Kate Just
A Sign of the Times (A hand-knitted homage to Zoe Leonard's, I want a president, 1992, which was installed as a billboard along the New York Highline in 2016) | 2026 | hand knitted wool and acrylic yarn, timber, canvas | 155 x 122cm
Sunshine Coast National Art Prize 2026 - Finalist
Courtesy of Kate Just and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.
Kate Just
VIC
A Sign of the Times (A hand-knitted homage to Zoe Leonard's, I want a president, 1992, which was installed as a billboard along the New York Highline in 2016)
2026
Hand knitted wool and acrylic yarn, timber, canvas
155 x 122cm
My 2026 series, A Sign of the Times, involved me hand knitted pictures of many well-known, text-based, political, art signs that have been installed in public by other artists across the world that are relevant to our current political and social climate.
The largest work in my series was this work A Sign of the Times: A hand knitted translation of a person viewing artist Zoe Leonard’s I want a president, 1992, as reinstalled in 2016 along the New York Highline.
My hand knitting of Zoe Leonard’s, ‘I want a president’ text as it appeared in New York, is one of the most challenging pieces I have ever completed. Zoe Leonard is an award-winning American artist who began working as an artist in New York City in the 1980s, an era marked by heightened political awareness due to the enormous loss of the AIDS epidemic. ‘I want a president’ was first written/typed by Leonard in 1992 in response to her friend and a poet Eileen Myles’ bid to run for president alongside George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. The continued reproduction and re-citation of Leonard’s work, including during the 2016 U.S. election, propelled the original document beyond political art and into popular culture.
I knitted my homage to Leonard’s work on 3mm needles. This labour of love in the reknitting formed a conversation between my own queer life, feminist and political sentiments and Leonard’s own.