source: coolcleveland.com
While other cities across the nation are encouraging artists to rise up against ICE raids and deportations, including Minneapolis, where the killing of Alexi Pretti and Renee Good caused a storm of revolt, Downtown Cleveland and the City of Cleveland released an RFQ for the Asphalt Art Initiative, a bargain-basement, low-cost strategy to activate the streets in the Gateway District. The charitable organization founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, billionaire and former mayor of New York City, Bloomberg Philanthropies, funded the public art project. The City of Cleveland announced it on February 6.
Interested artists should submit an application by February 26, which is less than three weeks after the announcement. Five finalists will receive a $500 honorarium to prepare a conceptual presentation. The finalist honorarium is $750; the lead artist’s design and project management fee is $7,500. No information was available regarding the review committee. For more information, https://www.downtowncleveland.com/jobs-and-rfps
“The Asphalt Art Initiative positions artists as civic partners, recognizing creative practice as a form of infrastructure—advancing safety, belonging, and cultural expression across the city,” according to the RFQ.
In Minneapolis, artists mobilized to crush ICE with screen-printed posters, apparel emblazoned with anti-ICE messages, beaded earrings, and even spell-casting. In an article published by Hyperallergic, their message is clear: Artists want ICE out of Minnesota. Read more at https://hyperallergic.com/in-minneapolis-artists-mobilize-to-crush-ice/
Artnet News reported on activists embracing craft as a tool of anti-ICE resistance, including knitting, quilting and origami projects that have emerged as unlikely tools for activism.
“Public school students are making origami rabbits for a five-year-old boy detained by ICE, and there’s been a run on red yarn for the Melt the ICE hats—two projects rooted in historical examples,” said Sarah Cascone, a senior writer for Artnet News in a recently published article.
Needle and Skein, a yarn shop outside Minneapolis, announced plans to host a “resistance knit-in” where participants knit a new $5 pattern the shop had dubbed the “Melt the ICE” hat. The proceeds would go toward local nonprofits supporting the immigrant community, reported Cascone.
In Cleveland, hundreds of students, including those from the Cleveland School of the Arts and Cleveland Heights High School, marched out of class to protest, with some organizing under the banner of the Cleveland Liberation Center. Film and media arts students from Cleveland State University (CSU) joined demonstrations downtown carrying signs to stand in solidarity with immigrant families.
Earlier this month, SPACES artist-in-residence Steve Parker created an immersive sound sculpture to explore themes of healing, injury, and labor through the lens of football culture. moCa Cleveland recently opened four exhibitions that form a “single, bracing conversation about cultural, environmental, spiritual, and bodily survival,” according to the museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art has 30 works on view created from the 1950s onward that showcase the unique histories and perspectives of Indigenous artists. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum features SNL: 50 Years of Music, Revolutionary Women in Music: Left of Center, and The Music of 1984.
Not exactly political resistance.
Locally, Cleveland artist Ape Bleakney blends her social advocacy and community engagement with her art. Her recent series of silkscreen posters directly confronts ICE imagery, with several anti-ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) posters as protest art, with proceeds donated to immigration support organizations.
Bleakney describes her aesthetic as bold, gritty and textural, loaded with meaning and layering. She uses photographic elements as figurative components, textures or abstracted layers. A recent set of silkscreen prints reads, “Do Not Obey in Advance,” above an image of a masked ICE agent. Another says, “Think for Yourself. Question Authority.”
“I look to the 1960s for inspiration, our last huge social shifting moment where there were so many things happening at once,” she said. “Even further back to suffrage and abolition,” she added, “we have models of resistance, having faced fascism before in the world.”
Printmaking was accessible early in her career and inexpensive as a medium, allowing her to produce multiple prints, making her work more available. “It is a democratizing medium,” said Bleakney. “You can jam out a lot of prints and distribute them easily.”
She serves as a board member on the InterReligious Task Force on Central America (IRTF), a Cleveland-based interfaith group that promotes peace and human rights in Central America and Colombia. Bleakney described the group as “very grassroots and scrappy,” even as they continue their work on migrant justice and safety.
Clay Parker, notorious in the 1990s for the flyers and posters of the local underground rock scene, did a sticker project during the NO KINGS protest in October 2025 and, more recently, produced two separate FUCK ICE stickers and mailed out hundreds across the country.
Parker, who has been screaming about Trump since 2012, said, “It just keeps getting worse and worse.”
His recent work, based on photographs of ICE raids in Minneapolis, will be in the Wild World exhibition at YARDS Projects from March 12 to April 18th. “It just infuriates me that people sit around while these idiots are scooping up our Brown and Black brothers and sisters. This myth of American exceptionalism is a lie.”
Parker points to a meeting with political artist Sue Coe while a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, as a key moment of self-awareness. Coe, known for her raw, politically charged, and socially conscious art, caused a stir after telling students, if it’s not socially aware, “then it’s not worth shit,” according to him.
“I would love to paint pretty pictures, but it is almost a duty at this point. Fascism is kicking into gear all over the world. It is the artist’s responsibility to respond to it,” added Parker. “I have a hard time telling my kids to respect elders when you see how they behave; it is like, holy crap, I don’t know what to do about this.”
Working through the punk rock era while in NYC during the late 1980s, Parker witnessed the underbelly of the art world firsthand. “One show after another was nauseating with inside jokes and shit. It made me nuts,” he said.
His recent battle with brain cancer has shifted his priorities dramatically. “I have been working like they are going to take it away from me. Family is important, as are the transgender and gay communities, and finding a way forward.”
