The artist Carrie Mae Weems, who was awarded a Nationwide Medal of Arts earlier this month, has lent photographs from her landmark Kitchen Desk Collection (1990) to a nationwide marketing campaign advert supporting Kamala Harris’s run for the US presidency. The video, titled Kamala’s Desk, begins airing right this moment (30 October) on streaming and digital platforms in battleground states. It’s aimed toward urging Black, Latino, Asian and girls voters to help the Democratic candidate on the polls on 5 November.
Opening with a slideshow of scenes drawn from Weems’s well-known sequence (which depicts the every day life, worries and joys of a Black lady portrayed by the artist herself), the advert transitions to images of Harris throughout her childhood and on the marketing campaign path. “The kitchen desk. It is the place we collect with household. It is the place we eat collectively, pay our payments. It is the place Kamala Harris discovered the significance of serving the folks,” a voiceover narrates. The advert outlines just a few of Harris’s key election guarantees, together with tax credit for households and a proposal to provide first-time homebuyers as much as $25,000 to allow them to afford the down fee. “Pull up a chair,” the advert says in closing. “At Kamala Harris’s desk, there is a seat for you.”
“Very similar to nearly all of the nation, Kamala Harris was raised in a working-class house. She is aware of the struggles and hopes of People, as a result of she lived them too,” Mark Skidmore, the chief government of the inventive company Assemble, tells The Artwork Newspaper. Skidmore wrote the script for the advert with Gina Belafonte, the director and chief government of Sankofa—a social-justice basis based by her father, the late actor and Civil Rights activist Harry Belafonte. “Kamala is somebody who labored exhausting, performed by the principles and understands the advanced points dealing with households right this moment,” Belafonte says.
The advert was produced and directed by the filmmakers Tanya Selvaratnam and Hannah Rosenzweig, who beforehand labored collectively on the feature-length documentary Surge (2020), which tracked the report variety of first-time girls candidates who ran and gained seats throughout the US throughout the 2018 midterm elections. The Harris advert was commissioned by Communities United, a political motion committee that goals to mobilise girls, folks of color and youthful voters.
