Beehive Design Collective aims to heighten global awareness

The Machias Valley Grange Hall once housed the Grange organization, which was started in the 1800s as an answer to union-organizing and intended to protect farm families' rights and local agriculture. As of the year 2000, the Grange hall has been the location for the Beehive Design Collective, a group determined to crusade for raising awareness about socially relevant issues that have been kept quiet.

The mission of the Beehive Design Collective is "to cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as educational and organizing tools." The idea behind the posters they design is for the members to go to communities that do not have a lot of visibility, learn their stories and work with them to present the stories to a larger audience, culminating in an illumination of how these communities are intrinsically linked to the lifestyle in the U.S. and Canada.

As much as they enjoy working for the community, the Bees wish to remain anonymous in publication. They would rather be known for the works they help produce and not have their individual names elevated to a particular status.

"I came back to the United States really wanting to be responsible and active for the part that my being part of the country that we're in had to play," says Emma Bee, a senior administrator and tour coordinator for the collective. "I ran into the Beehive Collective, which had done one piece talking about different political issues happening within Colombia, and I was really blown away by this organization that had used such a creative visual means to tell such a complex story."

The issues that Beehive covers tend to be so large that they often intersect. In their works there is mention about bio-piracy, food systems, free trade and militarism. There is also mention of the corporate media and how the public receives information and how most people don't know what is going on because of the corporate media. All of their images are depicted with the characters being plants and animals, reiterating the underlying message of the less heard voices. But because they are unheard stories coming from human beings and not from the Internet or literary documents, there have been people so entrenched in academia that they could not fully engage in the work presented. The Bees do, however, research each of their graphics campaign topics thoroughly, visiting botanical societies for photos of species of animals and plants they will later illustrate in their posters. They also have their work critiqued by many people before taking it out to full public awareness.

"The graphics are a very unique and powerful way of telling a story," says Emma Bee. "It really breaks out of the boundaries of how we traditionally talk to each other, how we traditionally learn about things in this country and in our culture, which is primarily through mediated environments like schools and through texts and usually fits within one learning style. So it's really a powerful visual tool."

Besides the Machias area branch, the Beehive Design Collective is international, with Bees working in countries such as Colombia, Germany and Canada. The number of Bees, all volunteer, in Machias fluctuates with as few as two members for periods of time to as many as 15. "We're active all year," says Sasha Bee, the Grange coordinator. "We do all of our fundraising by touring, and it's all donation based. We take the posters to clubs and colleges for honorariums. It is done during spring and fall seasons, with attempts made at having a strong summer presence in Machias."

In support of each other, the Beehive members also live together in a house separate from the Grange Hall. "It's good," says Sasha Bee. "We live and work with the same people. It can be hard, for sure. But we've come up with some pretty good ways of supporting each other and making our space comfortable."

"It's been kind of an organic growing experiment for us," says Emma Bee. "It's been a really positive experience for us to have a house where we can all live together and become a more stable organization and grow our membership a little bit more. It's so important to have each other as a community to base our work in, and to organize around common values and principles."

For many Bees, the reward from their work has been getting to know the people in the community. When they present their work it is rewarding for them to see people understand things that they may not have realized before. People may realize their part in the world and what they can do to be responsible to the greater global community.

The Beehive and its works have raised awareness about multiple stories, all of which are involved with resource extraction and people being misplaced and used for the "good of capitalism." The graphics that the Beehive put forward have raised awareness about issues such as globalization and free trade in Latin America, mountaintop removal coal-mining, and the Plan Puebla Panama project.

Recently, an exhibit was held by the Beehive Collective titled "Farmworkers Feed Us All," concerning Maine's migrant workers. Photojournalist Earl Dotter and documentary audio-producer Tennessee Watson went out and documented the usually invisible stories of the migrant workers who harvest food and the hazards they face and the conditions in which they work. "It's about the sort of general lifestyle of migrant workers and what they have to experience and endure coming here in the harvest seasons," says David Bee, a presenter at lectures and the collective's technology person. "It's about the conditions they live under, the wages they get and the dangers involved with being undocumented."

"There's a whole population and a whole system underlying where our food comes from and how it's produced that, if you're not aware of, you're ignorantly responsible for the struggles of these communities," says Sasha Bee. "Because regulations are lower and a swept-under-the-rug issue, people just turn a blind eye to the people that are doing this work."

"We're not necessarily trying to teach just our point of view," says Emma Bee, concerning the graphics. "They are teaching tools, and the aim of them is to produce dialogue and conversation around the imagery."

"We feel really grateful to be a part of this community," says Sasha Bee. "I would really like to be able to start being a center place for community agriculture, for the building to be used for canning parties and maybe a community feed bank, or people being able to teach workshops."

"It's relatively recently that we've shown ourselves as having really radical politics," says David Bee. "We wanted our focus to be on restoring and preserving this historic building that has a lot of significance to the community already, and being able to offer free events and programming, and a space for community members as well as offering back the space to the Grange. We're still being experienced by the town, some people are still learning about us, but our reception has been really favorable. People are really into what we've done with the Grange Hall, and that is a really stellar example of youth active in the community."

The Beehive Design Collective encourages anyone interested to check out their website at <www.beehivecollective.org>.