LIZZIE SUAREZ
Artwork and posters visualizing a Just Transition of Florida food systems and the principles of Food Sovereignty.
About the Artist
Lizzie Suarez is an arts and cultural worker from Miami using the practice of illustration to paint and meditate on liberation, kinship, and the dignity inherent in all people. Since 2019, Lizzie has used art as a tool for community organizing and popular education. As a member of queer artist collective Fempower, she created illustrations and design for a digital fundraising campaign which raised thousands for Black Mamas Day Bail Out and led workshops on the relationship between art and liberation. In 2021, she collaborated with abolitionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba for the release of 16 Axioms of Abolitionist Organizing, a zine based on Kaba’s NYT best-seller “We Do This Til We Free Us”. Since 2022, Lizzie has collaborated with Food Culture Collective on creative material to support their storytelling work on food sovereignty, and Union of Southern Service Workers to create posters that illustrate the mission and demands for justice and dignity on the job. Lizzie is currently the Communications Manager at the Miami Workers Center, working to amplify the stories of working-class women of color who are organizing for power as tenants, workers, mothers, and immigrants..
Website | IG: @lizziesuarez_
About the Partner Organization
The Climate Justice Alliance Food Sovereignty Working Group is led by frontline grassroots organizers who are modeling Food Sovereignty as an essential part of a Just Transition. They are organizing resilient communities and a regenerative economy through the practice and scaling out of agroecology – a science, a practice, and a movement centered on growing food in harmony with ecological systems.
Website
Artist’s Statement
This illustration visualizes a nonlinear Just Transition of Florida food systems, from the current systems of domination to a regenerative system of food sovereignty, dignified labor and respect for people, earth, land, animals, plants. Each figure represents a phase of this multigenerational struggle.
In today’s extractive economy, people and the land alike are used by the wealthy as machines for profit. In Florida, Black and indigenous workers and their families are forced to live and work in toxic conditions after being displaced by war, climate catastrophe, and imperialism in their homelands. Extreme heat, water contamination, and food apartheid threaten our lives while we build their empty, luxury condos. Worker organization, cross-sectoral strikes, and experiments of food sovereignty mark the transitional phase of our economy. Farmworkers become trabajadores de la tierra and supermarkets become cooperatives. We fight to defend as we remember to heal. The regenerative economy is not a destination but a shared practice, on the micro and macro level. Relying on local food economies brings us closer to our neighbors, especially during Florida’s vibrant mango season. Our cultural cooperatives act as centers of memory and exchange, and rivers of grass go as far as our eyes can see.
Just like healing, our Just Transition is nonlinear. We must try many things, in many different ways and places, and be brave enough to be honest about our shortcomings. The past invites us to study, the present invites us to struggle, and the future invites us to dream. We are what we’ve been waiting for.
Watch Lizzie’s presentation during the 2024 Creative Wildfire showcase
Download the artwork
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.