Creative Dissent

CAN’T/WON’T is a set of four tapestry banners created by Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell as an artwork to be carried in protest and displayed in solidarity with intersecting social justice art movements. Constructed from granny squares with the messages “We can’t compete,” “We won’t compete,” “We can’t keep up,” and “We won’t keep down,” the banners acknowledge the dilemmas of feminist and queer cultural participation. As Logue and Mitchell note, ”We can’t compete so we won’t compete. Instead we will: collaborate, nurture, cultivate, feed, enable.” Created initially for the University of Brighton exhibition Civil Partnerships: Queer & Feminist Art & Activism, the textiles also capture the values of the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), founded by Logue and Mitchell in 2010 with the goal to give voice to those who are underrepresented in mainstream institutions.

Engaging immigrant and disenfranchised communities, Aram Han Sifuentes’ practice often revolves around skill-sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multi-ethnic and inter-generational sewing circles that become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. In response to the 2016 United States presidential election, Han Sifuentes founded the Protest Banner Lending Library to advocate for the importance of protest banners in public spaces and to ensure banners have been available to the public as protests and marches intensified. With sharp graphic text sewn or ironed on top of fabric, the banners from the archive presented here highlight a variety of messages from different voices while pointing to the ways in which people have engaged in resistance since 2016. Passing through many hands, the banners have taken on new life in each march and platform.

From left to right:

Lionel Streetart
Love and Hate, 2021
Digital print on vinyl
Courtesy of the artist

Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch
Water is Life, undated
Protest banner; silk and thread
Courtesy of the Protest Banner Lending Library

Jordan Bennett
All Eyes On Mi’kma’ki, 2020
Two flags, digital print on polysilk
Collection of the Art Gallery of Guelph

From their project Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, this banner was created by Slavs and Tatars, the artist collective founded in 2006 as a collaboration between artists and designers Payam Sharifi and Kasia Korczak. Beginning as an investigation into apparently disparate events in two distant regions of the world – the Iranian revolution of 1979, in the wake of which Iran became an Islamic republic, and the Solidarity revolution in Poland and collapse of communism in 1989 – Friendship of Nations traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s histories. The textiles are part of the collective’s efforts to trace lost connections between the two nations, including the importance of craft-based cultural resistance in both cases. In this banner, “Your Fate in Your Hands” refers to a phrase from the Solidarność or Solidarity movement, the first independent labour union in Poland known officially as the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity,” and is intended to speak to the resourcefulness, persistence, and discipline of the Poles in their struggle for independence.