Political Minded NYC, LA, San Francisco, Montreal

2003 - 2005

Heavyweight Art Installation first unveiled its latest series, Political Minded, in 2003 in San Fransico at the RedFive Gallery. The second installment came a year later in Los Angeles’s 33 1/3 Books and Gallery in the spring of 2004, followed by an independently produced exposition in Montreal on July 7th, 2004. The series is a collection of portraits and hommages of people, activists, political figures and cultural icons whose work, lives and sometimes their deaths reveal vital details about the reality of our world and the shape of our own social political perspectives. The next installment, Political Minded III, was in September 2004 in New York City and then Los Angeles in 2005.

For the past ten years, Heavyweight Art intallation’s live painting canvases have featured the portraits of favorite musical influences and cultural icons, writers, and artists celebrating their contributions to our cultural lives. In the Political Minded series – now created in studio, we have directed the focus on the lives of people who help define the meaning of activism and/or whose work or careers reveal information about a political climate that can often be missed in corporate media. The figures represent stories in which people insist on putting their careers, lives and freedom at stake in order to provide qualified, educated information about important world situations and strife. Others whose confrontations with policy, authority and inhumane idealologies highlight the struggle against injustice, and in some cases their actions typifying the qualities that we would hope of from our own leaders, society and policies. Some figures represent voices of impassioned leadership, the goals for progressive political objectives through basic democratic principles, or the yearning of the oppressed to be heard.

CESAR E. CHAVEZ
SHIRIN EBADI
PAUL KRUGMAN
SALVADOR ALLENDE
ROMEO DALLAIRE
NOAM CHOMSKY
RENE LEVESQUE
FELA ANIKULAPO KUTI