On Nov. 6, the day after the presidential election, the artist Hank Willis Thomas was at his studio in Brooklyn. His production assistants were poring over tables strewed with blobby red white and blue silk-screen prints of the words “Fragile/ Democracy / Handle With Care” in capital letters.
The design is one of Thomas’s many riffs on familiar phrases, meant to spur voters toward civic engagement. One version of the print ran on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Opinion section on Nov. 3. Another raised $18,000 in an online auction to benefit the Democrat Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Several are on sale, for $10,000, to support For Freedoms, an artist-run group Thomas helped found.
Dancing between art, philanthropy and activism, For Freedoms addresses issues including racism, misogyny, violence and free speech, most visibly by commissioning artists to make billboards. They hope their imagery will provoke questions in people who see them.
It has been a Trump-era affair. For Freedoms began as a temporary artist-run super PAC timed to the 2016 presidential contest. After Donald J. Trump won that election, they reorganized as two corporations, one a nonprofit. They’ve since grown adept at fund-raising, coalition building, branding and publicity. The list of their partners, friends and funders has more than 1,000 names, among them the philanthropists Andrea Soros, daughter of George Soros; Agnes Gund, a Museum of Modern Art board member; and Alicia Keys, the musician. They’ve broadcast their messages on more than 500 billboards across all 50 states, from urban centers to prairies.
And with Trump’s imminent return to office with solid margins, what now for the group?
“I feel confused,” Thomas told me in his studio in Brooklyn. “I guess I feel a little bit let down. But I also feel responsible. I think some of us want democracy and liberation and community to be easy. Some of us think that the truth is good enough.” He continued, “It’s a time for reflection and re-evaluation.”
But how do you evaluate something as subjective and mercurial as billboard art?
For Freedoms’ founders, who include Wyatt Gallery, 49; Eric Gottesman, 48; Michelle Woo, 40; and Taylor Brock, 31, describe their organization as anti-partisan, despite individual members’ leanings. “We’ve never really positioned ourselves as anti-Trump,” Thomas said, although he concedes “people might imply that or assume that.” Their group name refers to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”(freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear).
Yet they sync their campaigns to national elections, in part to build on people’s sense of urgency. In 2024, they collaborated with the advocacy group Movement Voter Fund and the Center for Contemporary Documentation to mount new and old billboard designs in 25 cities, primarily in swing states, including Pittsburgh, Detroit and Charlotte, N.C.
I first interviewed members of For Freedoms in September, ahead of their public convening for donors and partners at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The mood was more sanguine. The insider crowd at the opening party at a modernist house in Baldwin Hills included a healer, a graphic novelist, a magician, a rapper. People in the For Freedoms orbit spoke in terms of “other kinds of currency,” like love, time, positivity and culture.
For Freedoms’ ethos of civic engagement and question-raising — and their nonprofit status — prevents them from engaging specific candidates or parties. Indeed, a persistent criticism is that their artistic approach evades urgent issues in favor of abstract or anodyne statements.
“I ran into this quite a few times in this campaign, actually, about this frustration with a lack of urgency — I wholeheartedly agree 10 million percent,” Brock said two weeks after the election, adding that For Freedoms tries to think in longer arcs than current events.
Should a Billboard Provoke Anger, Even Fear?
Thomas, 48, told me that when his group pictures success, they recall a CNN headline from 2016 about a For Freedoms sign: “Mississippi residents unsure of controversial billboards intent.”
“That’s the sweet spot,” Thomas said.
The billboard, designed by Thomas and Wyatt Gallery, overlaid Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” on a civil rights-era photograph by Spider Martin of police menacing Black demonstrators in Selma, Ala. Residents who saw the billboard weren’t just confused — some contacted For Freedoms to express anger or fear. The billboard was removed ahead of schedule.
Eight years later, the group is more careful — they say they’re conscious that they’re outsiders to the communities where their billboards appear. They’ve developed a series of panel discussions they call town halls (they’ve held over 300) where they answer questions about their messages or discuss challenges like food insecurity.
For Freedoms used to have a phone hotline, and people used it. Now, their audience offers feedback on Instagram. The majority of online comments are positive; there are mounds of encouraging emojis. The criticisms can be withering. One Instagram user ridiculed a sign about a historical Black train porters’ union in Los Angeles: “Worst billboard ever created. I saw this today while driving. The text is small and doesn’t get your message across. This is some type of pretentious tax scam.”
Other comments from the last year or so decry the organization’s lack of a clear stance on the war in Gaza and its mounting civilian toll. In October 2023, For Freedoms reposted a photo of a billboard by Christine Wong Yap, installed in Omaha in 2020. “How Do You Keep Your Heart Open?” it asked, in crisp handwritten letters. Nykelle DeVivo, an artist living in San Diego, excoriated the post in the comments. “Humanism isn’t the answer to colonialism/white supremacy,” DeVivo wrote. “Get your neoliberal head out of your ass.”
In an interview, DeVivo described a split between a “new guard” of artists “that are more for burning it down or for creating new systems, versus trying to find ways to find peace within what the structures already are.” DeVivo underscored their respect for For Freedoms — in 2017, they participated in a digital project the group co-produced. But if there’s money for billboards, DeVivo said, “there’s also the funding to do more radical messaging. But I feel like that would interrupt their funding sources.”
Access to ‘The Medicis of Our Time’
The members of For Freedoms acknowledge the contradictions their project navigates. They solicit money for ad campaigns with subjective outcomes, encouraging civic engagement in ways that convey both nuance and mass appeal.
