Some posters blare slogans like “ICE out of Minneapolis” and “We love our immigrant neighbors.” Others center imagery: fists crushing ice cubes; a dog peeing on a snowman dressed as a federal immigration agent.

A collection of around 50 posters protesting the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown is on view in a pop-up exhibition at Can Can Wonderland in St. Paul through Feb. 19, organized by the art collective Art You Heart.

A public celebration of the art will take place from 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14. Poster designers will showcase their work; snow sculptor Dusty Thune is projecting images of anti-ICE snow sculptures including his own; and the muralist and graffiti artist Biafra will be painting live. Can Can Wonderland plans to donate proceeds from the evening’s regular admission ticket sales to charities of the poster artists’ choice.

“Artists are angry, we’re exhausted, but we have resolve,” said Nicki McCracken, a graphic designer who co-founded Art You Heart and co-curated the Can Can show. “Everybody is rising up and everybody is joining in, and the artists are documenting this moment in time.”

A show of this scale and scope would typically take around six months to organize, she said, but this protest poster show came together within the past two weeks. Posters in the show include designs by local studios Burlesque of North America and Little Dipper Art that have since become iconic around the Twin Cities, plus other works by printmaker Sean Lim, Native visual artist Jearica Fountain, St. Paul illustrator Alxndr Jones and letterpress shop Lunalux.

“It was important for us to also find those pieces that have already become part of the public community,” said Art You Heart co-founder Eddie Hofmeister Porter. “You go around the Twin Cities and see them everywhere, which means they’ve made an impact.”

McCracken and Hofmeister Porter are creating an online companion gallery of all the posters in the show, which they plan to launch on Feb. 14 at artyouheart.com. Copies of nearly all posters in the show are able to be purchased or obtained in some manner: Many posters will be available for purchase through the Art You Heart website, with proceeds split among ACLU of Minnesota, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and the International Institute of Minnesota. Other artists have either opted to make their designs available free to download or are handling sales and mutual aid donations directly, so links will be available online.

The current exhibition is also just the “first chapter” of what the duo has planned, McCracken said. They’re looking for a venue for a second iteration of the show in South Minneapolis, to respond more directly to the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and they’re also hoping to launch a wider public call for submissions to curate a broader body of local and national Minnesota-focused protest artwork.

“We want to make sure that there’s a place for this art to live beyond a single night,” McCracken said. “We don’t want this work to disappear into social media feeds.”

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