Kimberly Dawn Robertson’s “bead bombs” fasten Native feminist resistance to service poles, reflecting the city back to itself.
From above, Los Angeles can look like a circuit board: gridded streets pulsing with traffic, power lines stitching together neighborhoods, utility poles rising at regular intervals like exclamation points in wood and steel.
In Cypress Park, at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot where federal immigration agents have violently detained vendors and others, one of those poles carries a band of color with a fluorescent sheath that, on closer inspection, is made up of 10,000 pony beads spelling a message in block letters: “FUCK ICE.”
The intervention is one of three installed in LA by Kimberly Dawn Robertson, a citizen of the Muskogee Creek Nation who describes herself as “a Native artist” and “a Native feminist.” Metzli Projects, an Indigenous arts and culture collaborative, supported the series.
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