Grand Prize Winner Selected in 2004 Love Your Body Day Poster Contest

July 20, 2004

by Rachel Weisshaar, NOW Communications Intern

An abstract design by Atlanta art student Crystal Holiday was recently selected as the official poster for Love Your Body Day 2004.

An abstract poster design by Atlanta art student Crystal Holiday was recently selected by a panel of the four national NOW officers to be the official poster for Love Your Body Day 2004.

Holiday, who is majoring in graphic design, fine arts and multimedia web design at Glendale Community College, describes her poster as an illustration of the "beauty of every woman in an abstract Cubist style." Celebrating the diversity of shape, color, and size in women's bodies, the design combines a variety of hues and shapes into the serene image of one woman's figure.

"We thought that this poster was a wonderful antidote to the negative, degrading images of the female body that we see constantly in the media," said NOW President Kim Gandy. "The woman in the poster is a fusion of body parts of different shapes, sizes, and colors that merge into a beautiful, harmonious whole."

This year, the National NOW Action Center in Washington, D.C. was flooded with more than 2,500 entries for the annual poster contest, a 150% increase over the entries in 2003, and Gandy, for one, said she is thrilled at the campaign's increasing popularity. "Love Your Body Day is about celebrating the whole woman," Gandy said. "The number of posters we've received this year shows that thousands of women and girls around the world are doing just that."

The NOW Foundation started the Love Your Body Day campaign in 1998 to fight back against the negative images of women created in Hollywood and the advertising, fashion, cosmetics, diet, alcohol and tobacco industries. Women and girls spend billions of dollars every year on diets and cosmetic surgery, trying to reshape their bodies into the impossible ideal of our culture. On Love Your Body Day, people are encouraged to appreciate the uniqueness of their body and to resist the media's harmful objectification of all bodies, but women's bodies in particular.

Those who participate in Love Your Body Day often find creative ways to celebrate positive body image, such as staging rallies against companies that propagate negative images of women, hosting "real women" beauty pageants, committing to a healthier lifestyle, and writing letters of complaint to the sources of destructive images of women.

The NOW Foundation's ultimate goal for Love Your Body Day, organizers say, is for it to become obsolete: Ideally, women will be able love their bodies, free from the negative messages of corporations and the media, every day of the year.

Love Your Body Day 2004 is October 20. Place your order for an organizing kit and a free poster today!