Pop Art By Toni Tails Celebrates All Bodies

Toni Tails creates colorful pop culture art to celebrate bodies that don't fit society's standards.

Transcript

00:00It's really important to see fat bodies having fun and living their life in a nice way because

00:07fat bodies are most often depicted as being negative in the media.

00:18That's pretty! I'm awesome! I like to include a lot of pop culture icons in my art

00:24because there's not that many pop culture icons that are fat. So if we've got a

00:31fat pop culture icon such as Miss Piggy, she's strong, she's fat, she's beautiful,

00:38she's not afraid to be sexy, I'm gonna rock that as much as I can. And I also like to include

00:45non-fat bodies and create fat depictions of them such as Princess Leia because she's a warrior.

00:52And I have a woman of color, Princess Leia, and we need stuff like that. We need to have

00:58something to look up to and aspire to. Kids see images and absorb images much more quickly than

01:06we do as adults. My niece had a lot of self-image issues because of the things that she sees on

01:12television and in commercials and in magazines. You know, they take a human body and they brush

01:18it up and they change the shape of it into this unnatural shape that is unattainable by most

01:24people. I'm a survivor of abuse as a child and I had a really hard time seeing any value within

01:40myself. And it's something I still have to work on now, today. And because of that within myself,

01:46I want to utilize these gifts that I have and these talents that I have

01:52to kind of put that out there for the world.

02:02I receive messages from people that tell me that they're inspired by my art and that makes me so

02:08happy. I remember this one message that I received from a lady who wrote to me and said,

02:16this year, for the first time in my life, during the summer, I showed my arms and legs.

02:23We give away coloring pages online that can be downloaded and also my niece and I print pages and

02:43we hand them out. There are little girls out there who don't eat because they're afraid of gaining a

02:48pound. I think that showing images of all different types of bodies and showing that that

02:56is a valuable human being allows a child to look at themselves. When they look in the mirror, they

03:01can see those flaws and realize these flaws are just my little fingerprint on the world. They're

03:06what make me uniquely me.