamer’s story. Her Congressional bid evoked the contemporary groundswell of women newly running for office. Her forced sterilization in 1961 brought up reproductive rights and the Pro-Choice movement’s shadow history of racist eugenics. Her survival of a beating in a county jail underscored this country’s persistent police brutality against Black citizens. Her work with community agriculture reminded us of America’s continued lack of food security and equal access to nutrition for the working poor. And taken together, all of these myriad issues and problems are distilled and rarefied by Hamer’s simple truism:
Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.
It was that simplicity that swayed us in the end: Hamer started with focusing on the vote, and so did we. As the midterms approach, it is increasingly obvious to us that turning out the vote is the only way to turn the rising tide of state-sanctioned inequality and violence. It is more important than ever to help continue Hamer’s work, to combat racism and make sure that all Americans have the same access to their constitutionally-protected rights of suffrage. That task is as difficult as it’s been in decades, thanks to the Supreme Court overturning key portions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. And Black voters—those voters who most reliably stand for progressive causes and candidates, and who are already disproportionally targeted for disenfranchisement—are feeling the effects of that ruling. If progressives want their help in November, we need to help them first.
Fannie Lou Townsend was one of 20 children born to a family of sharecroppers in Mississippi; by the time she was a teenager, she was picking up to 300 pounds of Mississippi Delta cotton per day, despite a permanent leg injury from having polio as a child. Though she was only able to attend school through age 12, she loved learning and was an avid reader—years of Bible study forged for her a personal connection between scriptural stories of liberation and the modern Civil Rights movement. In 1945 she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a fellow sharecropper, and the couple later adopted two daughters. In 1962 she attended her first mass meeting—it was there that she learned for the first time, at the age of 44, that Black people had the right to vote. A few days later she and sixteen others boarded a bus to Indianola, MS to register as voters (her attempt was unsuccessful, thanks to literacy tests and poll taxes)—and the following day, she was fired from her plantation job. Pap was fired shortly afterward.
Hamer continued to try to register to vote, and started helping others attempt to overcome the racist literacy tests, poll taxes and transportation challenges that stood in the way. As her interest in direct action for civil rights increased, so did the attempts to silence her. Days after she lost her plantation job, she survived a drive-by shooting attempt by white supremacists. In 1963, while on a bus trip with fellow activisits from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Hamer and several others were arrested after being refused service at a cafe in Winona, MS. After being taken to the county jail, a state trooper took Hamer into a cell and ordered two inmates to beat her with blackjacks while the police held her down and groped her. The state trooper then joined in on the near-fatal beating, leaving Hamer with permanent damage to her legs, eyes and kidneys. She kept up her activism anyway: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
After the police beating, Hamer traveled widely on a public speaking tour—sharing her story, singing gospel hymns, gaining followers and raising money for civil rights groups. In 1964, after co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (which helped expand Black voter registration and challenged the state’s all-white hold on the party), she ran for Congress. Her bid against a white incumbent was unsuccessful, but in an interview with The Nation she said, “I’m showing the people that a Negro can run for office.”
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party continued to grow, agitating for change to the system of seating only white Mississippi Democrats at the Democratic National Convention. Hamer and her fellow MFDP members traveled to the 1964 Convention to stand as the state’s official delegates, with Hamer was chosen as the party’s speaker—prompting the white delegates to walk out in protest. President Lyndon Johnson—who generally supported the Civil Rights movement and signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965—feared he’d lose his bid for reelection without the support of white Southern Democrats. To appease them and bolster his own campaign, he preempted the broadcast of Hamer’s convention speech by holding a nationally-televised press conference at the same time. Finally, in 1968 the national Democratic Party changed its rules to require equal representation from its states’ delegates, and the MFDP was seated at that year’s National Convention alongside the white Southern Democrats. In 1972, the same year that Shirley Chisholm ran for President, Hamer was elected as a national party delegate.
