Joan Baez
Greta , 2021
22 x 15.25
in
Greta was a part of Joan Baez' 2021 Mischief Makers 2 Exhibition. Greta was released on Earth Day with a portion of the proceeds going to the Environmental Defense Fund.
Joan gets emotional every time she talks about Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist from Sweden who was named Time magazine’s 2019 “Person of the Year.”
“I can’t even begin,” Joan says. “She just has the guts and the wits, she’s fearless and funny. And she’s 24/7 for the cause.” Greta has been 24/7 for the cause since, beginning in August, 2018, when she was 15, a high school freshman who famously began skipping school on Fridays to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament holding a sign with “Skolstrejk for Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate) written in big, black, hand-written letters.
Her action and her attendant overnight fame inspired 4 million people – many of them school kids like her -- to participate in a global climate strike in September 2019 that was the largest climate demonstration ever.
Once so upset by global warming that she refused to speak, she has come out of her shell to spar with climate-denier Donald Trump on Twitter and has dropped the jaws of the powerful with her blunt speeches, saying to world leaders at a U.N. Climate Action Summit in September 2019: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Joan, who has been known to mince few words herself, says, “She doesn’t mind telling it like it is, saying, ‘All you people will go back to your cars and planes.’ She has no problem calling out chastising people. They don’t know what to think.”