From protest signs to posters in shop windows to apparel, artists across St. Paul and the greater Twin Cities are responding to the federal immigration enforcement crackdown with a surge of creativity.
In the days after immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, live painter Noval Noir created a large-scale portrait of Good at the site.
“Art is a way to heal, and energy attracts other people, so that was my light to give back to the community,” Noir told local radio personality Sheletta Brundidge on her radio show in mid-January. “Art speaks language that words can’t. When you’re giving someone a visual, you get to change a narrative.”
And artwork that responds to and reflects social movements can be a tangible community-building force itself, artists say.
“Through grassroots organizing, we’ve always seen that art is a means of resistance,” said Chenda Hing, a digital organizer for Minnesota 8, a St. Paul-based advocacy group that works within the Southeast Asian community. “For me, as someone who really values storytelling as a way for people to understand and be moved, storytelling through visual art can really resonate and poke and prod at some feelings — and actually generate power within the people,” Hing said.
Hing and four other artists created T-shirt designs for MN8’s Deportation Defense & Relief Fundraiser, launched as the organization has seen a more-than-600 percent spike in its caseload as federal agents have targeted Southeast Asian immigrants, especially in St. Paul, Hing said.
Hing’s design depicts a yeak, a giant-like figure in Cambodian folklore, keeping a family safe from an ICE vehicle, along with the text “We Protect Each Other.” The design, Hing said, intentionally inverts the traditional characterization of the yeak as an antagonistic or even demonic force.
“I’m doing a retelling of it where it’s a misunderstood giant that is actually protecting our community members from the real evil, which is ICE,” Hing said. “My point on this in this piece was thinking about the criminalization narrative of immigrants. Trump is labeling immigrants that he’s detaining as the ‘worst of the worst’ and people who are totally harassing and disrupting this community, when, in my drawing, I wanted to portray that that is not our narrative at all.”
Across the Twin Cities, other artists, like muralist Audrey Carver and printmaker Sean Lim, have hosted pop-up events to disseminate artwork and raise money for community organizations. At a bring-your-own-shirt printing event Carver hosted at Wandering Leaf Brewing in Highland Park in mid-January, she printed more than 300 shirts and raised over $5,000, she announced on Instagram.
During upcoming community printing events Feb. 5 and 6, a design by St. Paul Indigenous artist Marlena Myles reading “ICE Out of Mni Sóta Makóče / No One is Illegal on Stolen Land” will be available to print on a shirt or tote bag you bring. The event runs 2 to 6:30 p.m. both days at the Minneapolis American Indian Center; 1530 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis.
Liz Derby, who runs the studio Little Dipper Art, has created a suite of “ICE out” posters inspired by local landmarks and wintertime imagery that are available at a quickly growing list of dozens of Twin Cities shops including, in St. Paul, Wildflyer Coffee, Next Chapter Booksellers, I Like You Too, Center for Lost Objects and SK Coffee.
Others still are releasing designs free online. Minneapolis design studio Burlesque of North America created a design riffing off the ubiquitous red-and-white snow emergency sign, a twist that’s earned national media coverage. The studio itself has printed more than 5,000 copies to donate and has uploaded free PDFs to its website.
Countless other artists — including snow sculptors at the World Snow Sculpting Championship in downtown Stillwater and the Minnesota State Snow Sculpting Competition at the Vulcan Snow Park at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds — are also using their skills to highlight and push back against what they see as unjustifiably violent immigration enforcement actions such as the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
“It’s been inspiring to see all of these different illustrators and artists and designers putting the same sentiment out there, the same kind of general feel, but in vastly different ways,” said Alxndr Jones, a St. Paul-based artist. “Some more intense, some more lighthearted, some more loving, some more angry. It just speaks so much to the creative community that there is in the Twin Cities.”
Jones’s own art is known for his distinctive gestural style he described as inspired by jazz album covers, punk rock aesthetics and the American traditional style of tattoo art. He, too, is offering some designs for free download on his website and selling prints to raise money for nonprofits.
One print, riffing off the Morton Salt mascot, depicts a person in a yellow coat dropping salt behind them and holding a sign reading “Abolish ICE” or, in another version, replacing the first word with a common expletive. In another design collection, a diving loon holds a banner reading, variously, “Protect Our Community” or “We Fight Together.”
“After the murder of Renee Good, I couldn’t pick up a pencil without drawing something that was anti-ICE, was protest,” Jones said. “We’re in a world where it feels like there’s so much we need to do, but at the same time, it’s like, what can I do? I don’t know what to do, but I do know how to draw and how to make an image that might resonate with somebody.”
The power of art to drive fundraising efforts, empower protesters to action, share cultural stories and connect with like-minded neighbors cannot be overstated, Hing said. But also? It can just be nice to look at. And that counts for a lot, too.
“When crisis hits, when we are feeling at our most down, art is really a source of joy for us all that we can really connect with,” Hing said. “Art is just so beautiful, and our people really deserve beautiful things at this moment.”
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