Hamer’s voice continued to inspire her national following, even as she narrowed her focus back to her native Sunflower County, Mississippi. In the late 1960s she lent her time, money and energy to a number of grassroots efforts there, including a communal farm and livestock share program to increase food security and nutrition equality among the sharecroppers and rural Black residents. She argued that self-sufficiency was the best path to full citizenship for Black Mississippians, and promoted land ownership and crop control as essential civil rights. She enlisted the help of a Wisconsin nonprofit called Measure for Measure, and secured a large celebrity donation from Harry Belafonte, to found the Freedom Farm Corporation and begin buying up Mississippi Delta farmland. By 1971, despite threats by white supremacists, Hamer had acquired over 600 acres for use in communal agriculture: “If we have that land, can’t anybody starve us out.”
Our 27th broadside, Seeding the Vote, honors Sunflower County, where Hamer planted so many seeds for freedom, suffrage and full citizenship for all. The first half of the quote sits “behind bars,” obscured by the stalks of wilted sunflowers, while the second half is festooned with vibrant yellow blossoms. Hamer’s portrait hovers above a trio of her iconic yellow voter registration buses—which are also designed to be reminiscent of other Civil Rights Movement buses in the American South, including Rosa Parks’ famous bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
To help combat the same racist disenfranchisement that Fannie devoted her life to fighting, we are donating, via a grant from the Dead Feminists Fund, a portion of our proceeds to Spread the Vote, a nonprofit that obtains government-issued photo IDs to help eligible voters meet the requirements of voter ID laws. Currently 34 states have some form of voter ID law as a requirement for enfranchisement; many of the strictest laws exist in states with a large percentage of Black or other minority voters. With their IDs obtained with the help of Spread the Vote, these same people can also secure housing, jobs and other essentials more easily—helping them participate more fully in society and exercise their rights as Americans.
Seeding the Vote: No. 27 in the Dead Feminists series Edition size: 165 Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977) was the youngest of 20 children born to Mississippi sharecroppers, and was picking cotton by age six. At 13, since she was literate, she became the plantation’s record keeper. Married in 1944, she continued plantation work with her husband. In 1961, Hamer was subjected by a white doctor to a hysterectomy without her consent, while undergoing surgery for a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization of Black women was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Starting in 1962, Hamer organized buses to register thousands of Black voters in Sunflower County, Mississippi. They faced continued voter suppression, a $100 fine for a bus that was too yellow, extortion, threats and assaults — and Hamer was fired from the plantation. In 1963, after she ran a literacy workshop to help Black voters overcome racist poll tests, police arrested her and beat her nearly to death. Nevertheless, she ran for Congress in 1964 and helped organize the Freedom Summer voter registration drive in Sunflower County. At the Democratic National Convention later that year, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated group of activists who openly challenged the legality of Mississippi’s all-white, segregated delegation. Through it all, Hamer kept campaigning, while signing hyms and traditional spirituals to keep up morale among her followers. Today she is heralded as a civil rights icon, yet the refrain of her famous words is still familiar to the choir: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in honor of the tireless work of women who plant the seeds and tend the crop of budding voters.
Well, here we are. Our book has been out for a year, and already (for us, anyway) it has transformed from a celebration of women’s accomplishments to a laundry list of battles in need of fighting all over again. The new president has been in power mere months, and already he and his toadies have singled out the most vulnerable among us to be blamed, excluded, punished, even crushed. As artists, we feel our path is clear, our work is cut out for us: the hard part is choosing where to start, upon which injustice to focus first. In the end, the oppressors chose for us, with a seemingly endless succession of outrages against Latino-Americans and Central-American immigrants: the border wall, ICE raids, the DACA repeal, Joe Arpaio’s tent cities and later pardon, the list goes on. And since nobody spoke truth to power like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who better to preside over this broadside?
Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
Frida’s life story is the stuff of legends, and one that many of us know by heart. So rather than travel the well-trodden ground of her accident and illnesses, or her relationships with Diego Rivera and famous men and women of her era, we paid homage to Frida’s artwork instead. (Even our edition number is symbolic of Frida’s body of work: she created approximately 200 paintings in her lifetime.) Estados Divididos is largely inspired by two of Frida’s paintings:
The first is Self Portrait Along the Border Between Mexico and the United States, which she painted in 1932 in Detroit, while Diego worked on a mural commission there. It’s painted on tin, in the Mexican folk tradition of retrablos or devotional paintings. She signed the piece with the name Carmen Rivera, perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek response to the way Americans would have referred to “the wife of the artist.” Interestingly, Diego insisted that she was the real artist in the family, calling her “la pintura más pintor,” using both the feminine and masculine form of the word painter in reference to her prowess (and possibly her androgyny, as well).
