Protest making: how crafting collectively can empower disenfranchised people

Craft, particularly fibre art, is situated in an exciting position to be able to respond to current conversations on social justice and claim space for marginalised peoples. I entered craft as an immigrant womxn of colour and a daughter of a seamstress. I was drawn to the medium because its history and discourse includes conversations about labour and globalisation, and textiles have been strongly associated with important movements of social justice, particularly feminism.

Womxn of colour have been excluded, however, even though they are the ones currently working in the garment industry inside and outside of the United States, whether in sweatshops, factories, prisons, or doing sweated labour in businesses or in their own homes for little pay. With Black Lives Matter protests erupting all over America and the world, womxn of colour are now at the forefront of this movement for social and racial justice.

I started the Protest Banner Lending Library (PBLL) on 9 November 2016, the morning after Trump was elected as president of the United States. I was devastated, so began making banners in my apartment in Chicago. Needing to feel a sense of community, I invited friends to make them with me, soon creating workshops for the public. The project became a lending library because I wasn’t a citizen at the time, and the majority of those working with me were also disenfranchised, non-citizens, mothers, people of colour, people without safety and freedom to gather in the streets but who wanted to contribute their words as slogans. Those who need banners for protests can check them out and carry our words for us, with an understanding that they come from this community.

My workshops have become a place where people come together in solidarity through making as a form of resistance. Since 2016, over 2,000 banners have been made in workshops and there are various PBLL all over the United States and Canada, which house more than 500 banners. The words and the banners we make have a growing history. They are made by someone, used in a protest, returned to the library, and then taken by someone else to a different protest. The banners carry the histories of the hands that made and hold them, and the places to which they have and will travel.

In the last three years, I’ve learned a lot from witnessing how the banners are used and where they show up. They get checked out for protests, marches and political purposes, but also for everything from conferences, public talks and exhibitions, to schools and events. Sometimes people simply tell us they want to put them up in their room. It’s been interesting to look through media coverage of nationwide protests and see how often we spot our banners. It’s important for me to witness their impact as people encounter the artworks in public spaces, newspapers, or on social media, where they are widely shared.

One profound aspect of textiles is the accessibility of materials and how this lends them to improvisation. When recent protests erupted while most of the United States was in isolation during the covid-19 pandemic, people were able to repurpose materials in their everyday lives – clothes, bed sheets, curtains and paint – into declarative statements and demands. In a few words, these signs and protest banners can poignantly express anger (ACAB, short for All Cops Are Bastards), demand justice (Justice for Breonna Taylor), point out ironies or hypocrisies of power (White Supremacy is Terrorism), confront chilling realities (Stop Killing Us!, …And Children Are Still in Cages), uplift the movement (Lifting As We Climb) and imagine new worlds (Care Not Cages, No Borders).

These signs are symbols and messages to stand behind and move into the future with. Throughout history we see crowds of people standing behind posters and banners – from the Sanitation Workers’ Strike in Memphis in 1968 to the march to protest the murders of Black women in Boston in 1979. As well as conveying messages, they also provide a choreographic function, displayed at the front of the crowd for pacing.

The most profound way craft is used to fight for social change is how it supports a sense of community through collective making. Sewing lends itself to being made in groups. For my projects, I sew with disenfranchised people, creating a space for subversion, protest and empowerment, enabling people to collectively take a stance, talk back to power and fight for a better world. The act of making banners itself is an act of protest.