Structural Patterns

As the School for Practical Philosophy & Meditation prepares for the fall registration, I again worked with creative director Jaime Sears and digital consultant Adam Wasserman to create the new advertisement campaign. We began by considering current events and New York City realities – the protests due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, upcoming national elections, heightened political tensions, rising rents… And yet New Yorkers are incredibly resilient. Tourism appears to be thriving. Based on the heavy daily traffic, it appears that the city is hard at work. New building projects are everywhere and there isn’t enough housing. New immigrants are increasingly integrated into the city life… We sought to create an advertising campaign that captured the ongoing unrest while also celebrating the resilience of New Yorkers and adjacent to it all, the peace that one may achieve through philosophy and meditation.

I created a few new illustrated characters in meditation, two were selected. I scoured the web for New York City silouette landscapes and combined and reworked vector files to generate a city background. I also reworked silouettes of people protesting. I created two variations of this scene, one with characters that I had created and another only with silouettes. For the platform poster, I used a graphic AI to generate images of NYC residents protesting. It took many prompts to have an image generated that I wanted to work with. I vectorized the image, reworked it and then superimposed one of the meditating characters along with the text theme we landed upon: “PEACE BEGINS WITH YOU.” And the copy begins with the question “Struggling to find your place in a chaotic world?” The greater space of the platform poster permitted us to broaden the copy with a few of the outcomes from the introductory course “Philosophy Works”: learn timeless wisdom, focus, happiness and inner-strength.

A recent article from El Pais details the mass migration of Cubans off the island:

Cuban economist and demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos has announced that between 2022 and 2023, the island’s population fell by 18%… His study also references the 738,680 Cubans who arrived in the United States between October 2021 and April 2024 after receiving immigrant visas… The economy had been moving towards collapse since 2019, there were the economic sanctions of the Trump administration, economic and political measures that sank the country even further”
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-07-23/from-a-population-of-11-million-to-little-more-than-85-million-the-real-toll-of-cubas-migratory-crisis.html

The first time that I was in Cuba in 2017, the island was in the midst of positive transformation. Tourism was thriving, there was construction throughout the streets of Havana and Camaguey. And the centers of both cities were bustling. Whether it was the curators of the video festival I participated in or the students working the festival or the owner of the home that hosted me, people appeared happy, friendly and eager for conversation and exchange. By my second visit, in 2019, the island seemed very transformed. Everyone I spoke with wanted off the island. Construction and renovation sites seemed abandoned. Tourism had radically declined. It was striking to see the negative change. I entirely blame Trump and his administration’s short-sighted isolationism.

As an extremely near neighbor of the United States, our empire has the power to quickly transform this island. Obama saw that possibility and even our responsibility to help the Cuban people. The Obama administration opened up travel to Cuba and Americans immediately embraced the island as a vacation destination for so many great reasons – quick and easy travel, inexpensive, and a taste of unique unAmericanized culture without McDonald’s or Starbucks on every corner. Everyone felt it was the moment to visit Cuba before McDonald’s, Starbucks, Target, Americanization took over… Trump’s moronic and selfish isolationism put a halt to the economic upswing of Cuba and rather than stopping the immigration of Cubans to the United States, his policies have brought the numbers up because hungry and desperate people will migrate.