Hip-Hop Producer & Venture Capitalist Flash Amarasiriwardena and Conceptual Art History Scholar & Gallery Owner Remedios Gomez Named New Cochise County Co-Chairs of Arizona Americans Elect Party; Vow to Support Radical Transformation of State's Educational Priorities

BISBEE, Ariz., May 20 -

Trey Young, leader of Arizona's fastest-growing political party, the Americans Elect Party, today came to the steps of the elegant Cochise County Courthouse for a press conference at which he introduced the party's new county co-chairs, Remedios Gomez, a scholar of conceptual art and owner of a Bisbee art gallery, and Flash Amarasiriwardena of Bisbee and Austin, Texas, a hip-hop producer and principal of the venture capital firm Sandhill 128 Associates.  

The new county leaders pledged to make their focus the Arizona Americans Elect Party's goals of reforming what Ms. Gomez called "some of the nation's shittiest and most underfunded schools" and increasing what Mr. Amarasiriwardena termed "Arizona's abysmally low educational attainment rate."

Ms. Gomez is the owner of Arthropologie, an art gallery on Main Street featuring the work of local artists and nationally-known established artists such as Helen Berggruen, Joe Zucker, Johannes Atli Hinriksson, Yuko Shimizu, and Sadie Benning.  She has a Ph.D. in Art History from Princeton University and was chair of the Art Department at Wellesley College.  Ms. Gomez is the author of well-received critical biographies of the conceptual artists Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, and she has served as a panelist on the interdisciplinary arts panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Mr. Amarasiriwardena was in the early 2000s best known as Lil Flash, a driving force as a hip-hop producer in the party-oriented Atlanta style known as "crunk."  A native of Mumbai with degrees in music and business administration from Emory University, Mr. Amarasiriwardena signed such classic acts as Xscape, Dem Bonez Boyz, FYM, Shawty Boi, and Lucidly Ghetto.  In recent years, as a venture capitalist in Austin, he has funded such successful tech startups as Marketic, Bizmondo, K Cube, and  TrueMooc; he and his wife, the actress Heidi Palover, own a ranch outside their second home in Bisbee.

Arizona Americans Elect Party Leader Trey Young hailed the accomplishments of the new Cochise County party officials and stressed that they would be the point persons for the party's drive to improve Arizona's failing education system.  "To support our children's learning is the most patriotic thing we can do," he said, stripping off his shirt in the 100-degree heat as the crowd of party members at the courthouse steps applauded.  "Our party pledges its support for education."

"Unfortunately," Mr. Young continued, "the influence of the assholes at the family-hating, unpatriotic Goldwater Institute and other crackpot right-wing agenda groups has made Arizona perhaps the stupidest, most ignorant state in the U.S."

"All that will change under the Arizona Americans Elect Party," said Ms. Gomez.  "We're going to kick conservative ass and institute a truly equitably funded system that will educate all Arizonans, regardless of income, location, race or ethnicity."

"The Arizona Americans Elect Party calls for a radical restructuring of learning in this state," added Mr. Amarasiriwardena, "which until now has not been able to train people for the high-paying jobs today's skilled knowledge workers get in other places, like my other home Austin or in Silicon Valley or Research Triangle or lower Manhattan or the suburbs of Boston and D.C."

"As our party motto states, let's make Arizona less of a shithole," Mr. Young concluded.  "That starts with mandatory, government-funded pre-K education and goes all the way to making Arizona's higher education system an innovative fount of lifelong learning.  We'll work with visionary leaders like past and present ASU presidents Lattie Coor and Michael Crow to implement their ideas for transforming one of the worst-performing states into one of the best."