The other painting that inspired our broadside is What the Water Gave Me, painted in 1938. This is the first Frida Kahlo painting I (Chandler) ever saw—and it has, in a way, haunted me my entire life, even as my understanding of it has grown and changed as I’ve aged. This painting is largely known as Frida’s autobiography: scenes from her life, both joyful and painful, as well as symbolic figures are combined in a tableau reminiscent of an allegory by Hieronymous Bosch. These scenes float in a tub of bathwater in which she’s soaking her battered, scarred feet: both her bath and her unflinching self-reflection are rituals both soothing and possibly agonizing.
We tried to channel that unflinching gaze of Frida’s when we created this broadside. We’ve highlighted intolerance toward Latino-Americans and Spanish-speaking immigrants before in our Adina De Zavala broadside, but whereas we mostly dealt in metaphor and veiled symbolism then—the gloves are off now. Every time we heard of some new cruelty directed towards Latinx populations, our fury and disgust grew, and we funneled that rage into the design itself. The lower half of the illustration comes right out and says it: faceless ICE agents in red MAGA baseball caps arrest and threaten and round up and brutalize people, while civilians rat out their neighbors, carry tiki torches, turn a blind eye to injustice, or sign executive orders with their tiny hands.
That said, our design is still filled to the brim with symbolism and layers of meaning, starting with the title. Estados Unidos is “United States” in Spanish, but we are anything but united right now—so our title is the Spanish translation of “Divided States.” Also, the bird taking wing is a quetzal—an ancient Mayan symbol of liberty and a more modern emblem of Central and South American culture. And because right now the whole world is upside-down, we’ve turned our paper upside-down, too. The deckle, that natural rag edge from the paper mold that you normally find at the bottom of our broadsides, is now at the top. (We think it gives Frida’s cloak a nice fluttery quality as her portrait presides over the composition.) The folksy, children’s-book illustration style contrasts sharply with the content of the lower half of the design. This is a jab at American exceptionalism and the fairytales we tell ourselves about who counts as “us” and who gets lumped in with “them.” That contrast of cheerful colors and serious subject matter is yet another nod to Frida’s life and work: she has frequently been referred to as “a ribbon around a bomb.”
The two separate color schemes represent two worlds: Mexico and what Frida called “Gringolandia,” peace and war, heaven and hell, tolerance and bigotry, freedom and captivity, friend and foe. Like a flag—or a war zone—the two full-bleed color fields are sharply bifurcated by a no-man’s-land of Whiteness, representing the border wall of white supremacy that has long since been erected in America. Yet if you follow Frida’s words and footprints, starting in the trouble below and heading upward, you’ll find a way through—a path across the divide.
In recognition of this challenging duality, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to two different nonprofit organizations. One is Border Angels, a San Diego-based organization that provides free bilingual immigration services and consultations, as well as migrant and day-laborer aid and outreach—including border rescue stations and desert water drops. The other donation supports Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a Seattle-Tacoma-based advocacy group that provides legal assistance to community members facing deportation. This is our second donation to NWIRP, acknowledging the very important and difficult work they tackle, especially in our hometown of Tacoma, at the Northwest Detention Center.
Estados Divididos: No. 26 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 200
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico. Growing up in La Casa Azul, Frida would endure lifelong pain due to polio, a near-fatal streetcar accident, and more than 30 surgeries, including foot amputation. She began painting to ease the pain and combat the boredom of bed rest, often creating self portraits. Incorporating symbolism from her own life as well as Mexican popular culture, Frida declared: “I paint my own reality.” She was fearless in depicting the female form and experience, including pregnancy and miscarriage, and her tumultuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera. Frida and Diego had a shared mexicanidad, an identity born of Mexico’s indigenous cultures and its colonial past, and a common dream of a liberated socialist country. After her wedding to Diego, Frida took to wearing the Tehuana style of dress, including long skirts, embroidered blouses and floral headpieces. Traveling with Diego as he took commissions in the United States, Frida was miserable in “Gringolandia.” Her self portrait on the border between the two countries contrasts belching smokestacks with agrarian themes, juxtaposing electrical wires in America with plant roots in Mexico. One of the most important 20th century artists, Frida’s paintings confront those issues that divide us more than 60 years after her death, including gender and cultural identity, feminism, politics and power.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring in opposition to racism, injustice, intolerance and walls of hate.
