A (Brief!) Statement from the Artist

Andrew Kohan can’t decide what he wants to be when he grows up, but for now he’s a working comics artist and illustrator regularly making trouble at Winnipeg City Hall. A trained community organizer with roots in the HIV/AIDS movement, he’s made art and noise with grassroots activists in DC, Chicago, Cleveland, and Toronto. More of his work is available at andrewkohan.com.

Recommended citation:

Kohan, Andrew. “A (Brief!) Statement from the Artist.” Sequentials, vol. 2, no. 1, 2021.

Text descriptions of page images:

Page 1

Title: A (brief!) statement from the artist

Rough comic sketch: White man with a beard and messy hair sitting at a desk with an iPad.
Speech bubble: “Hi, I’m Andrew. I drew this book!”
Speech bubble: “Right now, I’m still drawing it!”
Image: A big Apple Pencil draws the speech bubble in a meta-reference to the act of illustrating the comics.

Text: “When I started collaborating with Joe and Tanner to interpret this great activism-oriented learning sciences scholarship, I was excited.”

Rough comic sketch: Andrew, Joe, and Tanner talking. Andrew speech bubble: “There’s a lot of great work here! I'd love to help make it more accessible to activists!”
Joe and Tanner combined speech bubble: “YAY!”

Text: “And since we got started, the need for this work has only felt even more pressing.”

Rough comic sketch: Police in riot gear about to hit protestor with a baton. The protestor is holding sign that says, “No cops on Stolen Land.” Another protestor has a sign that reads, “ACAB.”

Text: “It feels like there’s a new crisis every week. With everything going on, who has time to read a whole article, no matter how crucial?”

Text: “All that crisis doesn’t make it easy to do this kind of work, either. While we’ve been making this book, I can’t count the ours spent in organizing meetings, having one-on-ones, on video conferences (thanks COVID-19!), and at protest after protest upon protest.”

Rough comic sketches: A meeting at a round table, a Zoom meeting with lots of squares of people, a protest banner that says, “No Cuts. Except Cops,” a large rally with placards that say, “Justice for Eishia” (a 16-year-old Indigenous girl killed by police in Winnipeg in 2020), Andrew standing next to his bike as part of the rally, wearing a shirt that says, “Abolish the Police.” Andrew’s thought bubble says, “Isn’t it more important to be in the streets than working on any comic?” A dashed line labeled “(Related)” connects this thought bubble to the speech bubble at the top of the page that says, “Right now, I’m still drawing it!”

Page 2

Rough comic sketch of Andrew’s face with speech bubble: “Maybe all that uprising has something to do with one of the biggest problems with this book: my tendency to draw activism principally in relation to protest.”

Text heading: “Pros”

Text list item: “It’s easy and fun to draw protests.”

Rough comic sketch: Andrew in a rolling office chair drawing on his iPad as people march past.

Text list item: “Protests are recognizable symbols of activism.”

Rough comic sketch: A person standing neutrally, labeled with three question marks, next to a person holding a sign, labeled “Activist!”

Text list item: “The easiest images to reference about movements I wasn’t a part of are the tactics.”

Rough comic sketch: A video camera is capturing the image of a protest, while out of frame there are images of meetings, discussions, planning with a flipchart, and cooking—all with arrows pointing into the center protest image.

Text heading: “Cons”

Text list item: “Most of the real doing of activism is behind the scenes, keeping movements alive. (Marxist feminists call this ‘reproductive labour,’ some social movement scholars call it ‘shit work’).”

Small, rough comic sketches: A non-binary person with an undercut chopping vegetables, a white woman washing dishes, an Asian Canadian woman making a sign, a Black NB putting up a poster on a light post, a flyer reads: “meet and plan,” a person doing childcare, a Brown person in a wheelchair counting money at a table.

Text list item: “This work is often gendered, sometimes racialized, and almost universally de-emphasized in popular stories.”

Rough comic sketch: A white man on a stage, with two press cameras on him. Behind the scenes, eight women and non-binary people doing the work.

Text list item: “Focusing on tactics instead of the work of movements doesn't help us learn to win.”

Rough comic sketch: Two people are talking in a deserted scene. One says, “I don't get it. I posted the event on Facebook!” A tumbleweed rolls by.

Rough comic sketch of Andrew talking: “and anyway, the best and most treasured stories of movement elders mostly aren’t protest stories.”

Rough comic sketch of a polaroid of a white woman serving young Rosa Parks bacon at Highlander.

Rough comic sketch of older Rosa Parks saying, “…and that was the first time I really believed that integration was possible.”

Page 3

Text: “All the same, I’m bringing a visual approach to this work, and the movements that I love and brought me up spent a lot of effort to make visible presences that remain etched in our collective consciousness.”

Rough comic sketch of Andrew holding a Treatment Access Now sign, wearing a shirt that says “Student Global AIDS Campaign.”

Large comic sketch of the iconic poster of a pink triangle against a black background that says, “SILENCE = DEATH.”

Andrew speech bubble: “The AIDS movement, where I got my start in activism, has produced some very stunning visuals in both design and action. The ACT UP elders who mentored me and my peers knew how to take direct action and be visually memorable.”

Text: “So I hope you’ll forgive my indulging in the quick trick of drawing activists with placards and megaphones. Comics are a visual medium and lean towards shortform and tropes to get ideas across quickly and digestibly.”

Rough comic sketch: I AM A MAN signs, from a Black Civil Rights Movement protest.

Text: “But when I think about the movements that got us here…”

Rough comic sketch: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at the reflecting pool with the Washington Monument and Capitol in the background.

Text: “I think those movements lean into images, too.”

Rough comic sketch: Bree Newsome scaling a flagpole to remove a confederate flag.

Text: “Maybe it takes a striking image—”

Rough comic sketch: Two posters. Poster 1 shows George Floyd’s face and reads, “Rest in Power, George Floyd.” Poster 2 reads, “Abolish the Police.”

Text: “—to help us imagine transforming our world.”

Text: “Just remember, as the authors here make clear, if we want our movements to learn and grow, WE GOTTA DO THE WORK!”

Page 4

This comic is part of Learning to Engage: Movements and Sociocultural Theories of Learning.

For more, visit: AndrewKohan.com/LearningToEngage

Art and lettering by Andrew Kohan (little sketch of Andrew) (@akohan, AndrewKohan.com)

Edited by Joe Curnow (little sketch of Joe) (@LearnSolidarity, joe.curnow@umanitoba.ca) & Tanner Vea (little sketch of Tanner) (@TannerVea, tvea@psu.edu)

This comic was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (Grant #201900131). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation.

©2020

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0