The art of protest is alive and well in Kansas. It is the color of democracy.
Protestors march at the No Kings event on Oct. 18, 2025, crossing Sixth and Commercial streets in downtown Emporia. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
As protest art goes, we’re experiencing an American revival.
Not since the turbulent protests of the Vietnam War era have so many taken paint and poster board in hand to express their displeasure. The current wave started six years ago with the summer of George Floyd, during which demonstrations erupted nationwide after the killing of a Black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Protest signs are common to just about every cause that brings people together in a public space, as they have been since before any of us were born. Photographs of the hand-lettered banners carried by women in the suffrage movement of a century ago look surprisingly modern, if a bit neater.
Historically, resistance movements have harnessed the power of human expression — paintings, poetry, paper cranes — as paths toward progressive goals. One now recognizes Picasso’s “Guernica,” produced in the wake of the 1937 bombing of a Basque village by the fascists, as an important ant-fascist work that transcends its specific subject matter. The same goes for Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” written in 1945 and possibly the shortest poem about the violence of war, and perhaps the most effective. The novels typically come a decade or two later, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Not a painter, poet or novelist?
Not to worry, because posters are the folk art of contemporary politics.
Just because they were produced by those untrained in graphics and design doesn’t disqualify them as art. Some might say it adds to the power of the message, because anything produced with the too-finished and generic look of artificial intelligence lacks authenticity. Someday, if museums survive the current moment, a sign carried in Minneapolis or Portland or Emporia may be on permanent display with a card reading, “Melt ICE,” circa 2026. Artist unknown.
The modern DIY protest art movement may have reached a zenith with the three No Kings protests opposing the second administration of Donald Trump, held in June and October of 2025 and March of this year. Kansans participated in the thousands during all of those events, including in my home city of Emporia.
In March, protestors chanted and waved their handmade signs as they gathered at the intersection of Sixth and Commercial, the center of town. One of those protestors was my wife, Kim. She approached the making of her homemade sign with all the deliberation of an important homework assignment. What color of poster board to use? What about the letters? What should it say? She settled on a brilliant yellow background with “No Kings!” in blue and an x-ed out pink crown.
Looking over photographs of the event, the sign was easy to spot. It may not have been the best sign, or the most creative, but it was authentic. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of other handmade signs, and a few stood out: “Love America, Hate Orange Swine” with a caricature of Trump as a pig, another that warned “Hands Off Our Democracy,” and a simple one in bold type that proclaimed: “ENOUGH ENOUGH.”
The No Kings protestors have a sharply partisan viewpoint, but during the past two months I’ve seen the rise of another group that relies largely on handmade signs to get their point across. While anti-data center groups use the same strategy for their signs, the protestors represent an unexpected coalition. In Emporia, I’ve seen people holding signs against a proposed data center here that come from all points on the political and cultural spectrum. Grassroots is an overused word, but in this case it fits.
If the protestors, led by Emporia Neighbors United, have anything in common, it’s that they feel betrayed by city officials who, since June 3, have rushed to adopt the municipal framework necessary to establish a 1,000-acre hyperscale data center. That betrayal has resulted in a petition drive to force the issue on the ballot, a move the city is attempting to block in district court with a declaratory judgment. It has also spawned other petitions, aiming to recall city commissioners and change the form of city government to a council.
Data center protestor Sherrie Kennison waves a sign at passing traffic on June 23, 2026, outside the Emporia city offices. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
There’s also a group recently formed to support local government, “Emporians for Progress,” but they are far outnumbered by the dissenters, who have turned out in the dozens. On Aug. 19, seven neatly dressed individuals held carefully lettered signs across the street from City Hall, with many saying they “back city officials.” The signs were duller than those carried by Emporia Neighbors United. They were carefully lettered and bore no caricatures. One of the seven supporters at the pro-city rally was the interim president of the local chamber of commerce. Perhaps I’m being too hard on Emporians for Progress. But then, I think the definition of progress is that which improves the human condition for everybody.
On Aug. 20, a district judge ruled the data center ban would go to a public vote on the November ballot, according to local reporting. But Glenn R. Braun, the Hays judge assigned to hear the case, also said the question of whether the petition’s aim was administrative or legislative in nature remained unresolved. If deemed administrative, the ban would be voided even if approved by public vote.
The quick rise of the data center resistance has caught a lot of people off guard, including some of my friends who are educators and journalists. The movement is so new that nobody knows in which direction it will eventually lead, but what seems certain is that it will play a significant role in politics at all levels of government in the coming months. Personally, I think we must resist the proliferation of data centers with the same zeal that one would campaign against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, because both involve existential threats to humanity.
Somewhere, right now, a self-taught artist may be creating the symbol of the data center resistance, intentionally or by chance. It will be something that is at once simple in design but powerful in message. I don’t know what the symbol might be, but the movement will embrace it when it sees it.
There are examples we can take from history.
