Michele Pred’s Art of Resistance Is More Necessary Than Ever

When Michele Pred was in seventh grade, she complained to her father, a University of California, Berkeley, professor, that only the girls—not the boys—had to wear gym uniforms at school. He helped her write a letter to the principal, which went to the local Title IX office.

“Of course they had to change it, because there’s no sexism allowed in schools,” Pred said. “It was so empowering to me. Change might not always happen, but you
have to speak up and act.”

It was an experience that proved formative for the artist, an avowed feminist and activist who has dedicated her practice to the fight for equality, bodily autonomy, and social justice. Her current show at New York’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery feels more pressing than ever, filled with work that continues to sound the alarm about the erosion of civil rights, women’s rights, and other freedoms our society has taken for granted.

Pred hopes her work will inspire viewers to take action: “Going out and demonstrating is really important. But if you don’t feel comfortable demonstrating, you can volunteer for organizations, you can donate to organizations, you can sign petitions, you can call your senator,” she said. “There’s no excuse not to be involved on some level.”

A Conceptual artist who stages performances and creates sculpture with found objects, Pred trolls eBay and Etsy for things like vintage purses, wooden gavels, and disarmed bullets. Using these materials, she codes her works with uncomfortable messages packaged in ways that are approachable for a mass audience, like recasting classic toy soldiers as a tiny army of Rosie the Riveters.

She’s also collaged a 1960s-era quilt with expired birth control and abortion pill packs. To create awareness of the availability of these pills—which is increasingly jeopardized by state laws—Pred created giant inflatable abortion pill sculptures, on view here in the gallery courtyard, which have crisscrossed the country in the mobile exhibition “Body Freedom for Every(Body).”

Motherhood Transformed Her Career

“Politics and feminism are in my DNA,” said Pred, who grew up between the Bay Area and Sweden, her mother’s native country. “Even as a kid, I was aware of women having more rights or more equality in Sweden than here.”

But these issues came surging to the fore of Pred’s work as an artist when she became a mother—“a surprise in the best of ways,” when she was already in her 40s, in 2009. She started thinking more about reproductive rights, equal pay, and other aspects of the patriarchy that impact women, and would affect her daughter, who will turn 17 in May.

In retrospect, it is clear that Pred has been warning us for years about efforts to strip women and the trans community of their rights. In 2017, I met Pred at a feminist parade outside Art Basel Miami Beach, a collective effort in community that has become a staple of her practice, working with other activist artists such as Wildcat Ebony Brown, Michelle Hartney, Airco Caravan, and Yvette Molina.

Pred is best known for stitching politically inspired slogans—“we shall overcome,” “dissent is patriotic,” “stop ICE,” and “my body my business” are among those in the exhibition—onto handbags using electroluminescent wire. The wearable works, which she’s been making since 2013, recast a functional, feminine fashion accessory into a bold and unapologetic expression of female empowerment, elevating one’s outfit into a light-up, miniature billboard.

“I wish I didn’t have to do this work,” Pred said, “but things are getting worse and worse, and horrifically so in our country!”

Rising to Meet the Moment

At the gallery, as well as across town at the “Every Woman Biennial,” Pred is debuting a new body of work, of photographs documenting protest projections she’s been staging without permission on the façades of museums and government buildings. She’s created a compact, portable setup that she can pack in a suitcase, and break down quickly in case the police show up.

On New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the message said “money for arts, not oligarchs.” A few blocks north at the Guggenheim Museum, she displayed a list of DEI-related terms whose use is now discouraged by the federal government, including “women.” Pred has even gone to Palm Beach projecting on a hedge near Mar-a-Lago, using the image of a running pig, a word President Donald Trump has often used to insult women. (Her next action will be on March 8, for International Women’s Day, on an undisclosed government building in New York.)

The earliest work in the show, , dates to 2002, and is made up entirely from scissors, corkscrews, and other newly illicit objects seized by TSA at San Francisco Airport in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Pred sees a through line between the work and our present-day surveillance state and a culture of fear, only now it is people that are being confiscated, our neighbors snatched up off the street as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

The artist was finishing up the show when ICE shot and killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen protesting ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis.

At the opening, Pred paused the opening festivities for a moment of silence in honor of Good, Alex Pretti, and other victims of ICE violence. She stood on a ladder to light the candles on her piece , a vintage Swedish chandelier embellished with bullets instead of crystals, conceived as a commentary on domestic violence, but now a memorial. (A second chandelier sculpture is currently on view in “Vårsalongen,” a juried exhibition at Stockholm’s Liljevalchs.)

“I feel like I have to get more radical,” Pred said. “We have to speak up. We have to stand up. Because if we don’t, what’s left? And then fascism is truly working.”