Get Your Clothes, Totes and Bandannas Printed With a Kewpie “Fuck ICE” Design at Pop-Up Event

When Mara Wroblewski brought her printmaking supplies and “Fuck ICE” design to the Cheesman Park pavilion for a makeshift pop-up a few weeks ago, she wasn’t sure if anyone would show up. “I did it in the park,” she says, “because I was like, ‘If no one comes, at least I’ll just be hanging out at the park.'”

But when she arrived, people were already waiting in line — a line that would grow to about 100 people hoping to get their shirts, totes, bandannas and other clothing items printed with Wroblewski’s block print, linocut design of three kewpies surrounding a heart reading “Fuck ICE.” At the end of six hours of non-stop printing at the park, Wroblewski had bruises on her knees from kneeling on the hard floor of the pavilion and $540 in proceeds to donate to the Immigrant Freedom Fund, a local nonprofit that helps pay bail bonds for people detained at the Aurora ICE detention center.

“Bail bond amounts are getting higher and higher, and they’re detaining more and more people and shoving them into these overcrowded detention centers,” Wroblewski says. “Immigrant Freedom Fund is doing really important work.”

On Wednesday, February 11, Wroblewski will be at a more official pop-up as part of Strawberry Mountain’s Disco-Swap clothing swap event at Renegade Brewing in the Art District on Santa Fe. A limited number of Disco-Swap tickets are still available, but people hoping to have their clothing printed with Wroblewski’s design do not need to purchase a ticket.

Wroblewski, who only started learning printmaking at an Art Students League of Denver class about a month ago, has been wowed by the response to her design. Before attending the January 30 rally in La Alma Lincoln Park, the artist posted a TikTok video offering to print her design on protest signs. The video has garnered over 49,000 views, and Wroblewski ended up making about sixty signs and handing them out at the rally.

Online, people begged her to make the design into shirts, but not wanting to “perpetuate consumerism,” Wroblewski came up with the concept of printing the design on clothing people already have instead.

The idea for the artwork itself came to Wroblewski after she saw a similar design on a fast-fashion brand tote bag at a thrift store. She loved the design but hated the text, which said something like “Sweet as Heaven.”

“I was like, ‘This would be so much cooler if it said something that actually says something,'” Wroblewski recalls. “I changed the messaging and transformed it into the linocut block print medium. ‘Fuck ICE’ was at the top of my mind. I wanted to say it out loud.”

And Wroblewski enjoys the slowness, intention and thoughtfulness behind printmaking — it feels like its own form of protest in a world where fast fashion is filling up landfills. “To me, fast fashion is a symbol of thoughtless consumerism and exploitation and trend culture,” she says. “The print is a juxtaposition. It’s cute and sweet and innocent and relatable and aesthetically pleasing, but the message is very obvious. It’s not hidden, and it’s obviously driven by feelings of angst, anger and frustration.”

While she was surprised by the turnout at her Cheesman Park pop-up, Wroblewski isn’t surprised that people like the design. “People just want a way to express themselves and their views in a way that feels authentic to them and already integrated in their identity,” she says.

The experience has shown her what a powerful tool art can be for building community and coming together in resistance to things that are wrong. “Art innately resists the idea that we have to conform and make ourselves small to fit into spaces that somebody else made and told us to exist in,” Wroblewski says. “Art is a reminder of our power in the sense that we can build and create our own meaning in our own lives that inspires us and motivates us, and we don’t just have to take what’s given to us and do what we’re told, even though it feels like that a lot of the time.”

Wroblewski wants to thank people for their support, especially those who came to the park pop-up. Her goal is for her art to bring more awareness to what’s going on in the world. “What’s happening with ICE isn’t isolated,” she concludes. “It’s connected to all the broken systems that are failing us and have been failing Indigenous, Black and brown people for a really long time. Organizations like Immigrant Freedom Fund and the Colorado Rapid Response Network are doing critical, on-the-ground work in Colorado. I think it’s really important to listen to people and leaders who are most impacted, and make sure we’re staying accountable.”

And it’s important to talk to each other, too. Wroblewski hopes her art is a conversation starter.

Bring a clothing item to be printed with Wroblewski’s design from 6 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, February 11, to Renegade Brewing, 925 West Ninth Avenue. Wroblewski will be printing with black ink; she says cotton, linen, denim and canvas materials work best. The prints are $15, and $5 from each purchase will be donated to the Immigrant Freedom Fund. Keep up with Wroblewski’s work and future events on Instagram and TikTok.