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Utopia doesn’t have to exist solely within the confines of a textbook. Idealism has been driving an activist-turned-artistic Maine-born collective for six years, and it’s thriving.
Representatives of the Beehive Collective, which encourages the reproduction of its uncopyrighted works, found themselves educating and entertaining for two hours in Neville Hall at the University of Maine last night. The speakers were more interested in generating discussion around the issues that had inspired the art, while providing some historical background to their efforts.
Regular Common Ground fairgoers may have seen their sprawling black-and-white posters brimming with images of insects, nature and activity. The collective is best known for its two completed “graphics,” or posters, embodying the complex topics of free trade within the Americas and the anti-drug-war strategy of Plan Colombia, both respectively completed before 2003. One speaker, who calls herself Emma “Bee,” promised that the collective would be issuing a third graphic by July 2007, but in the meantime the group is in a transition period, branching out to connect graphic artists with other non-profit organizations.
As most of the collective’s works involve indirect attacks on big corporations, oppressive media outlets and the abuse of technology and militarization efforts, it may come as a surprise that no one has, in turn, tried to oppress them. Part of that lies within the fact that much of the artwork is without words and can be open to interpretation, despite the extensive amount of research that fuels the decision-making process of how to symbolize abstract concepts. Another factor is the group simply “does not attract ‘that kind’ of attention,” according to Emma.
Emma said that the group has received criticism, but explained, “It’s never mean-spirited. People really just want to see our work be the best that it can be, so most of it is constructive criticism.”
One of those criticisms touched on last night involved the “demonizing” of certain animals. For example, the spiders found in the FTA poster represent the destructive forces of globalization. Emma and her colleague Bubba “Bee” acknowledged that maybe these depictions were too influenced by stereotypes found in popular culture, thus the third graphic will feature faceless hominoid representations of the “bad guys.”
This identification of an overtly negative theme was what has been pushing back the presentation of the third graphic, the “Bees” said. Specifically, Emma mentioned that they had to completely restart the project from scratch to incorporate a “more powerful message” with more hope and less foreboding.