Paper cranes have become a near-universal symbol for world peace, but the symbol began with a dying girl’s wish. Sadako Sasaki was 2 years old when her home town of Hiroshima was destroyed by the atomic bomb in 1945. She later was diagnosed with leukemia, an ailment linked to radiation that plagued many victims. While in the hospital, she was inspired by folklore that one’s wish would be granted by producing a thousand origami cranes. Sadako’s wish was to recover and join her school’s running team. She completed the task of 1,000 cranes, but did not get her wish. She died in 1955, at age 12.
Sadako’s story was made famous by a 1977 children’s book, “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” by Eleanor Coerr. Many thousands of paper cranes are sent each year to Hiroshima, along with wishes for world peace.
Another symbol that has global recognition is the peace sign, created by Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Holtom, a pacifist, was inspired by the letters N and D in the semaphore alphabet, standing for “nuclear disarmament.” It has since transcended its original meaning to mean peace in general, on countless bandanas and tee shirts worn from the summer of love to the present day. I have a peace sign on my acoustic guitar case. When I was in junior high school, one of my teachers told me the peace sign was an anti-Christian symbol, a Satanic icon, representing the “broken cross.”
That was my introduction to the cultural divide in which those values that are normally thought of as being politically “left” — you know, radical notions of world peace and universal healthcare and social equality — are demonized. The hippies and their peace signs were an outsider threat to traditional values, a nest of Communists in tie-dye, Mao-quoting atheists who could either love America or leave it.
It was hogwash then, and it is hogwash now.
But many would have you believe that contemporary American resistance — whether to draconian immigration enforcement or data centers that would make our tech oligarchs even richer — is part of a radical leftist conspiracy to weaken America. Few things could be further from the truth. In the first place, there is no conspiracy, no anti-“Project 2025” playbook. In the second, those in the resistance are embracing traditional American values of empathy, equality, and a love for the earth and those who inhabit it. Those who claim such conspiracies are trying to sell you a notion as tired and untrue as Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Just because I have a peace sign on my guitar case doesn’t mean that I’m a Satan-worshipping hippie with a poster of Fidel Castro on my wall. The poster in our living room is of the Americana singer-songwriter Gillian Welch. I’m not even sure I’m all that politically left, because at some point in the past decade the middle shifted suddenly beneath my feet. I regard the First Amendment as the basic tenet of civic religion, as readers of this column will know, but I also support the Second Amendment. I’ve had guns all of my life, both for hunting and for target practice. I believe all nuclear weapons should be abolished, but I’m not a pacifist. My three favorite presidents are Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. My personal philosophy isn’t so much a political one but an aesthetic and ethical one. It was honed by Mark Twain and Edward Abbey, Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Robert Altman and Stephen Spielberg. I don’t fit into any neatly labeled categories, and I don’t think many other Kansans do, either.
We are in a moment when traditional party labels have lost their meaning. At the same time, class distinctions — the ever-widening gulf between those in power and those who feel powerless, the chasm between the rich and the rest of us — have become sharper. A free-floating discontent has plagued America, and part of it has been expressed in frustration and anger since the summer of Floyd. It was also expressed during the No Kings rallies. Nearly three out of four Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to recent Associated Press-NORC polling.
We stand on the edge of tomorrow but are unsure of our footing.
It’s easy to feel crushed when confronted by today’s challenges. But this is just the moment to use our creativity to share something powerful with the world. What you share might even be beautiful and hopeful. But if it is to succeed, it must be authentic, the product of your own mind and your own hands.
The other day, I found just that kind of art when I visited the tent where Emporia Neighbors United were circulating one of their many petitions. It was nearly 100 degrees out, but members of the group were still at it, gathering signatures in an attempt to change a local government they saw as deaf to their wishes.
I wasn’t there to sign a petition but to ask how things were going.
Activity was steady, I was told.
The hot wind was whipping out of the southwest, rattling the canopy and ruffling the pages of the petitions on the plastic folding table. That’s when I noticed the rocks. Several grapefruit-sized rocks were being used as paperweights. Each of the rocks was painted. Some had slogans while others featured landscapes. One showed a prairie scene with sunflowers, and in the blue sky above was, “Keep Kansas Beautiful.”
The rocks were the work of Judith Bilyea.
She told me she had the rocks at her house and just decided to paint them.
The rocks carried messages of hope, authenticity and activism.
A fist-sized rock is likely the earliest of weapons. You can use it to kill your brother or smash your neighbor’s window. But Bilyea chose to use her rocks as peaceful messages with which to hold down documents literally representing the people’s First Amendment right to petition government for a redress of grievances.
Bilyea has a master’s degree in biology with a concentration in ecology and biodiversity. She could have given a lecture on all the environmental reasons she had become an activist. But I’m glad she let the rocks do her talking.
A rock painted by Judith Bilyea was used as a paperweight for a petition seeking to change Emporia’s form of government, as seen Aug. 9, 2026. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.