Meet Ben Wiseman, the artist behind Callen-Lorde’s 2025 Care Without Compromise designs

Each year Callen-Lorde’s Pride month art manages to be inspiring, funky, uplifting and celebratory all at once. 2025’s artwork for Care Without Compromise—an array of buttons and symbols you can see on our t-shirts, NYC Pride banners and other merch—is no exception.

We tapped Ben Wiseman for this year’s art because he has a storied drawing career and an existing relationship with Callen-Lorde: he was also the man behind 2017’s Healthcare for Every Body campaign!

But perhaps most importantly, we asked Ben to create this Pride’s artwork because powerful imagery that represents our mission and commitment to our community is more vital than ever. Pride is a particular act of resistance this year—and we needed artwork that represented that concept clearly for all of our audiences.

Read below for more on Ben and his vision behind Care Without Compromise. Look out for his artwork on our float at New York City Pride this Sunday!

Hi Ben! What is the story behind your artistic career? 

I moved to New York in the 2000s for Parsons [School of Design] and studied design. Right after college the focus was book covers–then I started on my own freelance career for design and illustration. And I’ve been doing it on my own ever since 2009.

As soon as I felt like I was making decent money, I tapped into this sense of wanting to give back and support an important organization. I recognized Callen-Lorde as a local and queer organization and started donating. I’ve been donating ever since.

How did you get involved with our Healthcare for Everybody Pride campaign? 

Years ago, someone at Callen-Lorde—I still don’t know who!–saw my name on the donor list and that I was an artist. From there I created Healthcare for Everybody.

How do you create your art? 

I work digitally, drawing on my tablet. I always start by responding to a text or source because so much of what I’ve done includes book covers and theater posters, it feels natural. For Pride campaigns, Callen-Lorde has the theme in place, so I react.

For Healthcare for Everybody, I created a range of body types and people to accompany the art and represent the community. For this year’s Care Without Compromise, the [creative brief the communications team supplied] showed me the power and legacy of protests. It goes without saying now how vital and essential that is. So it was, how can I harness that imagery in a way that’s hopeful but also shows the need to push and fight? I tried to blend all those moods together that this moment requires. I referenced the protest pins in the brief to create the icons—symbols to show what you’ve done.

How do you feel about this year’s Pride celebration and how your art fits into it? 

I’ve participated in Pride a handful of times, but this resistance energy does excite me more to participate. It feels more necessary to show where we stand and where millions of Americans stand.

When it comes to my work, I always want to make something interesting that makes people think or look again—longer than a second, in this day and age. I love seeing my work used in the wild—even the Healthcare for Everybody art being everywhere on shirts. I also love how much Callen-Lorde can use the art to spread your message and values. It expands from my computer to the streets.

In a similar idea, I gave a [Healthcare for Everybody shirt] to my mom and she wore it to the gym in Kentucky. It’s going far and wide—who knows where it can end up and what it could inspire?