When we wrote and illustrated our new book, Dead Feminists: Historical Heroines in Living Color, it was important both to us and the publisher that we fill the pages with new content, rather than simply rehash the story of our previous broadsides. So it came to us that one great way to do that would be to have a new broadside appear in the book and in the world simultaneously. One of the biggest challenges of doing this (other than having to print the broadside ahead of publication and then keep the secret for months) was choosing who to feature, considering the fact that we’d be introducing the broadside to a brand new and much larger audience. We wanted to feature a woman who touched the world, and who reflected the world we had become.
We live in a global society, with different cultures mingling—and at times clashing—with a regularity we now take for granted. It is easy to forget the imperialist origins of globalization, where Western cultures sought to dominate and even extinguish the societies they encountered. Colonization of the Indigenous world has had far-reaching effects on both people and the environment, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. And who better to understand the ripple effects of colonialism than the queen of a colonized nation?
“E onipai’a . . . i ka ‘imi na’auao.” (“Be steadfast in the seeking of knowledge.”)
— Queen Lili’uokalani
Queen Lili’uokalani was the last monarch—and only queen regnant—of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Raised by traditional Hawaiian custom and a resident of a post-colonial country, she was fluent in the ways of both Hawaiian and Western cultures. Her reign was sadly brief—thanks to powerful foreign interests who refused to share the nation they had claimed for their own. Yet she devoted much of her life to preserving traditional art forms and recording them for others to study. Hers was the middle road—the road of survival.
For Indigenous women like Queen Lili’uokalani, there is no going back to life before Euro-American contact. Yet Lili’uokalani led a life that included and celebrated both the culture of her birth and the one imposed upon her later in life. Her example of sharing both traditions with future generations helps us all create a path forward. We are especially thankful to Alison Milham, a Hawaiian book artist who has extensively researched the Queen and who helped us fine tune our message.
Jessica and I have our own paths to walk when it comes to creating each new broadside in our series. In my case, I’m always eager to explore different historical eras and design styles. And Jessica is constantly looking to push the envelope of what’s possible with letterpress printing—she loves to experiment with different techniques, like the split-fountain inking on our Nightsong broadside, or the crazy metallics of Focal Point, or the large floods and knocked-out shapes of Title Nine Iron. This time we wanted to create a tropical rainbow, but rather than printing every letter in ROYGBIV separately, we puzzled out how to create an illusion of a full-color design with translucent, overlapping colors, which Jessica would print in just four passes on press.
Jessica’s job was extra tricky, since the different plates had to line up perfectly to make the illusion work. But my end of the process was confusing, too: since I do the original drawing in black and separate the colors by hand, I had to keep checking and re-checking to make sure I didn’t assign some blob of color on the design to the wrong plate.
Generally speaking, we usually print our colors from lightest to darkest. So this time we started with a deep saffron yellow—the color of royalty in the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and one symbolic of Queen Lili’uokalani’s reign.
Then we overlaid a hot-hot pink on top of the yellow, one that stood in both for tropical flowers and the blazing color of the sun setting on Hawai’i’s Indigenous rulers. Wherever the pink overlapped the gold, the ink mixed to create a fiery orange.
Next came a pass of cerulean blue. This part might seem confusing, because you can’t actually see any blue in the finished piece (though you can see it on press on the photo of Jessica above), but it’s an essential ingredient of our color scheme. Wherever the blue overlaid yellow, we got green. Where it hit that hot pink, a royal purple resulted. And where it touched any orange areas that resulted from the previous pass, a russet brown appeared.
