An Art Machine for Global Movements

Many of the Projects on this website were built in my role as Founder and Creative Director of Amplifier.org. In the gallery below you will find dozen of other examples from 14 years of this initiative.

Amplifier was born from a TED talk I gave in 2010, based on a photographic body of work that needed to be spoken about in a way that did not fit with editorial publications like National Geographic. It was a story that demanded I pick a side, to stop being an observer and shifting into a role on some projects as an active participant and advocate. The images I was making for magazines needed to be distributed in new ways that viewers could not choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to. They needed to confront people in the streets and arm the movements fighting to have their voice heard. The stories needed to Amplify the work already happening in grassroots organizations around the world that didn’t have a big enough microphone.

I wanted to take the photo I was making transform them through collaborations with street artists, and pair them with the language from communities on the frontlines of fights for human and environmental rights and pointing to outlets for action and the orgianizations hwo had been working on teh ground on those topics for decades. The final outputs could take over public spaces, from wheat-pasting walls, to billboards, murals, and stickers, and bypass publications going straight to the public. My first collaborators were Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena, and through a 2011 crowdfunding campaign focused on treaty rights, and print sales of the work, enough funds were raised to distribute tens of thousands of physicals works in cities across the US, with enough left to fund dozens of other artists to make and distribute new work on the causes they cared about most. And so began the “Art Machine” that eventually became Amplifier.org, making art to sell art to make art to sell art to help Amplify the most important movements of our time.