Give Us Our Flowers

With a focus on highlighting revolutionary, but often-forgotten, Queer POC, “Give Us Our Flowers” explores their struggles while celebrating the strength they summoned to fight for their rights.

Printed in collaboration with Secret Riso Club, each of our 26 spotlights features a custom illustration and biography. 100% of proceeds are given to The Stonewall Protests, The Triangle Project, and The Black Trans Art & Joy Fund.

Riso printing matches the ink-on-paper aesthetic that accompanies traditional screen printing with the efficiency of Xerox. Secret Riso Club is an anti-capitalist design studio that focuses on intersectional social justice, design, and community building. Based in Brooklyn, NY, SRC was created in 2017 by Chilean immigrant Gonzalo Guerrero (he/him).

Artist: Fabrizio Lenci:

“My illustration of Simon Nkoli incorporates many symbols of his fight for equality. He stood against apartheid, and because of that was arrested and jailed. When he came out from jail he was received with joy and flowers – there’s an iconic portrait of him wearing a beautiful flower necklace and raising his fist from this time. Simon used to wear a vest full of buttons too, so for this piece I’ve made a graphic version of it that features his main causes. The necklace celebrates his freedom specifically through the use of the king protea, South Africa’s national flower.”

Artist Kuu Chen

“Leslie was particularly iconic for his versatility both on stage and in cinema, and was considered ahead of his time, especially in Asia, which was (and is) very conservative. He once said, “The highest achievement for a performer is to embody both genders at the same time. For art itself is genderless,” so I wanted to portray him as an ethereal embodiment of his many iconic performances and looks, instead of sidelining him into just one. All those facets are refractions of his identity, one that goes beyond a singular understanding of gender.”

Artist Kyle Strope:

"She was a Chief of the Crows and a warrior who brought an extended period of peace between her people and neighboring tribes. She identified as Two-Spirit, but chose to wear feminine clothing — this detail made me think she really knew who she was and didn't give a eff what other people thought. More evidence for this is in the fact that she took four wives.

I'm inspired by the storytelling found in a lot of Native American paintings, as well as the decorative patterns used in day-to-day objects like woven baskets and clothing. I tried to marry those two ideas in this illustration while playing with my own favorite tools.

In the end I just wanted to depict Pine Leaf Woman Chief as a BAMF, larger than life, confidently leading her multiple wives on horseback through a pine forest. I wondered if making the pine trees yellow in my illustration did some injustice to her jab at her wannabe male suitor, but the color was too pretty to resist."