Calendar uses Kaep portrait

The Nation magazine’s annual calender this year features, as the February image, the painting by Eric Drooker of University of Nevada, Reno alum Colin Kaepernick that appeared on the magazine’s Oct. 16, 2017, cover.

Drooker is the artist who previously created a portrait of the Oscar statuette as a black woman. It ran on the Feb. 27, 2017 cover of the New Yorker. He also painted Korean leader Kim Jon Um as a warhead for the New Yorker.

Drooker painted the Nation cover after the September 2017 National Football League protests in which players and coaches joined. It was held after Donald Trump attacked coaches and owners for failing to fire protesting players. Drooker told the Washington Post:

“What happened this past Sunday was so historic—so powerful—that most Americans have yet to grasp its magnitude. Needless to say, we live in a willfully unconscious culture, and we’re world famous for our historic amnesia. We artists, too, are asleep at the wheel most of the time.”