In the wake of the 2016 election, a community of artists started to answer a question: What really makes America great? Trump’s campaign hadn’t defined what “great” meant, or how the country would know that it had been reached “again.” Some called the slogan a racist dog whistle–a sanitized version of a Tennessee politician’s 2016 billboard that literally said, “Make America White Again” and tried to evoke white nostalgia for the 1950s.
A new book, What Really Makes America Great, collects the artists’ work, all in the form of posters designed to celebrate what’s already great about America, from freedom of the press and religious freedom to intersectional feminism and taco trucks.
When the project first started, the team planned to publish 100 posters from 100 artists in the first 100 days of the presidency. But they were overwhelmed with submissions, and the campaign is still going. “It’s still very much alive,” says Slavkin. Until now, the art was sold as posters and T-shirts on Creative Action Network’s website. Now the book will be sold nationwide, “in places like Walmart and Target, and outside of our community and outside of the world of activists and political types who follow it,” he says. “Now we can bring this message to anyone walking down an aisle at one of these stores.” Proceeds support DreamCorps, a social justice accelerator founded by Van Jones.