Graffiti as Witness: The Art and Activism of a Quaker Pirate

This and our other First Monday Lectures are streamed live and available as recordings on our YouTube channel, Pendle Hill USA.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill. Please make sure to review our health and safety expectations at https://pendlehill.org/stay/covid-19-information/. If you’d like to join us for dinner before the event, please sign up at least 24 business hours in advance.

Join Friend Todd Drake as he shares his lifelong journey and witness as a visual artist and social justice activist. Drake’s practice of witnessing and facing life’s great sadnesses with creative practice offers us all another North Star on our own journeys. He will speak to how he has been shaped by this practice, from making art with children in the West Bank to posting graffiti on the streets of New York City. Todd will also share about his exhibit, “Leading in Linocut – The Graffiti Prints of a Quaker Pirate,” currently on display at Pendle Hill.

Thanks to the generous support of the Friends Foundation for the Aging, we’re able to make this and other free, online programs accessible to f/Friends of all ages.

Leader

Todd Drake is an artist and experienced teacher living in the East Village area of Manhattan in New York City. During the COVID pandemic he stayed – along with his wife – to continue running a Quaker collaborative community called Penington Friends House. Drake has also collaborated with other Quakers in creating “Quaker Canvassing Peace Walks” that allow Quakers to engage successfully with other people across political divides. Today, Drake continues to print and post his linocuts and silkscreens. His most recent posters speak to how war begets war. Originally from North Carolina where he earned an MFA in Painting, he was also a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chapel Hill. Drake has exhibited his work all over the United States and overseas, including in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine. Drake is a member of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting. You can follow his work on Instagram @QuakerPirate.