Ella Baker Center Night Out for Safety and Liberation (2021-2022)

In part of a poster series to help promote their annual Night Out for Safety and Liberation, I was commissioned by the Ella Baker Center to create a poster defining what safety looks like to me. Inspired by community response to the pandemic that I was blessed to take a part in. I decided to create an illustration that encompassed what I’ve learned about the meaning of mutual aid, intergenerational organizing, autonomy and abolition this past year through practice. I watched community take care of each other, no savior, no aid, just community caring for community.

In my second year participating in Ella Baker Center’s Night Out for Safety and Liberation poster series, I opted to reframe the question of what safety means to me in relation to the climate crisis we are facing. While the question Ella Baker Center asks, is poised in relation to policing, I aimed at communicating how much the climate crisis is interconnected with the prison industrial complex. The military being one of the biggest polluters in the world, pushing imperialism at the expense of our planet. Our militarized police force following behind. Including the manner in which water and land protectors have been faced with militarized oppression at the moment of resistance.

I wanted to create a new dawn, where the land and water is protected, the pipes have broken, fishing and hunting rights have been restored to Indigenous folks, and the people have won.