Rebeka Sawka ’24
Visual Rhetorical Analysis: Voices Are Power
Rebeka Sawka’s analysis of Favianna Rodriguez’s 2018 painting Voices Are Power (2018) was written in Professor Hantgan’s College Writing class. For this Visual Rhetorical Analysis assignment, students selected an image of choice (street art, public art album cover, theater poster or political poster) and analyzed it to reveal how visual rhetoric is responsible for an embedded meaning or argument about a contemporary issue of culture, society, identity, social justice, stereotypes or misrepresentations.
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Favianna Rodriguez is an artist, social justice activist, and cultural strategist from Oakland, California. She gained inspiration for “Voices Are Power,” a painting which portrays a woman of color speaking out, when she traveled to Lima, Peru in 2014 for a feminist gathering of Latin American women.
At first glance, this piece interested me because of its colors, and the large scale image of a woman located at the center of the image. The woman holds a microphone, and three blue circles are painted above the microphone. Flanking this woman on each side are two other women of color, who are much smaller in scale. The artist uses both shapes and bright colors, such as blue, orange and teal, for the background. A black silhouette is shown at the bottom of the painting with many people raising their fists to the sky.
What’s interesting about this piece is that it’s composed of monoprints and drawings that include many shapes and textures from her earlier works (“Voices Are Power”). Originally, this piece was commissioned by the Global Fund for Women based in San Francisco, California, and I found it through a For Freedoms billboard in Washington D.C.. For Freedoms is an organization that promotes creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action through artistic endeavors and community efforts. “Voices Are Power” uses a variety of rhetorical strategies, such as symbolism, color, and shape to argue that women of color and feminists have important voices to be heard.
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Symbols present the hidden meaning in Voices Are Power. When I first viewed the painting, I noticed the woman at the center, with the microphone. Art theorist Rudolf Arnheim writes,“an image acts as a symbol to the extent to which it portrays things which are at a higher level of abstractness than the symbol itself” (138). A symbol represents an abstract concept, an example here being the microphone, which represents abstract concepts of communication. And in this painting, in particular, the microphone symbolizes how voices of women of color should be heard.
Another symbol is the size Rodriguez chooses to represent the women in the painting, and in turn, the importance of the female gender. The woman at the center of the painting is larger than the other two females; her size represents an abstract concepts of importance, and is key to the entire meaning of the art work. She represents the importance of the voices heard from women of color, in speaking into the microphone for herself, as a woman of color. While others might interpret a different meaning, from a feminist and female perspective, I see that the females in the painting represent the importance of voices heard by women of color, and that their voices implicitly have power.
In the image, there is also warmth and coolness from the many different pops of color, blue, yellow, orange, and pink. Educator Jenae Cohn writes, “It is generally agreed upon that particular colors like orange and red tend to convey warmth or passion while colors like blue and purple tend to convey coolness or calm” (27). The painting’s background contains all of the colors described by Cohn, and these bring forth emotions and help the viewer determine what’s important in the painting. The orange and red represent warmth and passion, suggesting the woman in the center has a passion to be heard. I believe the blue represents, as Cohn suggests, a cooler and calming emotion, the woman’s passion in speaking out performed here in a calm rather than combative way. In contrast, the black silhouette of a crowd with arms raised in the air frames the three females, everyone standing together as a whole, as equals. More people involved means more voices are being heard, which subsequently yields more power.
Finally, shapes in the background, like triangles, rectangles and circles, represent continuous movement and the imbalance of voices heard in a society. John MacTaggart, a retired art teacher, writes, “Squares and Rectangles can portray strength and stability, Circles and Ellipses can represent continuous movement, Triangles can lead the eye in an upward movement and Inverted Triangles can create a sense of imbalance and tension” (“The Visual Elements-Shapes”). This underscores how people interpret different shapes into meaning. The background in Voices Are Power includes many different inverted triangles, which portray imbalance, subtly suggesting that women of color and feminists aren’t receiving a fair platform when speaking out. If a circle represents continuous movement, the three circles adjacent to their mouths represent how women have been trying to receive the power of voice for a while now. While the painting was created in 2015, the embedded meaning about the imbalance of female voices in a global discourse is still relevant to today and, like the circles, continuous.
Through the use of visual rhetorical strategies; such as symbolism, color and shapes, Favianna Rodriguez’s Voices Are Power, argues that women of color and feminists have important voices to be heard. I selected elements that evoked my own feelings towards the piece, which in turn helped me to uncover the embedded meaning. Many others will look at this image and view the signs and symbols differently and come out with a completely different meaning, but what I interpret from this is that women of color and feminists have powerful voices that need to be heard.
Work Cited
“Voices Are Power”. Artist, Organizer & Social Justice Activist: Favianna Rodriguez, 15 Jan 2019, www.favianna.com. Accessed 21 Dec 2020. https://forfreedoms.org/
Cohn, Jenae. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric - Writing Spaces.” Writing Spaces.org, writingspaces.org/sites/default/files/cohn-understanding-visual-rhetoric.pdf.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley [etc.: University of California Press, 2015.
MacTaggart, John. “The Visual Elements-Shapes.” ArtyFactory, www.artyfactory.com. Accessed 21 Dec 2020.