PORTLAND, Maine — On the edge of the Old Port, an unassuming print shop is becoming a hotbed of political protest.
For the past week, artists Charlie Hewitt and David Wolfe have been holed up in the Bakery Studios, frantically producing collages — many disturbing — of President-elect Donald Trump, and ratcheting them up for humor, shock and awe.
On their days-old site, StealThisPrint.com, anyone can download, print and spread their politically charged posters around the world — for free.
In an example of how left-leaning creatives across the country are reacting to Trump’s election, the artists are marrying an old-school medium with the immediacy of the internet to create a digital hub to protest the current political climate.
With a nod to activist Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal this Book,” an anti-government guide tied to the 1960s Yippie movement, Steal This Print hopes to use digital images to augment a growing progressive protest.
The artists are inviting other makers, like Cannonball Press in Brooklyn, New York, to join their online community, and want street artists to take notice, too.
“We hope that it gets stuck up on lampposts,” said Wolfe. “The exciting part of this is what’s happening online. It puts it into so many hands.”
At the helm is Hewitt. The ’60s counterculture Mainer came of age in New York’s SoHo and Lower East Side art scenes. As the 70-year-old places a cut-out head of Trump behind a paper wall, he cracks a smile. The white-haired artist hasn’t been this fired up since Richard Nixon was in The White House.
Hewitt was active in Vietnam War protests, journeyed to Kent State after the massacre and was involved in anti-Nixon rallies.
“This is a way to exorcise my demons,” said the painter and sculptor, who likens the country’s hard turn to the right to a national hemorrhage.
“The whole vessel just cracked. This is not a normal world. Things will fall apart,” he said.
Putting paintbrushes aside, Hewitt has new energy and a renewed mission. One of several posters he has made is an appropriated drawing by artist Philip Guston depicting Nixon with a swollen leg as a crutch in his Phlebitis series. Hewitt added Trump into the frame. Another, conceived by Wolfe, shows Trump’s head coming out of a devil’s rear end with the word “Loser.”
The makers are enjoying the faster pace of this rough-and-tumble low art, which is not meant to be perfect or pretty.
Instead of pitchforks, flaming torches and Molotov cocktails, these artists are hurling provocative posters accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
“All these images are out there and they just jumped into the consciousness. The wall becomes an image. You put a wall up and everyone knows it’s Donald Trump’s wall,” Hewitt said as he collaged the head of Trump peering over a brick wall flanked by a sign for Maine mill towns like Mexico and Rumford.
He intends to design a slew of pinatas with Trump’s likeness and have them made in Mexico, Maine. A line of safety pins is in the works, too.
“We have to drive a political process out of Maine,” said Hewitt, who has a studio in New Jersey and is represented by a New York City gallery, but lives in Yarmouth. Driving back to Maine from Manhattan recently with Wolfe, the idea came to him.
“I was thinking of this just before the election. When [Trump] won, I knew we had to do it,” Hewitt said.
Wolfe, a printer, has made hundreds of posters through the years, but never political until now, and said he feels personally responsible for the presidential outcome. He, like many Americans, underestimated Trump’s chances of winning.
“We have a system of checks and balances in this country, and he is closing them down,” said Wolfe. “We would like to make sure they stay open.”
Fellow artist Crystal Cawley fears that the Trump administration could retaliate once he’s inaugurated. She is working by Wolfe’s and Hewitt’s side on her own artistic lament.
“Our president-elect doesn’t read, he just fires off tweets. I’m against that,” she said. “So I’m firing a shot.”