A gift from Shepard Fairey

We are thrilled to share this new portrait from legendary artist Shepard Fairey, all made possible by Amplifier Art!

Valarie’s portrait kicks off Amplifier’s Rebuilding the Union initiative, featuring a series of portraits of today’s movement leaders. We are honored that Amplifier brought Valarie’s story to Shepard Fairey to create this stunning artwork! To celebrate, we have an offer just for you.

Amplifier has reserved 50 limited edition prints, signed by Shepard Fairey, of Valarie’s portrait just for our community! Click here and enter the code REVLOVE to purchase your print.

And… the portrait comes alive! Download the Amplifier AR app on your phone. Hover your phone over the portrait (even on a computer screen, like the one in this email header) and Valarie will start talking to you about revolutionary love. Watch how it works here. It’s magical.

We are now collaborating with Amplifier to send this artwork to more than one million students in classrooms across the nation this fall, along with educational tools anchored in the framework of revolutionary love. Imagine students looking up at classroom walls to see this portrait and doing lesson plans on how to love others, opponents, and ourselves. This is how we create culture shift. To support this education work, click here.

In the meantime, you can download the image for free here. We invite you to post it on Valentine’s Day and spread the call to revolutionary love. What does it mean to you to love without limit? Use the hashtags #RevolutionaryLove #SeeNoStranger #ValentinesDay. Be sure to credit the artist @obeygiant and tag @ampliferart.

The images and stories we take in shape the way we see, how we feel and what we do. This is why we are so grateful to work with the visionaries at Amplifier — and all of you — to shift the national imagination together.

– The Revolutionary Love Team

P.S. If the limited edition prints are sold out by the time you click through, don’t worry! They go fast! You can also purchase an open edition print of Valarie’s portrait. And there’s a special offer right now: Get two prints for the price of one with any $20 donation. Keep one, give the other as a gift for Valentine’s Day!

The portrait brings to life Valarie Kaur’s story and vision for the world. At the center of the artwork is a symbol of Oneness: Ik Onkar, the heart of the Sikh faith. It inspires us to look upon the face of anyone and say: “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” It is surrounded with a circle of khandas, a symbol from the Sikh faith that features double-edged swords. The khanda represents sovereignty, both within oneself and out in the world, and conveys the bravery required to fight for justice with love.

In the upper left hand corner are the words See No Stranger, the title of Valarie’s book, and the message of Guru Nanak, the first teacher of the Sikh faith. Beneath that is her urgent declaration that reads as a headline: Time to Reject Hierarchies of Human Value. This is what it means to see no stranger. In the upper right hand corner, the heart and fist is inspired by the logo of the Revolutionary Love Project and captures the power of revolutionary love in practice.

Valarie sat for this portrait in the midst of the pandemic and racial reckoning and election chaos of 2020. She carries a battle-worn look after twenty years of fighting for civil rights and human rights in this country. But in her eyes, there is a vision of the world that could be, the world longing to be born. Like a midwife, she shows us how to labor to “REBIRTH,” the name of the portrait.