They even have mixed feelings about billboards as a medium. “Our attention is being grabbed by advertisers, by people trying to point us to do something, or buy something, or vote for something,” Gottesman said. For Freedoms tries to co-opt those blaring ad spaces. As he put it, “That’s an essentially artistic question. How do you participate in flawed systems, of which you are critical?”
We met one afternoon at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles in one of James Turrell’s signature sky rooms, a rectangular space with a retractable roof offering views subtly altered by LEDs. Outside in the courtyard, fashionable guests gathered for a preview of For Freedoms’ new monograph, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” which catalogs their U.S. billboards through 2023.
Early on, Gottesman said, he and Thomas realized that the art world afforded them “access to the Medicis of our time.” (Thomas is the son of the critic, Deborah Willis, and is married to Rujeko Hockley, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.)
Gottesman, who is ready with talking points, said For Freedoms pushes against “the perception that art is elitist. I mean, here we sit.” He gestured toward the skylight. “I think the way to mitigate that is to provide context, and not didactic explanation, but to provide a way for people to have conversations” about art.
I asked Gottesman how For Freedoms measures the success of its projects, particularly the billboards. “This question of impact or metrics or whatever. It comes up all the time,” he said. Funders want to know what their money accomplishes. “Initially my answer was like, screw you for asking,” he said. “We know art works. You wanna know how it works? Like, you measure it. But I’m becoming a little bit more nuanced about it.”
Measuring Art’s Impact
Billboard companies offer metrics like “eyeballs” on your ad. Online, you can measure clicks and attention. Museums can tally visitors. But how do you determine if, and how, someone has been affected by a work of art?
For Freedoms has tried. The group commissioned studies run by the think tanks Perception Institute, in 2018, and More in Common, in 2020. (A third study is in progress, Gottesman said.) These studies queried groups of U.S. adults, including self-identified liberals, conservatives and independents, and asked them to respond to For Freedoms materials, including billboard designs.
Perception Institute’s study had 2,869 participants. Those shown For Freedoms materials reported the intention to vote at a higher rate than those shown images from the feminist activist group Guerrilla Girls, the artist Barbara Kruger and Rock the Vote, a nonprofit aimed at boosting turnout among young voters.
Rachel Godsil, a founder of Perception Institute who worked on the For Freedoms study, underscored that the intent to vote is a strong indicator of actual voting. But she also pointed out that other measures found no meaningful impact. For example, the summary of the report, which Godsil shared, notes that “the content of the campaigns did not have a significant effect on attitudes toward the arts in politics.”
The roughly 100 participants in the More in Common study were shown For Freedoms content including billboards and social media posts and asked to respond.
Reactions varied, especially concerning abstract statements and visuals. The billboard by Christine Wong Yap — remounted in 2024 in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention — that asked “How do you keep your heart open?” appealed to survey participants; whereas another phrase, by Christine Sun Kim, “Why Doubt My Experience,” raised questions.
“What we saw from people is they don’t really know who this billboard is referring to and whose experience is being doubted,” said Coco Xu, who worked on the More in Common study. “A lot of times people just wanted more context.” While many “were also intrigued by the different billboards and visuals,” she added, “there is a sizable minority who is just confused.”
Kim, the Korean American artist, who is deaf, shared in an email that the billboard reflected personal frustrations. “When I call someone out as an ableist or racist, those around us often respond, ‘Oh, they would never do that. Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding.’ This constant doubt in my words is exhausting and consuming.”
She added that, on social media, her billboards “resonated with people, especially deaf Americans.”
Feeling a Little More Powerful
Two days after the election, I drove from New York to Philadelphia to see a billboard by Thomas and Leslie Willis Lowery, his aunt. I wanted to see For Freedoms’ work in public. Although I had its location, I missed it on the first pass. On the second, I spotted it — backlit by the sun setting behind the skyline: looping, white-on-white script, styled like neon, that reads, “Love Over Rules.”
Thomas has used the phrase several times over the years, including in public neon signs, to commemorate his cousin and roommate, Songha Willis, who was murdered in 2000 outside a Philadelphia nightclub. “Love Over Rules” were among Willis’s last words. It’s an intensely personal message for the artist. It may resonate differently, or not at all, with viewers passing in their cars.
I pulled into the arts district where the billboard stood in an empty lot. None of the employees I spoke with at a brewery with a slim view of the billboard had noticed it. One pointed out that Pennsylvania gets a lot of political ads in election years. He’d gotten pretty good at ignoring them.
On For Freedoms’ Instagram I found a fan. RJ Rushmore commended the Philadelphia billboard — he saw it every day. He was also familiar with Thomas and For Freedoms; Thomas had contributed an image to a series of unsanctioned phone booth ads installed by Rushmore’s own collective, Art in Ad Places. “You’re calling to ask about what is it like to see in person,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s the most important thing.” On social media, he said, the billboards have an outsize reach.
But what if, rather than sparking conversations, For Freedoms is mostly bolstering what people already think? That’s important too, said the Guerrilla Girls member known as Käthe Kollwitz.
“With this giant billboard, everyone sort of feels a little more powerful,” Kollwitz added, “if it’s speaking to you about something you care about.” (Guerrilla Girls has produced many billboards since the 1980s, and two with For Freedoms in 2018 and 2020.)
The artists behind the billboards generally agree that more public art never hurts. “I used to be pretty anti-billboard,” Wong Yap told me. “I came of age in the 90s and I was reading ‘Adbusters,’” a seminal culture-jamming magazine. But the media landscape has changed, she said. “There’s so much at stake right now in this particular moment. We don’t have the luxury of being picky about the tools that we use.”
For Freedoms has branched out into online videos, public forums and publishing. But the group says it will keep making billboards. For one thing, they said, journalists love them.
