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DAVID LESTER ART

Normal History Vol. 12: The Art Of David Lester

leasterv12370Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Questions from the audience … The recent Mecca Normal tour included “How Art & Music Can Change the World,” an art, music and lecture event that intends to inspire audiences to add political ideas to their creative self-expression. The lecture features David’s “Inspired Agitators” poster series, which includes Paul Robeson. At a high-school event, David talked about Robeson, outlining his beliefs and actions, telling the students that the U.S. government punished him by revoking his passport. After the lecture, two young Asian women—girls, really—came bounding up to ask, “What’s lynching?” At another lecture, a young woman looked bored out of her tree. Hunched in her chair, eyes down—I wondered if we were making an impression at all. Two weeks later she wrote to say that she and her friend had spent the rest of that night talking about things we’d said and that since then she’d been in an extremely creative mode. This is a realistic model of how small actions multiply into waves of inspiration that can change the world.