• Make It Meaningful is a book for aspiring and established creatives (artists, crafters, makers) on how to make socially engaged street art and crafts that speak to the issues of the day, from politics to social justice to the environment. Uplifting and modifying the age-old tradition of protest art and crafts, this book includes advice, inspiration, and suggestions for contemporary creative instigators; it encourages them to think about how they can take their creative skills and apply them to projects with collaborators with the intent of making change in the world.

• The book also profiles of some of today’s most compelling artists working in the field, including Diana Weymar of the Tiny Pricks Project, a public art project that used embroidery and needlepoint to capture President Trump’s most egregious falsehoods; the Red Dress Awareness campaign, a traveling art installation of red dresses on clothelines to bring attention to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in North America; and The Spirit of the Animals is in the Wheels, a fleet of pedal-powered animals created by Juan Martinez and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers that transports kids in Detroit and other urban centers to after-school literacy and tutoring centers, in the belief that artwork should live and work in the community, not only in galleries.

• The book includes several full-color photographs of various art projects insitu.

• Leanne conceived of the book prior to the pandemic but wrote most of it during the world-wide quarantine in 2020. As we emerge from the pandemic, Leanne says that she and most of the artists included in the book feel that the role of participatory art in our culture is all the more crucial and necessary: “There was a lot of fear expressed in my conversations with artists [during the pandemic], but overall, one theme that stood out was that they all knew that they needed to continue to make something to connect with other people.”

• Leanne Prain is the co-author of Yarn Bombing (2009), considered a seminal book on the “knit graffiti” phenomenon that continues to this day. The original book was a bestseller and featured on the front page of the New York Times’ style section; an updated tenth-anniversary edition was published in 2019. Leanne is also the author of two other Arsenal titles: Strange Material (on activist textiles) in 2014, and Hoopla (on unorthodox crochet) 2011 (now out of print).

© 2022 Arsenal Pulp Press (eBook): 9781551528762

Data wydania

eBook: 19 kwietnia 2022