The art build: design and protest
by Danielle Aubert
On the Saturday before the Auto Show protest, a group of about 30 designers, artists, and activists gathered to make signs and banners, participate in direct action training, and strategize. We gathered at Talking Dolls, an art collective and experimental studio on Detroit’s East Side. One of their members is Andrea Cardinal, a graphic designer, activist and educator I’ve known for many years.
I reached out to Cardinal when we first began planning the protest, just 3 weeks before it happened. She agreed to help right away. She came to the January DSA general meeting and offered to host the art build at Talking Dolls. This was the perfect space — they have a large warehouse equipped with all manner of digital and screen printing equipment, a wood shop, and room to spread out.
I was involved with general planning for the action at the Auto Show with Jessica Newman and Natasha Fernández-Silber. Newman and Fernández-Silber emphasized that the GM plant closures, combined with interest in the Green New Deal and the timing of the Auto Show created a unique opening for us. The response by the UAW and elected officials had been tepid, at best.
Newman had experience organizing protests in the past and had a good sense of what would be most effective. Our goal was not to prevent people from attending the Auto Prom, but to create a powerful visual presence outside that would be clear to the media. She said that ideally, a single photo taken at the protest would be able to carry our message.
We wanted the protest to communicate that we are environmentalists, labor and community activists united in our message. We decided on yellow as the main color — we thought it would be bright enough at night, and echo both the yellow vest movement in France and the Sunrise Movement-led campaign for a Green New Deal in D.C. Yellow is both hopeful and urgent. We used green as the secondary color.
Everything moved very quickly — we picked yellow and green on a Tuesday and immediately got to work picking up supplies for the art build on Saturday. We designed a set of 8 posters — I worked with Cardinal and fellow graphic designer and DSA comrade Kikko Paradela to refine them and get them to Emily Borden, at Talking Dolls, who stayed up most of the night Friday preparing screens. The day of the art build, DSA members showed up early to help set up and pick up food, paint, and other last minute items.
The Talking Dolls space quickly turned into a hive of activity. People were standing on ladders tracing letters onto fabric, and once they were traced, others sat on the floor filling in the outlines with paint. There were three stations set up at tables for screen printing — a friend of Cardinal’s showed up and promptly set to work churning out signs, Wayne State graphic design alumni set up at another station. Anybody who wanted a turn pulling a print was able to — a kind of organic assembly line production fell into place with people bringing over blank boards, others printing, and others hanging up wet posters. A DSA member set up a system of nails and strings on a wall so we could hang posters to dry from clothespins. Another DSA-er cut out strips of yellow fabric to be used for armbands. Pretty soon the space was full of yellow and green, music, kids and food.
Cardinal was the perfect person to lead these activities: she remained calm throughout the planning and during the art build itself. Another Talking Dolls member, Russell Stewart took photos and gamely allowed his couch to be taken over by a group that was reviewing talking points with Fernández-Silber. Members of EMEAC/Climate Justice Alliance and Sunrise movement joined in. They discussed ways to answer questions like, “Who will pay for this?” and “Isn’t GM already committed to a zero emissions future?” and “Why are you protesting today?”
In an adjacent room a direct action training was led by Eli Rubin, of Michigan for Single-Payer, and Will Toms, of the Detroit DSA Medicare for All working group. Rubin had worked closely with the M4A team, which was fresh off a successful action in Lansing. They helped a group of about 15 participants think through some key practical questions related to the protest — who would be a police liaison? Who would lead chants? Where would we meet beforehand? They ended the training with a raucous mock demonstration, with someone on a megaphone shouting “When I say green, you say power! Green! Power!” While all this was going on, a member of the Detroit Radical Childcare Collective kept a group of kids entertained in another room — some of them made their own banners with messages like “Boo Trump”.
At the art build we managed to produce four 9-foot banners (see this write-up on the banners), 75 signs with 6 different designs and 100 armbands (which, in the chaos of the protest, we failed to distribute but will use in the future). At the bottom of the signs, in lieu of a union bug, we printed the Detroit DSA flower growing out of a tire, and added the words “PRINTED WITH OUR OWN LABOR / OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION”.
Our friends at the screen printing co-op Ocelot offered to help us by printing signs we weren’t able to get to — one of the ones I saved for them was “JUSTICE FOR POLETOWN” knowing that they would appreciate it, as at least one of their members lives in the Poletown East neighborhood. I told them they could choose whether to print the rose at the bottom of each sign (this required printing a second screen/color, thus, more labor). They said of course they’d print it, they consider themselves part of the movement, and their labor in this is ‘our’ labor. They printed 70 more signs for us during the week before the protest.
In graphic design, people often talk about the appeal of analog print production and its political potential. It was a beautiful experience to see our message duplicated over and over and over, the more we printed, the more convincing it felt — this could actually happen. We have the skills and the energy. We are the workers, we are the makers, we are the community: SEIZE THE PLANT, SAVE THE PLANET.
Join the Detroit Coalition for a Green New Deal
We are labor, environmental and community activists united in our demands for a just, green economy:
1. General Motors must honor its labor contracts and its legal and moral commitments to the places in which it has done business. This means keeping all the plants open, creating more union jobs, and ensuring they contribute to the building of a green economy.
2. If GM does not agree to keep the plants open, we demand that they be seized via eminent domain and put to public use. If eminent domain was used to take property from the residents of Poletown in the early 1980s to build the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, it can be used today to take the assets back. Public hearings on this issue are vital.
3. We demand a Green New Deal that takes us on a path to rapid decarbonization of the economy, implements a federal union jobs guarantee, and ensures a just transition for workers, people of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups.
We are:
Elected Officials
Rashida Tlaib, U.S. Representative, MI 13th District
Raquel Castañeda-López, City of Detroit Council Member, District 6
Organizations
Detroit DSA, Auto Workers Caravan, Breathe Free Detroit, East Ferry/Warren Neighborhood Assoc., Sunrise Michigan, East Michigan Environmental Action Council, Soulardarity, Boggs Center, Good Jobs Now, Good Jobs Nation, National Lawyers Guild Detroit/Michigan, League of Revolutionaries for a New America, Green Party Detroit, We the People-Michigan, SE Michigan Jobs with Justice, OneHamtramck, Detroit Jews for Justice, Detroit Eviction Defense, LP-Indivisible, Indivisible Fighting 9, UNIFOR Local 222 Political Ation Committee and Retired Workers Chapter, Moratorium Now!, We Want Green Too, Swords Into Plowshares, Detroit Community Wealth Fund, Michigan for Revolution, Detroit Solidarity, Detroit IWW Solidarity Committee, Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, Food Not Bombs/Food Not Class.
And a growing list of individuals. Add your name here.
Website: Detroit Coalition for a Green New Deal
Call your elected officials to demand a public hearing on the GM plant closures and a Green New Deal:
U.S. Rep. Andy Levin (586) 738–0116
U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (313) 423–6183
City Council Member Mary Sheffield (313) 628–1119
Mayor Mike Duggan (313) 224–3400
