Tom West is a local pop artist behind the protest sign that graces our cover. He said of the sign, “When Trump got elected, I wanted to do political art, but I didn’t want to glorify his image. I think anyone who did anything with his face was buying into the whole cartoon of him and helping him. So I was trying to do something besides that to protest him as a person. I made a bunch of fake parking signs and put them up everywhere. For a long time, people thought they were real parking signs. They kind of went unseen, but the people who mattered saw them and the people that you didn’t want seeing them didn’t notice them.”
Can any of these signs still be found around Providence? West doesn’t think so. “They finally caught on and got rid of them in one last swoop,” he said. But you can still see one here!
For more of West’s work, follow him on Instagram @tomwestface
