‘Winning hearts and minds’: How protest signs shaped the anti-ICE movement in Minnesota
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At a Twin Cities art studio, artist Dio Cramer pulls a squeegee plump with red paint across cream canvas, screen printing the phrase “Neighbors Say ICE OUT!”
Several of these signs hang and overlap around the studio, their big juicy letters repeating the words like a Dr. Seuss book — “Out! Out! Out!”
Cramer, and other members of a local art collective (which has asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussion), have screen printed this phrase more than thousand times since the federal government started “Operation Metro Surge” in December.
The art collective came up with the design, Cramer said, to send a message to ICE from their neighborhood of Powderhorn Park, the same neighborhood where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Macklin Good on Jan. 7.
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“What would it be like to get a whole neighborhood to visually display that they were not interested in having ICE in their neighborhood? Could we make it feel emotionally unpleasant for the ICE agents driving around?” Cramer asked. “Then we started as a collective printing a ton of these flags and distributing them.”
There is power in the term “neighbors,” said collective member Conor Cusack.
“Anyone can see themselves as a neighbor, whether they're in Minnesota or not,” Cusack said. “We don’t just want ICE out of Minnesota. We want ICE out of everywhere.”
A surge of protest art
The banners, flags and posters can be seen in storefronts and porch windows, on telephone poles and electrical boxes, in neighborhoods across the metro area. They are part of an explosion of art made in response to ICE’s presence that has included protest songs, comics and zines and coloring books, snow and ice sculptures, stickers and buttons and whistles 3D-printed in every color of the rainbow.
Perhaps more than any other medium, Minnesota artists and designers have made protest posters and signs en masse, echoing the outpouring of art made in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.
The posters range from the textual — “Hell Melts ICE,” “Abolish ICE,” “Chinga la Migra!”— to images of Macklin Good, Alex Pretti and Liam Conejo Ramos. Artists have adapted corporate branding from Target and Morton Salt and played with Minnesota iconography like lady’s slippers, hot dish, monarchs, snow plows and many a laser-eyed loon.
“It's breathtaking,” said Carol Wells, who has been watching the artistic response from Los Angeles, where she is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, home to one of the largest archives of protest art in the world. “The posters are records of how people put their lives on the line for something that was bigger than them, that they were willing to fight for.”
So many protest posters have been produced in Minnesota that at least two arts shows have already come and gone at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design at CanCan Wonderland in St. Paul. Minneapolis art collective Art You Heart is hosting a protest poster projection event from 7 p.m. to to 8 p.m. on Wednesday at the Witch’s Hat Water Tower and there are more exhibitions to come.
“There’s this multi-level artistic blossoming that’s happening that really can only happen in moments of crisis like this,” said Ricardo Levins Morales, a Minneapolis artist long known for arts activism.
To the presses
Cramer first started mass producing political art in 2021 during the Stop Line 3 movement with a poster of a bird grasping a snake with its talons that says, “We are here to protect the water. Stop Line 3.”
The image “became a symbol that widely resonated with people,” Cramer said, adding that it crystallized her approach to designing for movements by using “really clear images that were able to be mass produced.”
Minneapolis design studio Burlesque of North America has printed more than 20,000 “I.C.E. OUT of Minneapolis” posters since December, said co-owner Mike Davis.
“This is far and away the most we've ever printed any image,” Davis said.
The studio first started printing protest posters for the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Davis said that’s when the studio learned: “This is what we can contribute to the cause.”
Davis and co-owner Wes Winship came up with the “I.C.E. OUT of Minneapolis” idea, reimagining the ubiquitous red-and-white snowplow design of “Snow Emergency Route” signs. Except here, the plow isn’t clearing snow, it’s clearing the gear of federal immigration enforcement officers — gas masks, guns and handcuffs.
“We love the idea of taking something that’s familiar to people and then just giving it a completely new context or meaning,” Davis said. The studio has handed them out for free at protests and sold them to benefit mutual aid and immigrant rights groups at places like Bench Pressed, a shop and design studio in Minneapolis.
“We’ve always felt it’s not only important, but pretty necessary, to use our voice and our creative abilities and our printing press to speak up and say something,” Davis said.
Sarah Agaton Howes, an artist based on the Fond du Lac Band Reservation in northern Minnesota, had a similar response.
“One of the things that I really try to do as an Ojibwe artist is to tell the stories of what’s going on around us, and also try to do work that supports organizations that are doing really hard work or important work on the ground,” Agaton Howes said. She remembers thinking, “What can I do to try to support people who are being snatched off the street?”
She created a design that says "ICE Out of Mni Sota" over a black shape of Minnesota outlined in blue and adorned in flowers, a common color motif in Ojibwe art, Agaton Howes said. It’s been printed on T-shirts and posters, available through her shop Heart Berry and the Minneapolis bookstore Birchbark Books & Native Arts, to help raise money for the Immigrant Defense Network.
