The Aesthetics of Protest: Stitching Memory and Collective Action

​By studying historical textile banners, this workshop addresses how the aesthetics of protest shape social and political change. Grounded in feminist ethics of care, participants will create a collective banner and consider connections between art-making, community-building, resistance, and social transformation.

​Protest banners carry a long, global history of resistance: suffragist sashes; hand-embroidered abolition banners; khadi (handspun cotton) in India as a symbol of anti-colonial defiance; Sicilian anti-mafia bedsheet banners; and contemporary banners demanding an end to gender violence, facism, and systemic injustice. Banners materialize collective action, reclaim erased stories, and inscribe movement memory onto the material world. Improvisation is at the heart of this radical performance and embodied practice. Transforming repurposed materials into messages of defiance and solidarity is an engaged form of public pedagogy, cultural practice, and collective world-making. Through stitching, in this workshop, participants will consider how mending and sewing are gestures of resistance and relationality—acts that bind memory, grief, and hope into public form.