Defend Your Planet, 2014 by Favianna Rodriguez. She made this piece for the People’s
Climate March in September 2014. I particularly chose this art piece, because the way I heard about the Climate March, was through a flyer someone handed me in front of
Borough of Manhattan Community College. And the first thing that got my attention was the this art piece printed on the front page of the flyer. I ended up attending the March with my friend, and it was an incredible experience to be part of something so important to our existence on earth. What is interesting about this is, that this painting on the flyer was so powerful and made me think about the consequences of our behaviors in our environment, that I was driven by it and acted on behalf of that and wanted to help make a change.
The march began around 11:30 a.m., at New York City's Columbus
Circle just off Central Park and all the marchers carried banners and signs that represented mother earth and its concerns, and a lot of those people were carrying this specific poster, which I my mind is a very powerful poster to march with, and I can say this was one of the only posters that I remember from the march.
The first obvious things, that are to see on this monotype and collage on
Japanese paper is a mother with her child in her arms and a house in the background.
In front of her is the earth and around the edge of the earth are cities. And very obvious
is the Statue of liberty to the left side on the edge of the globe. The background has yellow, orange tones, which reflects a very warm environment and comfort. The house as well as the planet are blue, and I was thinking that the blue house might suggest, that the rising sea levels could “destroy” the home and blue also represents colder atmospheres. The cities circling the earth are black, which to me shows, that we the people in the cities, with our urban lives and constant inventions, cars and our use of technology harm our planet. It is as if we have surrounded earth and slowly “kill our planet”. Like the title suggests, this painting is about the earth we live on, which has different categories to it, we can separate it into family, home, city, planet. When we see our planet as just earth, we are wrong, there is so much that contributes to our planet, and we are responsible for a lot of it.
We as the