“Making art that is Indigenous art, Ojibwe art, covering this state, but also utilizing the Dakota word for our state — the response to it was insane,” Agaton Howes said. “I was amazed to see how many people were really, really excited to be able to support that work.”
A growing arts activism infrastructure
Sitting in his Minneapolis shop and studio, Levins Morales describes himself as “a healer and trickster-organizer disguised as an artist.” He’s surrounded by decades of artwork from anti-ICE buttons to labor posters quoting Frederick Douglass and the Black Panthers.
Levins Morales got his start making political cartoons in the 1960s and then became a founding member of the Northland Poster Collective, a Minneapolis group that operated from 1979-2009 making art focused on social justice.
“It became a center for doing activist art that over its lifespan — it lasted a good 30 years — produced art for movements both here and around the country,” he said.
Now he does that work through his shop. In response to the ICE presence in Minnesota, his studio team made what he calls “rapid response” signs for businesses and neighbors.
“We recently put out a warning sign to ICE and other federal agents that, in fact, there is no immunity for criminal acts, and that Stephen Miller can’t protect them,” Levins Morales said.
Levins Morales has also spent time observing and reflecting on the artistic response to ICE in Minnesota.
“We are seeing a lot of infrastructure that’s been in place, some of it was created after the uprising following George Floyd’s murder, some of it is groups like ours that have been doing this for a long time,” Levins Morales said.
He points to printmakers and print shops that have offered free or low-cost printing and pop-up events where people can make their own prints.
“We’ve had a series of waves of movements, going back to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, each one of which is creating sort of increasingly artistic expressions, and they're happening so close together that the memory is retained, that it's happening within lifetimes,” Levins Morales said.
An ephemeral art form
Art historian Carol Wells said Minnesota artists have been making incredibly effective political art that “breaks through the bubble” of people's daily lives, joining a long lineage of political art.
“There’s never been a viable movement for social change without the arts as central to the movement,” Wells said. “The arts are absolutely critical for winning the hearts and minds, for getting people’s attention and moving them.”
While people drawing up their own individual signs or posters is important, Wells said making them in mass is key to a movement.
“That’s an act of organizing,” she said. “Seeing a crowd of people holding signs with the same demand is very empowering. It makes people question, ‘Why do all those people feel that way? Why is there so much disconnect between what we’re hearing our government say is the truth and what we’re seeing is the truth on the streets?’”
Wells said protest posters are an ephemeral art form, made from cheap materials and often left out in the elements, which is one of the reasons she created the center.
“They’re definitely not meant to last forever,” Wells said. Even so, she encourages archiving them.
“We’re doing a very important service in that we’re keeping records of past movements for social change and contemporary ones, because contemporary ones are going to be historically important tomorrow,” Wells said. “We have the history [administration officials] don’t want told. That’s why we're digitizing everything, because paper is fragile.”
Many in Minnesota’s artist and activist communities are starting to consider how to document, display and archive the protest art.
Minneapolis-based artist Maria Cristina Tavera is curating the group show “Resilience,” opening at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis on April 3. The show will feature prints, political posters and specifically protest posters made in response to ICE in Minnesota.
“As things started to progress in Minneapolis, I realized that there was a very important significance with what was happening artistically with the protests,” Tavera said. “Artists are taking it upon themselves to create their own source of resilience.”
A longtime printmaker, Tavera said the medium is ideal for creating movements.
“That’s part of the reason that printmaking exists,” Tavera said. “It’s always been an inexpensive way to share political messages and to distribute by passing along the different copies and multiples.”
Landscapes of art and grief
Cramer and Cusack say the art collective will keep printing and distributing the “Neighbors Say ICE OUT” signs as long as an ICE presence remains in Minnesota.
“Imagining a future where every single ICE agent has left Minnesota, I would feel so excited to be still printing lots of these and sending them to people in our networks who are fighting ICE in other places,” Cramer said.
Cusack, who is also a graduate student in heritage studies and public history at the University of Minnesota, said the collective and others in the community are thinking about how to document what’s happened, similar to Memorialize the Movement and the Urban Art Mapping Project at the University of St. Thomas.
“It’s a very exciting and challenging time as a public historian,” Cusack said. They’re thinking about “art that commemorates and marks the places and the events that have happened in the city. It's not just about the object itself, but it’s about the experiences that happened on the street and how that has forever changed what that place means.”
Cusack and others have started the “Landscapes of Grief,” a project to create altars where federal agents have killed or taken Minnesotans since Operation Metro Surge began. Anyone is welcome to leave a written or audio offering sharing a memory or story “to honor what, and who, we’ve lost. Together our memories remake the landscape.”