Finally, we were ready for our last color, a rich black (actually, Jessica ran that last pass twice—the double hit of black made the ink nice and opaque) that brought everything together into harmony:
Our 24th broadside, Song of Aloha, depicts the lush flora and unique fauna of Hawai’i. Plumeria and hibiscus bloom, while leaves and fronds stand in silhouette in homage to traditional Hawaiian quilt motifs. At the center of the design is Queen Lili’uokalani herself, wearing a sash in royal colors, her signature brooch, a necklace of shells (from the extinct species Carelia dolei) and a Kamehameha butterfly in her hair. As a symbol of the vanished Hawaiian monarchy, every bird pictured is an extinct Hawaiian species—including the greater koa finch, the Hawai’i mamo, the Lana’i hookbill, the Hawaiian crow, and several species of endemic honeycreeper that now only exist as museum specimens.
Oh, and hidden in the design are ‘Iolani Palace and a line of music from Lili’uokalani’s famous composition, “Aloha ‘Oe.”
This piece marks the inauguration of the Dead Feminists Fund, to which a portion of our proceeds (and those of our new book!) will be donated. In honor of the power of women’s work, the Fund supports nonprofits that empower girls and women to create change in their own communities.
Song of Aloha: No. 24 in the Dead Feminists series Edition size: 192 prints
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
Lili’uokalani (1838 – 1917) was the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Born into the royal family, she ascended the throne in 1891 via traditional election after the death of her brother. She reigned for less than two years, until Sanford B. Dole—backed by American business interests and the Marines—deposed her and dismantled the monarchy. Dole placed Lili’uokalani under house arrest and despite her formal letters of protest, Hawai’i was annexed by the United States in 1898 without due constitutional process.
Queen Lili’uokalani lived with one foot planted in each culture, embracing Victorian dress and Western mannerisms while working tirelessly to preserve traditional Hawaiian art forms. A prolific singer, musician and composer, her best known song was “Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”), written in both Hawaiian and English.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, knowing that the spirit of aloha can honor what we’ve lost and save what remains.
Earlier we shared some sneak peeks of the chapter spreads, but now that our book is out we can tell you a bit more about how the book is structured.
Of course, we go into detail about the process and stories behind each of our broadsides, including a “director’s cut” of each print.
The great thing about the book format, though, is the ability to expand beyond the short colophons we include on each broadside. So each chapter goes in-depth about the women we featured and the social issues we highlighted with each broadside. Each story is anchored with archival photos and vintage ephemera to paint a more complete picture of these 27 women and their lives.
To tie everything together and reinforce our letterpress roots, the pages are peppered with vintage hand-set metal and wood cuts from Jessica’s incredible collection. Each one appears like an easter egg, linking our content to our process and bringing the past to life in the present.
Major thanks to our amazing editorial and marketing team at Sasquatch Books—every member of which is a fellow woman—for getting us to this point, and for continuing to support the Dead Feminists Fund through a portion of every book sale. And last but not least, thank you for supporting our series and our book. We hope that reading the book will be as rewarding for you as it was for us to write it.
See you tomorrow with more information about our 24th broadside!
People everywhere can finally read our book, because today is the official release date! You can find your copy wherever books are sold—you’ll find all the major retailers on our book page.
If you’re in the Seattle-Tacoma area, just a reminder that you can pick up your copy tonight (and see Jessica and me in costume) at our official release party at King’s Books!
Official Book Release Costume Party Tuesday, October 11, 7 pm
Hosted by King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
Event is free, all ages welcome; more info here
Come in costume, dressed as your favorite historical feminist!
We’d also love to see you at Tacoma’s Studio Tours, happening this Saturday and Sunday. This is our biggest event of the year, where we join more than 50 Tacoma artists for a city-wide free event. We’ll be selling (and signing) copies of our book at the event, as well ournew Dead Feminists broadside and a special new mini letterpress print. We’ll also have a host of new gifts and stationery for sale, plus free hands-on activities: print your own keepsakes at Jessica’s studio, and create a die-cut greeting card at my place. Sstamp your Studio Tour Passport at at least 8 stops on the tour, you can enter a drawing for a variety of artist-made prizes. Here’s the scoop:
Tacoma Studio Tours This Saturday & Sunday, October 15 & 16
11 am to 5 pm, free!
Chandler is stop #9; Jessica is stop #15 More info and maps here
If you’ll excuse us, we have some costumes to get into… See you tonight!
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