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50 2O24–2O2 5 GU I D E to Y E L LOW S P R I NG S P H O T O : L A U R E N ‘ C H U C K ’ S H O W S ▲ Yellow Springs-based artist Migiwa Orimo in her studio. On the wall directly behind Orimo is a series of women’s writings from around the world, translated and stitched in Morse code. ENCODING IDENTITY By CHERYL DURGANS Perhaps you’ve seen Yellow Springs-based artist Migiwa Orimo’s banners, created in collaboration with community activists: Visual representa - tions of various social justice movements, screen printed in her studio through the Peoples Banner Project. The messages on the banners are sometimes colorful, other times stark, but always urgent, poignant. Orimo has worked with YS Speaking Up for Justice’s Wrecking Crew young people to produce banners that were carried across 25 weeks of protest in 2020. On mustard yellow cloth with the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” she created an image of John Crawford, a Black man slain by a Beavercreek police officer while talking on a cell phone and holding a toy gun in his hand at the local Walmart in 2014. A “Vote No on Issue 1” banner was recently splayed across the entryway of the Emporium, a reference to a failed Republican-led August special election effort to con - trol the reproductive rights of women in the state of Ohio. “I’ve been doing these ban- ners for over 20 years, but during the Trump [re-election campaign] in 2020, or 2019, I decided to actually name them,” Orimo said in a recent interview with the News. “By naming it ‘The People’s Banner Workshop,’ it gained a plat- form. It’s a free banner for the activist. … The banner will be passed between … activist[s] and it might come back. It might not come back to me.” Orimo’s personal art is imbued with a different type of power — sometimes quiet, requiring the viewer to spend time engaging with the layers of meaning in her work more contemplatively. But the ban - ners produced through the workshop have more immediacy because of their purpose. They must visually pop to grab the attention of people passing by. “The banner cannot be a subtle and layered expression. The banner has to be legible. Understood. Within two sec- onds when the car drives by — ‘What’s that crowd, you can see people holding something, but what was that about?’” Orimo said. “It’s a real opposite treatment of words and text, from what I do for my studio. It’s always consciously that I try not to put too much of my creativity … sort of a twist.” Orimo consciously tries to keep the language on the banners simple and clear, so that there is no question about what they’re communicating. She alluded to the fact that sometimes protest events, where banners like the ones she creates might be seen, are shown by the media in photo- graphs or broadcast. “For people who are eating and watching TV, or cooking and watching TV, even far away — if the banner is in the image, immediately people know what that crowd was doing. So, all of that comes down to clear, big, simple,” Orimo said. For Orimo, community- based art is a way to contrib- ute to the causes she supports outside of leading marches and chants or wielding a megaphone. “When I worked with the young people who did the ban- ners with me, [they were] the artists in the crowd who are not going to do a megaphone,” she said. “They were doing some of those [banners] already every week, but the people who gathered here are the ones who wanted to do this different kind of statement.” Some of Orimo’s individual work was featured in the show “A New World: Ohio Women to Watch in 2023” at the Riffe T W I N C O A C H A P A R T M E N T S 310 / 320 Union Street Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387 937-767-9180 or 937-408-3424 Central Air • Fully Carpeted Two-Bedroom Apartments Two blocks from Downtown