When Marlena Myles was asked to create an anti-ICE poster, she had no idea the community response would be huge. The freelance artist moved quickly to get something ready. “The design took, like, 30 minutes,” she says, “because I was really motivated, and just wanted to help.”
At the free public screenprinting sessions with Skoden Studios things got off to a rocky start; Minneapolis’s All My Relations Arts was supposed to host the event, but when ICE showed up and began arresting people outside the building, organizers had to pivot. Two local venues quickly stepped up, with Pillsbury House + Theater in Minneapolis and Mino Oski Ain Dah Yung in St. Paul each hosting a screenprinting day that weekend.
The people came in droves, lining up outside in the January cold with white cotton tees in hand, ready to wait hours to make resistance art together.
“We didn't expect this response or anything,” Myles says. “We didn't know how many people would show up. Within 30 minutes, the people in line were volunteering and helping.”
Myles, who is Spirit Lake Dakota, grew up in the Little Earth community of south Minneapolis. Much of her work is educational, accessible (meaning free and often public), and deeply rooted in Indigenous history, whether she’s creating a Dakota land map of the Twin Cities or hosting knowledge-sharing events at Battle Creek Park. Her ICE protest stencil for this particular project is striking, but also succinct in its messaging, with bold font proclaiming “ICE OUT OF MNI SÓTA MAKÓČE/NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND.” There are Dakota florals on the side, and the arrows on top of tipis represent people defending their land.
“It has a little bit of toughness to it,” she says. “The tipis represent our homelands—the Dakota people. That's why no one is illegal on stolen land: White people, their origin story is also immigration.”
Nowadays, Myles estimates that as many as 5,000 people have shown up to these community screenprinting events to help print tees, posters, and totes.
“We’ve always supported the arts here in Minnesota,”Myles says. ”It's great to see how the arts can support the community in return.”
This is just one example of local artists creating something radical in response to the federal government's cruel and deadly siege of Minnesota. It’s a way for artists to contribute to a community movement that is coming together to fight hate with kindness, neighborly generosity, and empathy. This art is also, in most cases, free. With the exception of mutual-aid fundraisers, you can’t buy this art, and that’s a critical part of its creation and purpose.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘Hey, where can I buy this? Can I order this?’ You know, just like consumption, and that's not really the point,” Myles says. “The whole point is to come together as a community and be with each other, not just sitting at home doomscrolling all day and feeling super paranoid. If we're all together you’ll see that we still have the power as people.”
One way resistance art can be subversive is to take something familiar and flip it on its head, co-opting it into an all-new meaning.
That’s what the gang at Burlesque of North America are doing with their “I.C.E. Out of Minneapolis” poster, a playful spin on our ubiquitous red-and-white snow emergency/snow plow route signs. Co-owners Wes Winship and Mike Davis worked on the design off and on for a few weeks, eventually printing them off in time to start giving them out at last month’s anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park.
“We come from a graffiti background and the very nature of graffiti is political; there's a message behind it,” says Davis. “There's, you know, something more to it than just, ‘I want to create pretty pictures.’ Art is a powerful tool to spread a message to people.”
You might already be familiar with some of BRLSQ’s work and not know it; back in 2015 they made waves around the world with their “Refugees Welcome” stickers and signage, which can still be spotted in the windows of businesses all over town. And their recently installed ”ICE OUT” wraparound banner covering the exterior of Wrecktangle Pizza’s Lyn-Lake location is pretty hard to miss.
You can pick one of these bad boys up at places like Moon Palace, Smitten Kitten, Pilllar Forum, Extreme Noise, and Bench Pressed—when they can keep them in stock. (You can also download it as a PDF file via their website and print it out on your own.) Or, if you’re lucky, you might spot Davis out at a protest giving them away.
“Anytime I show up at a rally, I'll just carry a pile of them with me and get swarmed,” he says, laughing. “People just come up like I'm handing out free $20 bills.”
While the signs are free, BRLSQ has also been selling anti-ICE merch, from T-shirts to pins, on their website, with funds going to Joyce Uptown Food Shelf and the Phillips Neighborhood Urgent Relief Fund.
For activist, artist, and movement organizer Sean Lim, community collaboration is a key part to all of his work. So when people began tagging him on a December Instagram post asking a local artist to design a pro-immigration poster people could put on their lawns, he was on it.
The resulting artworks, the latest in what Lim calls his “porch poster” series, are emblazoned with love: “We love our Somali neighbors” and “We love our immigrant neighbors.”
“I chatted with a lot of the aunties and the grannies at the studio that I help steward, and we kind of came up with the final language,” he says. “I tossed in some butterflies, because butterflies have always been this beautiful symbol of migration, especially monarch butterflies.”
Lim has also been overwhelmed by the public response. He’s regularly dropping off stacks of hundreds of posters around town—including places like Arbeiter Brewing, Pillsbury House and Theater, and Bench Pressed Letterpress & Design—only to discover they’re all gone 24 hours later. “So far I’ve screen printed thousands and thousands of prints and got them out,” he says.
Lim has made these works pay-as-able, with all funds benefiting groups that do critical work in the community. And Minnesotans, who have been picking them up for their lawns and their windows—even repurposing them as protest signs—have been generous.
“I was invited to do two weekend popups [at Bench Pressed],” he says. “Each time, we raised $7,000 for mutual aid and it was a nonstop line of people from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. coming in.”
