I created it in response to a high school teacher friend and former colleague, whose contractual obligations meant she couldn't accompany students during the J20 walk-outs protesting Trump's inauguration. She asked me to keep an eye out for students if I happened to be in downtown San Francisco that day; since I was staying in Oakland, I wondered how else I might be of service to youth.

After researching online with resources from orgs like the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild and hand-drawing the guide, I Risograph-printed the first copies that day at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Art Lab. The guide covers topics like police tactics (kettling, LRADs, tear gas and pepper spray), how officers might try to get someone to talk, and students’ legal rights. The next day, I passed them out to young people I encountered at the 2017 Women’s March in downtown San Francisco, and later at other protests, like the SFO airport protest against Trump’s Muslim ban.

Since then, over 3,000 printed copies have been distributed at protests, schools, libraries, and community centers nationwide—including to former students of mine I've run into at protests of their own. It's also available as a free downloadable PDF for anyone to print and distribute.

The project is part of the Arte Útil archive and was featured in Tania Bruguera's 2017 exhibition, held at both YBCA and SFMOMA. As part of that exhibition, SFMOMA hosted the symposium Does Art Have Users?, where I was invited to lead a workshop. In Print/Imprint: Designing Political Print Pieces with Users in Mind invited participants to design their own pieces inspired by the guide.

It was also included in John Mink's book Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom (PM Press), along with curriculum I developed to help students create their own short guides on issues important to their own lives. In 2022 and 2024, I led workshops as a visiting artist at Napa’s Oxbow School, where students made their own guides on topics like accessing medical care as a transgender youth, dealing with microaggressions, using Narcan to stop overdoses, coping with anxiety, making friends, and bystander intervention.

Beyond these programs, the guide is also held in the collections of the Columbia University Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, College of the Atlantic Thorndike Library in Bar Harbor, Maine, among others. In 2024, it was included in Printmaking as Collective Action, at MoMA’s Creativity Lab. It continues to be adapted by others, including the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, which reworked it into an 8-page zine, and Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Arts library, which distributed hundreds of copies to students organizing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

I created it in response to a high school teacher friend and former colleague, whose contractual obligations meant she couldn't accompany students during the J20 walk-outs protesting Trump's inauguration. She asked me to keep an eye out for students if I happened to be in downtown San Francisco that day; since I was staying in Oakland, I wondered how else I might be of service to youth.

After researching online with resources from orgs like the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild and hand-drawing the guide, I Risograph-printed the first copies that day at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Art Lab. The guide covers topics like police tactics (kettling, LRADs, tear gas and pepper spray), how officers might try to get someone to talk, and students’ legal rights. The next day, I passed them out to young people I encountered at the 2017 Women’s March in downtown San Francisco, and later at other protests, like the SFO airport protest against Trump’s Muslim ban.

Since then, over 3,000 printed copies have been distributed at protests, schools, libraries, and community centers nationwide—including to former students of mine I've run into at protests of their own. It's also available as a free downloadable PDF for anyone to print and distribute.

The project is part of the Arte Útil archive and was featured in Tania Bruguera's 2017 exhibition, held at both YBCA and SFMOMA. As part of that exhibition, SFMOMA hosted the symposium Does Art Have Users?, where I was invited to lead a workshop. In Print/Imprint: Designing Political Print Pieces with Users in Mind invited participants to design their own pieces inspired by the guide.

It was also included in John Mink's book Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom (PM Press), along with curriculum I developed to help students create their own short guides on issues important to their own lives. In 2022 and 2024, I led workshops as a visiting artist at Napa’s Oxbow School, where students made their own guides on topics like accessing medical care as a transgender youth, dealing with microaggressions, using Narcan to stop overdoses, coping with anxiety, making friends, and bystander intervention.

Beyond these programs, the guide is also held in the collections of the Columbia University Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, College of the Atlantic Thorndike Library in Bar Harbor, Maine, among others. In 2024, it was included in Printmaking as Collective Action, at MoMA’s Creativity Lab. It continues to be adapted by others, including the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, which reworked it into an 8-page zine, and Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Arts library, which distributed hundreds of copies to students organizing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.