Bags, Flags, and Razor Blades
Undefeated, artist Michelle Pred practices her protest art
The haze over Oakland, California one week after November 8th, 2016, wasn’t something you saw: it was something you felt.
The air seemed perfectly clear at first glance on that crisp, windy morning. But underneath the clear sky, it was a little hard to breathe. In a county where only 14.5% of voters chose Trump as their President, the truth stung and was nearly impossible to swallow. There was still a sense of despair, of recovery, of mourning.
If anyone were to be enveloped by the haze, it should have been Michele Pred. It took less than a glance around her warehouse loft studio to understand that she had lost this battle. The room was covered with birth control pills, mod 1960s purses that had been engraved with neon signs that say “VOTE,” and flags made of bullets with black instead of blue. Donald Trump stood for everything that she didn’t. But that morning she still seemed optimistic, determined. Her career had been gaining momentum with some great press coverage of her two ongoing conceptual art series, and even with everything else, the show must go on.
“My first thought was, ‘oh shit,’ and the second thought was, ‘I’ve gotta get back to work,’ ” said Pred, fussing with the battery pack in a bulletproof vest that has been labeled with a glowing blue “MY BODY, MY BUSINESS” sign. “All of the sudden [this work] is really, unfortunately, extremely relevant. It’s about being targeted. So I’m realizing that I’ve got a lot to do, in a positive way. There’s a lot of scary things coming, so I feel like, okay, I’ve gotta pull my boots back up and get to work.”
So many I know had been dragging along in the week following Election Night, but there was nothing defeated about the woman in front of me. Michele Pred seemed stoic, eyes blazing underneath blonde sideswept bangs. Her arms were full of new designs for purses, part of her “Promote the General Welfare” series. The bright red and shiny black patent leather purses were mocks at that point, with masking tape pinning up printer paper with the words “#LOVENOTHATE” and “NASTY WOMAN.” They were not yet emblazoned with the sewn-in neon writing of their predecessors, but the prep work was there. And Pred was ready to keep working — she’d never given up on spreading her activist messages before. It wasn’t in her DNA.
“I have to go back to my dad,” she said, speaking of the man who spent over forty years teaching cultural geography at UC Berkeley. “He was a huge activist. Very political…it sort of taught me that you can actually do something.” She’d been an activist ever since she and her dad fought against uneven PE uniform standards at her middle school. “It really empowered me…one little person can have a voice, even though it might be a small voice.”
Pred’s work is unabashedly progressive. She’ll send pro-choice t-shirts to congresswomen and senators. She’ll blast “love not hate” from a digital billboard over the San Mateo Bridge and dress up as a beauty queen covered in birth control pills, calling herself “Miss Conception.” She’s never been afraid to make a statement. She refers to her lit-up empowering purses as “mobile billboards” that she carries around in order for them to be seen.
In her most recent performance, Pred walked around the SFO baggage claim on the fifteenth anniversary of the Patriot Act. She dressed up as a 1960s, Pan-Am flight attendant as she handed out pocketknives.
“The idea behind that was to return something that was taken away,” she said. “I collect stories from people about their experience and how they felt having something taken away and what’s considered all of a sudden a weapon today, and so I thought I’d sort of give them back. Symbolically I replace them, and so that’s why I was giving them back.” The preparation process, she said, was an interesting one. “I thought one of the most interesting things was that to do it officially through the airport, I had to get a Free Speech and Expressive Activities Permit. And they actually gave it to me. I mean, I was handing out knives.”
She’d gone through a similar process before, spending four months right in the aftermath of September 11th collecting supplies for the work that would end up launching her career. Her “Home Land Security” series of wall art and installations are made of razors, pocketknives, and scissors that had been confiscated in United States airports since the passing of the Patriot Act. She talked excitedly about her current installation for this series, on display in the Presidio; it featured everything from Bic lighters to toy guns, arranged in a ring on the floor to demonstrate the cycle and routinization of this loss of privacy and what could often feel like an illusion of safety. But the piece that most caught my eye from this series was the “Captain America”-esque bright bull’s-eye design hanging on the wall of her studio.
The aggressively pristine white and blue rings begged to be looked at, standing out boldly from a dulled silver background and drawing the eye to an even brighter red star at the center. To the uneducated passerby, it might simply be a bold-looking shield. But as you walked closer, you’d notice the repeating shapes painted underneath the symbol like bricks in a wall. You’d notice the brand names from countries around the world — Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom — different stories of travel and origin, all confiscated in a TSA screening line. You’d see the rows and rows of pedestrian-owned razor blades that had been deemed too dangerous to national security to go on board. The shield no longer represents the type of bold pride that, at first glance, it might have seemed to. Instead it mocks the heightened sense of fear in the name of safety and what trivial things have been believed to be dangerous. America, the shield seems to scoff. Land of the free, home of the confiscated razor blades.
But in that studio, in light of everything that had happened in the United States, these razor blades took on new meaning to me. They also represented the diverse streams of people that had contributed to the United States, frowned upon and wrestled away by those who feared what they didn’t understand. They represented a wide array of religions, nationalities and experiences being painted over in the name of patriotism. There was something new to see, like so many of Pred’s other pieces.
In particular, she pointed me to an in-progress display on her desk, where block letters spelled out “EQUALITY” as patterned by a cut-up American flag. “There was some roof work being done and a bunch of paint came down, so I covered it up, and I haven’t looked at it in a few weeks, but now that I’m looking at it again post-Trump…I have to finish it.”
Before, it was a political statement about the true American dream and what little respect it has received. Now, it is a protest for those who need their voices heard.
Pred showed me a photo of one of her “Promote the General Welfare” purses; this bag was black and red, with the two colors separated by a white uterus shape down the middle. Across the field of white, the word “VOTE” was stitched in glowing, neon blue.
“This purse right here was bought by a collector of mine and given to Hillary Clinton,” she said. “So Hillary owns that purse. Exciting and sad right now and all kinds of things.”
“Exciting and sad” seems to sum up the direction of Pred’s work as she looks towards her next step. Given her missions and her battles, there is both hope and discouragement up ahead. But her activism is more important than ever before, and she’s been at this too long to let anything stop her.
From the window of Pred’s studio, I could see an American flag waving in the wind. It caught my eye as I looked around the room that day. It was certainly a fitting view for this studio filled with American flags, whether they were cut up or assembled from confiscated lighters or reinterpreted with bullets. As it waved back and forth, I saw two messages: one taunting, the voice of the oppressive nationalism now baring down on this community that had tried to reject it; and one hopeful, the voice of a country that would continue to fight for progress, even when faced with the greatest of setbacks.
Before meeting with Michele Pred, I might have only seen that first, taunting flag. I might not have been able to find the way out of the haze I had found myself in. But the more I looked around at the work decorating the warehouse room, the more the flag started to stand for something else. I could see how it could represent something more positive.
After all, activism at its core is based on hope. Pred’s work centers on the hope that we might understand the consequences of our past and present and the hope that we might change perspectives and have a better future. The election results might have been a setback for her and for many others mourning in Oakland that day, but it does not mean the end of her fight. She will continue her work, and the flag will continue waving. And with time and perseverance and thought-provoking art, there might be easier days to come.
