Joan Baez Captures Her Heroes as she Celebrates her 80th Birthday
Video by Jane Hambleton
After a year unlike any other, Joan Baez emerges with her second collection of “Mischief Makers” – portraits of personal heroes, inspirational figures and extraordinary people who have made the world a better place.
In celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday, a reception will be streamed at 5:30 p.m. (PST) January 9, an interview with Baez, a virtual tour of the show and other festivities and “mischief” to mark this milestone occasion. Tickets are $15 at https://bit.ly/JoanBaezLiveStream.
The follow-up to her first “Mischief Makers” in 2017, her debut as a visual artist, “Mischief Makers 2” celebrates a new cast of luminaries and activists in a range of fields -- from politics and public health to literature, sports, music, entertainment, environmentalism, spirituality and the counterculture.
Since her decision to stop worldwide touring in 2019, the folk music icon has traded the stage for the art studio in her Northern California home, painting portraits of her personal heroes for this show, including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, filmmaker Michael Moore, former NFL quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick, gun control activist Emma Gonzalez, counterculture icon Wavy Gravy and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Alice Walker. As she did in her first “Mischief Makers,” Joan includes a self-portrait, this one titled “Black is the Color.”
With “Mischief Makers 2,” Joan paints people working for social justice and positive change through nonviolence. It’s art that not only illuminates. It inspires.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full color catalog of all 21 paintings that can be ordered through the Seager Gray gallery at [email protected].
This is her opening Artist Statement.
When I developed the first Mischief Makers exhibit in 2017, the portraits I painted reflected what I hoped would be an antidote to the toxic politics poisoning the nation, an escape from the perilous mire into which we as a population were sinking. I saw our situation as one that could certainly not last. But it has lasted.
The same month my new cast of Mischief Makers makes its debut in the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, California, we will have lived through so many grinding and heartbreaking events that many of us, on both sides of the aisle, are bone tired, waiting for a break in the news, a vaccine to appear, a president to disappear.
Maybe this has been our darkest hour. And maybe you and I can help usher in a new dawn.
During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, in a moment of inspiration, I painted infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci (he prefers “Tony”) and posted his portrait on the internet with a single word next to his image: “TRUST.” It went viral, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Then I posted my painting of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg along with the word “VOTE.” She received the same response. For hundreds of thousands of people, these portraits were like fierce crocus blades, green and piercing upward through the frozen earth.
I have never been one to endorse political candidates. But realizing that voting in the 2020 presidential election was the most important action anyone could and must take, I entered the political arena, painting then Senator Kamala Harris, now our Vice President-elect, with the inspired title “BADASS.”
My little portrait campaign, the second iteration of Mischief Makers, has been my way of doing what I could to help win this righteous fight. If nothing else, I believe it has kept my subjects and me on the side of the angels.
I hope this new collection of portraits inspires you. Maybe it will encourage you to go out and, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “make good trouble.”
--Joan Baez. December, 2020
See the entire exhibition here
Get a ticket to join the streamed birthday celebration here
