ROSA NADAY GARMENDIA

BILLBOARD USA, 2022

BILLBOARD USA is a temporary public art intervention, part of a project titled 8x5: ARTISTS AGAINST MASS INCARCERATION, CALLING FOR JUSTICE. Installed on a stationary billboard and mobile billboard trucks circulating throughout South Beach, the Design District, and Wynwood. Titled 8X5 in reference to the size of an average prison cell, this public art exhibition features commissioned artworks by Glenn Kaino, Dread Scott, the Guerrilla Girls, Reginald O'Neal, Russell Craig, Sherrill Roland and Kellen Stuhlmiller, Chire Regans, Judith Mistor, Jessica Helsinger, Rosa Naday Garmendia and Emily Velez Nelms. (Corner of S.W. 12 Ave. & Flagler street, Miami, FL)

For centuries, artists have used their work as tools of protest in subtle and overt ways. I am working through a multidisciplinary practice that includes letterpress and linoleum printing, public art and digital graphics, inspired by the historical potential of American Broadsides, broadsheets, political posters, (Art from the WPA program) and other printed ephemera. Letterpress printing has led me to explore digital graphics and broader grassroots struggles for justice. I develop projects that deconstruct, policing, racism, militarism and related institutions of dehumanization. Each work is an educational tool, a gesture of solidarity and a thing of beauty that inspires people to action, envisions and reflects alternative futures for humanity.

This series is an outcome of the research for Rituals of Commemoration, which began in 2014. raising awareness about Black lives lost to police killings. Briana Sykes, Kevin Matthews, Patrick Lyoya, James Lowery, and Jamal Rollins. They are among over 1,557 Black lives in the United States from 1979-to the present.