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In Pre-Debate Online Fundraiser, Kamala Harris Talks Contemporary Art

In Pre-Debate Online Fundraiser, Kamala Harris Talks Contemporary Art

Exactly three and a half hours before former Vice President Joe Biden walked onstage for the first presidential debate, his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, faced off with three contemporary artists to talk about art.

The event, which was billed as a “virtual kickoff” for online fundraiser Artists for Biden, featured Harris in dialogue with the celebrated photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Catherine Opie, as well as the artist and graphic designer Shepard Fairey, who created the Barack Obama “Hope” poster. Viewers of the event contributed from $100 to $10,000, with proceeds going to the Biden Victory Fund. The fundraiser itself runs Oct. 1-8. 

After an introduction by the dealer David Zwirner, whose gallery is hosting the 100-artwork-strong Artists for Biden sale, Harris began the event with a brief, general speech on policy before listing her own artistic bona fides.

Her late uncle, it turns out, worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and as San Francisco’s district attorney she’d been on the board of SFMoMA. Just as important, Harris informed viewers, she grew up playing the French horn, kettle drums, and violin, and was a member of a dance troupe called Midnight Magic.

In Pre-Debate Online Fundraiser, Kamala Harris Talks Contemporary Art

“All of those experiences through my childhood, and as I was growing up, really reinforced for me the importance of giving children, and as we go on, giving artists,” she said, “the ability to have these vehicles where they can not only express themselves and their feelings, but also build their confidence.”

And then it was time for questions from the artists.

Policy and Specifics

Weems, whom the New York Times’ magazine called “perhaps our greatest living photographer,” was seated in what looked like an elegant home office with a sheepskin-covered Eames recliner and an art-filled wall in the background.

“Although it seems to me that this country at times is coming apart at the seams, I love this country and all it stands for,” she said by way of introduction. “Democracy is a grand idea, a work in progress. But under Trump and his enablers, I’ve simply had enough.”

In Pre-Debate Online Fundraiser, Kamala Harris Talks Contemporary Art

Weems then prompted the vice presidential nominee to talk about how a Biden-Harris administration would advance the cause of art and artists. Harris chose to use it as an opportunity to mostly speak about school funding and the need to support small businesses (a distinction for which most art galleries qualify), though she also discussed Biden’s support for the creation of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and her own defense of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. 

But it was only when Fairey asked Harris about artists she found “inspirational” that the conversation got into specifics.

After graciously first saying “one obvious person: you,” she pivoted to a discussion of Elizabeth Catlett, an American Regionalist painter who was the granddaughter of former slaves. “Artists are historians,” Harris said. “There is always context to art and an artist—artists, they’re aware of the moment in which they exist.”

Fairey, who was seated in front of a large bookshelf packed with monographs, nodded in affirmation. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” he said. “I feel a lot of what’s going on in the world and respond to it, and I know a lot of other artists are the same way.”

Portraiture

Finally, it was Opie’s turn.

The two knew each other already—Opie had photographed Harris when she was California’s attorney general—and their back-and-forth was familiar. “Can you share with us a moment when you felt a portrait or a work of art affected you in some important way?” asked Opie, who was flanked by Biden-Harris 2020 and Black Lives Matter signs mounted on her wall.

In Pre-Debate Online Fundraiser, Kamala Harris Talks Contemporary Art

Harris brought up visiting the National Portrait Gallery in Washington to see Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama. “I was very moved by that one. She captured the former first lady, the forever Michelle Obama,” she said, listing the portrait’s strength, elegance, poise, grace, beauty, and presence.

Harris then moved on to photography and the Black Lives Matter movement, linking back to the photograph of Emmett Till’s mutilated body, which “helped spark a movement for people.”

Opie concluded the conversation by saying, “I hope I get to make your vice presidential portrait,” to which Harris responded: “35 days, sister, 35 days. Lots to do between now and then.”

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