Art of Resistance!
Beehive Design Collective Winter Tour
presenting Mesoamérica Resiste & The True Cost of Coal
(yes this really is on a Tuesday)
The Beehive Design Collective is a wildly motivated, all-volunteer, activist arts collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. They work as word-to-image translators of complex global stories, shared with us through conversations with affected communities.
In workshops and presentations giant, portable murals are used to deconstruct complex issues of globalization, climate change, colonization, and resource extraction. By provoking discussion, raising hard questions, and sharing hopeful stories about actions big and small we can take to build a better world.
The Mesoamérica Resiste graphics campaign is the culmination of nine years of story gathering, research, and illustration. The title, Mesoamérica Resists, reflects our efforts to document and share diverse stories of resistance, inspiration and solidarity. Our hope in releasing it into the world is that it will live and evolve as a dynamic tool for organizing and educating about some of the most important issues of our times.
This collaboratively produced illustration was created through an intensive process of grassroots research. It all started in 2004, when an initial team from the US, Canada, and Mexico traveled together from Mexico to Panama. Our most ambitious and elaborate graphic to date, Mesoamérica Resiste is a tale of widespread resistance to the mega- infrastructure projects of the Mesoamerican Integration and Development Project, or Project Mesoamerica.
The True Cost of Coal. Long exploited as a resource-extraction colony within the US, the Appalachian mountains are home to a fight for survival which has determined, in part, the industrial power of this country. Without coal, mined at a great cost to Appalachian communities, there would be no ‘cheap’ electricity. Today’s energy corporations and government bodies are continuing to show the extent of their greed and short-sightedness as they push their extractive agendas in the “New Coal Rush.” We will expose the deceptions of “clean coal” technologies and bring to light the root causes of the climate chaos the planet is facing today.
The True Cost of Coal examines all of our connections to coal, while celebrating stories of struggle from mountain communities. The last chapter of the story also looks to the future, raising questions about alternatives, remediation, and regeneration.