A mutual-aid market at Minneapolis’s Northern Coffeeworks, where Lim did some live screenprinting, was also a big fundraiser for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “Prints kind of just flew off the table once they were dry,” he says. “That event ended up raising $3,000 in an evening.”
Thousands of Minnesotans are finding their niche in the resistance, whether it's driving at-risk people to their job, signing up for neighborhood ICE watches, observing arrests, or marching. Artists creating art is another way people are connecting and contributing to a larger movement—a feat that can’t be overstated in an era of consumerism, cluttered adscapes, and misinformation from sources we're supposed to trust.
“I always view art as an invaluable tool in the toolbox of organizing, and one that is often overlooked,” says Lim, who first began screenprinting up North during the Line 3 pipeline encampments. “Art, at the end of the day, is critical to the revolution. When we look back in history, every single movement that has pushed to make the world a better place has had many things in common, and one of those is art.”
South Minneapolis resident Stacey Combs (aka Stace of Spades) provides one of the cutest examples of resistance art. The artist specializes in children’s illustrations, stickers, food doodles, and usable stuff—stationary, notepads, tees—charmingly festooned with things like shrimp, axolotls, pickles, and cheeseburgers.
Her anti-ICE posters, which are free to download, proclaim “MN Nice Melts Fascist ICE,” “ICE Out Now,” and, our personal favorite, the succinct “Fuck ICE.” Two of her printouts include an adorable little ice cube with the doe-est doe eyes you’ll ever see. It looks sad as it melts away. That’s right, suffer little buddy.
“I was like, ‘OK, I don’t want something just mean and bleak, because there's a lot of love here,” she says of her project. “Everything is rooted in love with us being out here protecting our neighbors and taking care of each other. Our love is gonna melt ICE.”
Combs was jolted into action after a terrifying ICE incident at her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter’s daycare.
“One of the cooks at my daughter's daycare was abducted right in front of the school. So that put a lot into motion with parents organizing and supporting teachers. We've been doing food runs and giving them rides and stuff,” she says. “I do grocery shopping, but it just doesn't feel like enough. I wanted to make some art that people can bring out to protests or put in their windows or whatever.”
Since releasing her anti-ICE poster Combs has begun collabing with a variety of makers and artists. Her dying little ice cube has shown up on a candle label Apothecary 19 made to fundraise for mutual-aid orgs, and her work is featured as album art on local folk/country artist Jillian Rae’s protest song, “Fuck ICE.”
Soon, you’ll also be able to see Comb’s work in the St. Paul sky; in March her work will be featured on an anti-ICE billboard on Maryland Ave. E near I-35E as part of the Minnesota Billboard Project.
For Combs, and so many other radicalized Twin Cities artists, art is how she fights for a better, ICE-free, world.
“Being a mom, I can't really feel comfortable getting out on the front lines and protesting and observing and stuff,” she says. “But I can at least provide visual assistance to the resistance and raise a kind human and let her know that it's not okay to let people be treated like this.”
While some artists’ work focuses on the overreach of the federal government, Matthew Cermak’s poster series rails against the corporate citizen. Namely Target, a Minnesota company many of us have been boycotting since it dropped its DEI policy in January of 2025.
His poster series is some of the most unsettling work of the movement because it centers ICE brutality, using AP/Getty/Reuters photos of ICE tackling, arresting, manhandling, and chasing individuals, with Target’s red logo dotted liberally throughout each scene. Like a newspaper ad from hell, there are also slogans like “We let ICE do in-store pickup,” “Drive up & get your shots,” and “Daily doorbusters: Your 4th Amendment now 100% off.”
At its root, Cermak says, it’s all about calling out corporate inaction as tacit complicity.
“Co-opting their branding elements and referencing their style is my way of saying that Target, through their inaction, is really endorsing what is happening here,” he says. “That's why we need to ‘Expect more, demand better.’”
Last week he shared about his series, which is free to download online, on the r/Minneapolis Reddit thread, where it sat as a top post. One commenter enthusiastically called it “graphic design jujutsu.”
Cermak says the goal of his renegade one-man campaign is to get Target to step up for its community by threatening its bottom line.
“We need to compel companies that do have power and political capital to stand up for us, because their home state is a target right now,” he says. “We have to show them that the demand for Target is very elastic, and our money is very conditional.”
This feature is merely a sampler platter of some of the art that is emerging from the movement. Everyday new protest posters are showing up online for free download, rebel loons are taking over social media, and tattoo artists are creating all kinds of righteous flash art to raise funds for folks in need. It’s a movement with many people trying to do small things that add up to a big picture.
“You know, the government underestimated how much Minnesotans are willing to come together for their neighbors,” Myles says. “They just thought, you know, white people wouldn't care what was happening to people of color. And that's obviously not the case.”
“So many basic rights have just been trampled on in such a short amount of time,” David says. “And seeing it happen, even if it's not people you know personally, it's people in our community. It's people who work at a restaurant that we've been to. It's people who live near a friend.”
“I think that we should be using every tool in the toolbox at our disposal to fight for the community we know we deserve and realize the world we want to build together,” Lim says. “We each have our niche in this moment, whether that is art making or mutually organizing or patrolling—whatever that might be. We all have our niche that we are fulfilling.”
