I made this drawing of Lady Liberty after a guy on twitter said he’d donate $5 to the ACLU for every hand-drawn image of support for refugees and detainees tweeted at him.
I made this drawing of a variant Baphomet after seeing this post of a miniature Baphomet statue (I want one for my dollhouse garden so much!). The Satanic Temple sells them in their online store.
The horrific situation with the US makes me want to make transgressive art that shows love and faith. I don’t know if this will give comfort to anyone but me, but it makes me feel better to have made it. Thanks to the monthly support of my Patrons, I can make and distribute free and copyright free art. He can gut the NEA, but he can’t stop the people from supporting artists.
Usually I make my free drawings available with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike License (CC BY-NC-SA), so that people can use them freely but Urban Outfitters can’t profit off them. However, in this case, if Urban Outfitters wants to make t-shirts or phone cases with my fat, hairy, trans demon sheltering a spectrum of marginalized children, they are welcome to.
This drawing is in no way intended to be a critique of the official Satanic Temple Baphomet statue, created by Brooklyn sculptor Mark Porter after a drawing by 19th-century French occultist Eliphas Levi.
The official sculpture is a transgressive work of art that derives visceral power from the clever use of two children in a pose that echoes popular formatted iconography of the 1950s. No shade, just a variant, an homage I offer to the world!
I hope the statue will be placed at the Arkansas Capitol; I love the mission of The Satanic Temple:
The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will. Politically aware, Civic-minded Satanists and allies in The Satanic Temple have publicly opposed The Westboro Baptist Church, advocated on behalf of children in public school to abolish corporal punishment, applied for equal representation where religious monuments are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy, exposed fraudulent harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners and claims in mental health care, and applied to hold clubs alongside other religious after school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations.
I have been a huge fan of Montreal photographer Laurence Philomene since their first showing in Berlin, at the inaugural IRL Curated by GIrls show.
I’ve been following Laurence on Instagram and delighting in their Non-Binary Portrait Series. These luminous works are alive with compassion and love. With Laurence’ permission, one of the works is reproduced below. It doesn’t compare to seeing them in a bright gallery, printed large, though! They are so fucking exhilarating.
