The Aesthetics of Protest Typography: On Preserving Dissenting Letterforms

Patrick Martinez, Hold the Ice (2020). Neon on plexiglass, 36 × 22 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. Photo: Kevin Todora.

In 1968, photojournalist Ernest C. Withers captured an image of the Memphis sanitation strike. The black-and-white photograph depicts a group of Black male workers holding up copies of the same sign: in a vertically elongated black typeface set on a stark white background, the signs read, “I AM a Man,” with “AM” bolded and underlined. Derived from the line “I am an invisible man” in Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel Invisible Man, the posters edit out the word “invisible.” In doing so, they reinforce the Black worker’s presence in the workplace while simultaneously referencing Ellison’s expression of alienation brought on by the Jim Crow era.¹ The “I AM a Man” signs would initiate an iconic protest phrase of the movement.

With knowledge of this history, typographer Tré Seals created Vocal Type, a type foundry for creatives of color, in 2016.² “I had already known about the ‘I AM a Man’ signs since fourth grade,” Seals said.² “That’s why Martin was the first [typeface] I made.” The Martin typeface takes from the original posters’ use of uneven bold lettering, mixed capitalization, and underlining, infusing a sense of urgency into the written text. Seals’s typefaces, many inspired by Black liberatory movements and figures, focus not only on the overall messaging of a letter, phrase, or sentence used in protest signage, but also the typography—the letter shape, arrangement, and aesthetic—and how those elements convey, assert, or obscure meaning.

The need for dissenting typography is as abundant today as it was in 2016 or in 1968. In June of this year, ICE and law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level conspired to facilitate mass raids across L.A., abducting people, tearing communities apart, and attacking those protesting against them. Thousands of people mobilized in response, taking to the streets to demand that ICE get out of Southern California. Some protesters in downtown L.A. held up 18 x 24-inch posters designed by L.A.-based artist Patrick Martinez with an image of a neon sign reading “DEPORT ICE,” glowing in a cold, arctic blue, a color that cheekily resembles an ice cube.⁴ (“ICE melts in the summer heat” is a common refrain at protests across the country.) Martinez’s neon works and accompanying protest signs appropriate a typographic form ubiquitous across L.A. His neon signs, hallmarks of consumerism, also signal the neighborhood mom-and-pop shop. As a result, he embeds protest language into the everyday, using commercial typeface design in ways that disrupt the consumerist status quo while pointing to the very fabric of L.A.’s diverse population and workforce.

A month earlier in New York City, demonstrators with Writers Against the War on Gaza held posters that utilized the plain serif font of The New York Times in all caps as though it were a breaking news headline on the front page of the paper. The text was placed above yet another image of Palestine on fire at the hands of the West. This sign, held up by a demonstrator standing in front of The New York Times offices, read: “NYT IGNORES GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE.”⁵ Through this typographic subversion, there’s no way the message could be more legible.

If typography is a study of and practice in legibility, then in reference to the language of protest, it is also a site of power, access, utility, and archival history. The text and fonts printed on protest signs have the potential to remix the everyday in ways that provide powerfully layered meaning, rooting out contradictions, confronting power imbalances, and making clear our most intimate, innate demands: autonomy, freedom, love. The protest sign functions as the medium through which a movement speaks—to the world and to participants en masse. It’s the most direct screen onto which a protestor can cast demands if only because it is the protestor, the author of those demands, who controls what is written, how it is written, and the forms and shapes it takes.

What happens when these protest letterforms, originally created for an object meant for use at a demonstration (flag, banner, sign), are recycled into an artwork? On one hand, by bringing the language of protest into the gallery, there is potential for the lifespan of the referenced protest and its cause to be extended, brought into an art historical canon, and thereby preserved in the archive. Unavoidably, though, bringing protest language into a white-walled space also risks removing the protest ephemera and its letterforms from its vital context and, most importantly, from its utility. Though, if an artist is mindful of this dynamic, perhaps it creates an opportunity. An artist can bring a protest’s typography into an art space or institution, not to sterilize it or water it down, but to keep it from getting lost to a materialistic news cycle that is only focused on what’s next. The typography remains long after crowds are dispersed from a demonstration, slowing the protest so as to sustain its message over time. After all, substantive change is urgent, but that change is also a long-term project. Change takes time, care, and attention. Still, artists like Martinez are finding ways to strike a balance with their use of dissenting text, creating protest letterforms that introduce urgent messages to the archive (within institutions or galleries) while also offering utilitarian and community access to their typography, so it might continue to do its work outside of the institution. The language of dissent, then, is at once preserved and usable.

