This poster was created for The World’s UnFair, a multimedia public art project presented by CreativeTime in Queens, New York, in 2023 proposing the inverse of the historic World’s Fair model, which typically dehumanized Indigenous and other non-European cultures as it celebrated colonial plunder. In this installation, audiences were invited to participate in a future freed from colonial power structures, represented in this poster by the number for a hotline that people can call to learn more about the Land Back movement. Land Back is an ongoing movement in which Indigenous peoples strive for the return of their ancestral lands and control over territories that were taken through colonization. Its goal is to provide Native communities with the power to govern, protect, and make decisions about these traditional lands. The term was coined in 2018 by Arnell Tailfeathers (Kainai, Blackfoot Confederacy) in satirical social media posts; NDN Collective—founded by Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota)—launched the formal LANDBACK Campaign on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2020 following protests at Mount Rushmore, building on the Yellowhead Institute’s foundational Land Back Red Paper (2019). Here, New Red Order references Sherwin-Williams’s 1893 “Cover the Earth” logo, converting it from a capitalist tool to one that challenges the legacies of colonialism. Instead of paint spreading across continents, red (the color of Indigenous resistance) blankets a globe, transforming it into an apple, a natural symbol of rebirth. The poster operates through reversals: where Sherwin-Williams showed the earth covered in its product, New Red Order asks whether the colonizers will return the earth they have buried to its natural state. The question mark means that the point of engagement becomes an invitation rather than a militant demand, one that offers them a role in mutual survival rather than continued occupation.
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