Jesus and I are both members of a worker owned co-op called Justseeds. It’s focused on art, culture and social justice.
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 26 artists committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. We believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end, we produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets – all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.
In 2009, Justseeds won the Grand Prix at the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts and were invited to Ljubljana to install an exhibition at the 29th Biennial. In 2011, fifteen Justseeds artists spent an intense week working collectively on an installation entitled Refuge. The exhibition addressed issues of human and animal migration and the negative effects that global capitalism has on migration patterns and our respective ecologies.
Since then several of us have contributed to creating a book called Refuge: A Migratory and Momentary Guide to the City (Ljubljana Alternative City Guide). This book expands the ideas initiated in that exhibition by extending the connections between capitalism and migration, to include self-reflection on our role as artists within these globalized networks.I contributed an essay I wrote about why it was important for me to activate around the anti-immigrant climate that bursted with fury in Arizona.
Refuge includes over seventy photographs, as well as essays by Justseeds artists Dylan Miner, Roger Peet, Melanie Cervantes, and Slovenian sociologists Mojca Pajnik and Veronika Bajt. Other than a recent book release party in Norway, this website is the only place to purchase the book outside Slovenia.