As the election shifts into screeching high gear, Jeff Gates is girded for the race. He is an agitator whose weapons are visual disruptions aimed at the MAGA leadership. In word and picture he’s made a rogues’ gallery of legislators, government leaders and their advisors who’ve gone mad. Through Dec. 8, this retinue of rascals is hanging in the exhibition The Faces of the Republican Party at the American University Museum. I wrote an essay for the catalog—which you can read below.
Jeff Gates is angry, and reasonably so. “I’m angry at those who manipulate our cultural zeitgeist for their own aspirations,” he says. Creating political posters that visually ooze contempt through take-no-prisoner images, each poster in Faces of the Republican Party is executed with emotional intensity. Each politico’s face is captioned with a simple indictment for crimes against the nation. His targets are the fervent MAGA men and women in Congress and those opportunists who are just along for the ride.
Make no mistake, this work is not gratuitous trashing, but heartfelt protest. “To govern effectively, we need people who listen to each other,” Gates says, “especially those from different parts of the political spectrum.” The congressional representatives for whom he shows no mercy aren’t interested in governing. “The Republican Party,” he insists, “isn’t interested, either.” They want raw power. And Gates’ images reveal this as vividly as he can.
His images are neither caricatures nor portraits; let’s call them character traits. In the tradition of German polemicist John Heartfield, the acerbic Weimar photomontage executioner, Gates’ raw material comes from public photographs. “I will often alter their faces just enough to emphasize the emotions and attitudes they’re already conveying.” They are arguably exaggerated portrayals and decidedly vicious in their intent. Gates takes exception: “If we’re going to use the word ‘vicious,’ these people’s rhetoric and actions are vicious. As a visual critic, I’m just pointing it out.”
Jeff Gates’ biography reads like a testament to the First Amendment and the tremendous power of political commentary. In the late 1980s, he founded Artists for a Better Image (ArtFBI) to study stereotypes of contemporary artists. With a political science and graphic design background and living in Washington, DC, he found a critical voice by addressing political causes. Early on, he understood the social ramifications of the web, which influenced his choice to join the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As lead producer of New Media Initiatives for 22 years before retiring in 2018, he helped shepherd the museum into the online world. He is the founder of the Chamomile Tea Party, where he’s created over 300 posters on the hypocrisy of American political discourse. Just before the 2012 presidential election, he was the first artist to buy ad space in in the DC Metro, hanging posters about the effects of legislative partisanship on platform signs. From 2018–2020, Google Arts & Culture published an eight-part online exhibition of this work, allowing Gates to create a visual history of American politics, from the rise of the Tea Party to the election of Donald Trump. And his bête noir is the onerous gang of ultra-right agitators, including Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar. They “deserve to be taken to task for their lack of civility, their unwillingness to compromise for the betterment of Americans’ lives, their belief in conspiracy theories, and their desire to disrupt our institutions instead of helping their constituents.”
Gates is nostalgic for saner times when “the purpose of our government [was and] is to solve problems so we can survive and flourish. It’s not a place for personal vendettas or manufactured cultural wedge issues.” His “Faces” reflect frustration with this existential perverse transformation of American beliefs.
Gates’ earlier work began as remixes of 20th-century propaganda posters. He’s always been an ardent observer of advertising. “I’m interested in how to ‘sell’ an idea using images and text in very economical ways to increase their impact.” His philosophy for making agitprop art has deep personal roots. “Western and Eastern philosophies show us two different ways we deal with power and anger,” he explains. “Think of the West’s boxing versus the East’s martial arts. In boxing, it’s who hits hardest and longest: direct power against power. In martial arts, one uses their opponent’s energy against them—taking the oncoming force and redirecting it. I’m more of a martial arts guy in my interactions with others. I grew up in a house where whoever yelled the loudest won. Later, I learned to disable my father’s ‘boxing’ by redirecting his anger. It was fascinating and compelling.”
His art is a psychological release. “I’m redirecting their power to give voice to my opinion.” As a visual political critic, Gates understands the limits of his power as an artist. “I make these images for myself. It’s a way of countering the powerlessness I feel these days. I’m not a political powerbroker. The success of my work is getting it out into the public where people can react to it and even use it (this is why I offer all my digital images as free downloads).” He hopes the people depicted in these images might see and react to them. But Gates has no illusions. “They won’t inflict pain on people so self-absorbed. If anything, they feed on criticism.”
Throughout history, artists have often faced penalties for their opinions. Among other banned graphic commentators of the 1920s, Georg Grosz was put on trial for libel and “sacrilegious” work for protesting militarism and caricaturing key military leaders. In this country, Gates has the freedom to be contentious. “The First Amendment protects my right to comment on [our leaders’] behavior unless I am inciting violence, which I’m not. There are no religious or social edicts against visually depicting Congresspeople.” Libel means to defame. Merriam-Webster defines defamation as “communicating false statements about a person that injure that person’s reputation.” There is nothing false about these images or the words they utter. Gates either quotes them or describes behavior that has already been documented. “Any defamation of their character is self-inflicted,” he says. But he’s anxious about losing that freedom.
Gates believes that artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Pablo Picasso, Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson, and more contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei, Banksy, Nan Goldin and Kara Walker have “documented their times in their work.
“As we refine our history to include previously obscure events or marginalized people and their experiences, art creates and enhances expanded worldviews.”
And where does his current commentary fit into the body politic? “Many see my work as part of the left critique,” he explains. “But I find some things very illiberal about the far left. This isn’t an issue of ‘bothsidesism,’” he insists. “The GOP is much more destructive. It keeps churning out cultural wedge issues, such as teaching critical race theory. They ban important books that tell a more realistic history of the American experience. And they often attempt to rewrite history.”
There can be no mistaking Gates as non-partisan. His work to date has focused on Republicans. Yet he describes his position as not being on the political spectrum but outside it. “I consider myself a humanist and learn from the wide breadth of others’ stories. I can work with traditional conservatives who value order and tradition,” he says. “But I can’t accept Republicans who live their lives in constant opposition … and their attempts to lock history into a narrow paradigm.”
Visual commentary, Gates argues, reflects and comments on destructive currents in our culture. “I reject our status quo, and my art reflects this. To quote the sixth-century Buddhist Sent-ts’an, ‘If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.’” Jeff Gates believes, “Whether visual or written, art attempts to keep our history elastic. We can fill it with as much lived experience as we want.”
