Blog / 2024 / Pollinator Propaganda

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

It all started with a silly question:

What if bees hired a marketing firm?

I was trying to figure out what kind of self-promotion these essential pollinators would want. Would it even be self-promotion? Or would bees understand the bigger picture better than us? That’s how Aunt Sam, a bee version of the American icon Uncle Sam, was born!

I began with a bee painting I made in 2012 for my book, Crime Against Nature. I always liked this image. I figured out how to give the bee an Uncle Sam kind of hat—I was working on a French version of this piece at the same time and that’s what the floppy cap you see on the bee is from.

Then I started painting, layering on the color and figuring out as I went what the painting should look like in terms of red, white, and blue but also in terms of how I wanted the text to look.

While I don’t know that my pollinator promotion will help the bees or the rest of us very much, I like the idea of stretching my imagination. So much of our world today is set on narrowing our vision, turning us into consumers who accept things as they are. We buy into traditional ways of thinking as we buy the products that those ways of thinking produce.

We need to imagine a better world before we can create it. We need to imagine that bees and rivers and the climate can participate fully in human society—that they each can be as much of person as a corporation is, for example. I’d love it if they could have a vote or a voice. What would our world look like if we designed a social system in which the natural world was a full participant? What common language would we speak?

I speak two human ones already and that certainly feeds my imagination. I made a French version of Aunt Sam, playing on the French icon Marianne.

We need to imagine a better world before we can create it, and art is excellent at nurturing our imagination.