Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
On March 31, I noticed an interesting tweet from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. They wanted people to tweet them images that they intended to showcase on a big screen in the museum during the day. What a great idea! I decided to tweet jpegs of David Lester‘s “Inspired Agitators” poster series and some of his other illustrations related to human rights. As directed, I used the hashtag #VisitCMHR. I didn’t really expect they’d put them up on their big screen, because that would just be too easy, right? And they didn’t, as far as I know. As the day went on, I got the gist of their intentions: selfies at the museum. Argh. So rather than an art exhibit at the Museum of Human Rights, it turned out to be an art exhibit on Twitter that a few friends—including K Records boss Calvin Johnson—re-tweeted.
And do you know what? I think this was even better than the museum showing the jpegs. The situation gave me a reason to consider our long friendship with Calvin—our shared concerns that go beyond bands and sound recordings to human rights, and a continued consideration of whatever comes up in front of us as a viable method to transmit thought in whatever form it takes—from cassettes to tweets!
If you’re so inspired, you can search and re-tweet David Lester’s drawings and posters using #VisitCMHR on March 31, 2015
“Strong White Male” from Jarred Up (K, 1993) (download):
