Growing up as a child in rural Michigan, my bedroom was filled with Detroit Tigers pennants. I was always drawn to the tactile printed quality of felt. As a Métis person whose ancestors worked as fur-trappers across North America, the production of felt (initially made from animal pelts) was one of the main reasons Native people were inserted into the capitalist economy. In the early twentieth-century, radical labor unions like the IWW made and sold pennants for rank-and-file members to demonstrate their affiliations and solidarity. I have been making multiple series of hand-sewn, hand-cut, and hand-printed pennants based on a variety of issues.
Originally printed for a solo show on radical labor history in Chicago which retold the stories of the daily struggles faced while working in the building and dismantling of the rural and industrial Midwest.