⁂

In 1970, during a Gay Liberation Day march in New York City, photographer Donna Gottschalk took to Christopher Street with a sign that read in imperfect, uppercase handwriting “I AM YOUR WORST FEAR I AM YOUR BEST FANTASY.”⁶ Nine years later in 1979, at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, a group of demonstrators held up a banner that read in all-caps akin to Gottschalk’s sign from nearly a decade earlier, “FIRST GAY AMERICANS” in a bold, confronting, and messy hand drawn scrawl.⁷ Through their publishing platform GenderFail, the artist Be Oakley coalesced these individual moments, both from the Gay Liberation Movement, to create a single, downloadable typeface called “I am your worst fear; I am your best fantasy / FIRST GAY AMERICANS.”⁸ This typeface and nine others produced since 2018 were the subject of Oakley’s 2024–25 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Each of Oakley’s fonts are derived from distinct but intrinsically interconnected socio-political movements—from the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and ACT UP in the 1980s and ’90s, to the resurgent calls for Black liberation in 2020, and the student uprisings for Palestine in 2023–25. The fonts are symbolically meaningful, wherein the “uppercase letters [do not have] any hierarchical importance over lowercase letters.”⁹ But they are also meant primarily to be useful, readily downloadable for queer, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people of color to use for protest signs, fundraising and mutual aid purposes, personal projects, and more.

GenderFail, An Incessant Unknowability: An Archive of Protest Inspired Typography and Its Open Source Uses (installation views) (2024–25). Images courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photos: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.

GenderFail, An Incessant Unknowability: An Archive of Protest Inspired Typography and Its Open Source Uses (installation views) (2024–25). Images courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photos: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.

In this way, an archive of past protest typography is transformed into a tool for the present and future. Oakley engages with the archive of protest not as a fixed or nostalgic look at the past, but as a dynamic and living resource—a place from which a movement can be both catalogued and continually reimagined. The “I am your worst fear” typeface is not merely a symbol of queer history, but an instrument for queer futurity, allowing generational knowledge from a movement that has been decades in the making to be passed down, active and defiant.

Oakley certainly isn’t the only contemporary artist to reference the histories of socio-political and economic upheaval in their work, nor is Oakley the only artist to employ a typographic means to do so, especially in Los Angeles. From Dr. Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles and Mary-Linn Hughes and Reginald Zachary’s Love is for Everyone mural, to Elana Mann’s collaborative banners and sculptural protest rattles, to print projects by L.A.-based organizations such as the Feminist Center for Creative Work and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, artists and collectives across the city continue to reference and, like Oakley, reinvigorate protest movements by way of typography.

Be Oakley / GenderFail, Mother Nature is a Lesbian Font (2020). Image courtesy of the artist and GenderFail.

Last summer, while visiting the Dallas Contemporary, I found the landscape of L.A. staring back at me. Patrick Martinez’s immersive Histories exhibition, which ran from April 2024 until January of this year, recalled the visual language of East Los Angeles through large-scale installations of brick walls adorned with vibrant murals that depicted an array of references: flowering bougainvillea and Sitting Bull, Mayan warriors and Emiliano Zapata, Larry Itliong and feathered serpents. The bricks in the sculptural mural were also collapsing, signifying rich and vital histories of place that are being disappeared by racialized eviction and gentrification.

Installed throughout the gallery were Martinez’s signature neon signs. These works reference street-level commercial marketing and its diverse history within L.A., while also subverting it, swapping marketing copy for a more dissident kind. Among a tightly-packed line of neons, the border of a rectangular sign—the sign itself a little bigger in size than a storefront’s “open” display— glowed a bright purple, the inside reading “TIERRA Y LIBERTAD” in an uppercase type. Another, bigger sign nearby critiqued the city’s housing crisis (“NOTHING IS UP BUT THE RENT”) while others envisioned new and greater forms of collectivism (“MUTUAL GIVING CREATES COMMUNITY”) and demanded an end to racialized violence (“STOP ASIAN HATE”).

Subversively, Martinez also reworks his own neon artworks, which are purchased by institutions and collectors, into lawn signs. Partnering with Mixed Media Editions, Martinez brings objects that are otherwise secluded behind gallery walls into real neighborhoods and onto the city’s streets to be used at actual demonstrations and protests.¹⁰ While these lawn signs are for sale at $80 a piece (perhaps a bit expensive when compared to the few dollars one might spend to make their own), a portion of every sale goes to the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights (CHIRLA), one of California’s largest immigrant rights organizations. In particularly urgent moments, Martinez distributes the signs for free, such as during the Solidarity L.A. March & Rally on March 15 at City Hall,¹¹ or donates all of the proceeds to CHIRLA. The gesture, however complex, is meaningful. While the actual neon signs are displayed in privatized spaces, his lawn signs offer another way to engage with the work—an engagement that is accessible to a broader public and that enacts his typographic slogans in real spaces of dissent, working to actualize their impact.

Martinez and Oakley’s works are the most generative when they step outside of the art gallery and into the streets, as a lawn sign available at a demonstration or a free typeface that protestors can download and utilize. These works then operate on two levels. First, as art projects, they preserve histories of protest inside institutions. Rather than maintaining the institution as an exclusionary boundary, the artists use the institution as just another tool at their disposal—one that allows for expansive record-keeping, maintenance, and exposure. These artists’ letterforms also operate in a second way: By turning their typographic artworks into tools to be used by protesters, they are creating accessible ways of disseminating history, aesthetic power, and knowledge to the public. This intentional use of letterforms becomes a means by which to continually dissent with every word, every consonant, every vowel—a living archive, and a slow (but steady) protest.

Patrick Martinez, Ceasefire (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. Photo: Patrick Martinez.

Aaron Boehmer is a writer and researcher based in New York City. He covers culture, politics, and the arts and has written for The Nation, Literary Hub, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Texas Monthly, and others.

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