About Ice Out of MPLS

My mother was a photographer. An extraordinary one, the kind whose work deserved walls, archives, and recognition. She didn’t get that in her lifetime. When she died, I inherited not just her photographs, but the responsibility to preserve them. The plan was simple: archive the work, digitize it, and eventually share it with the world.

To do that, I bought a printer at an auction.

It was an Epson 9900, a serious wide-format machine capable of producing museum-quality prints at large scale. It had been sitting in a print shop that was closing down. I bought it because I thought one day I’d use it to print my mother’s photographs.

Before I even learned how the machine worked, Operation Metro Surge hit.

Federal immigration enforcement escalated across Minneapolis. The city shifted. Fear, anger, solidarity, grief, everything was suddenly visible. The conversations people were having in private were spilling into public life. I wasn’t thinking about archival timelines anymore. I was thinking about what people were feeling right now, and how to get that feeling out into the world.

I already knew something about visual communication.

Years earlier, I had worked as a DJ and party promoter in downtown Manhattan. My audience was artists, musicians, and creative communities. I learned that the most effective promotion doesn’t feel like promotion at all. In a world saturated with advertising, people pay attention to things that offer value—something worth looking at, thinking about, or carrying with them.

So I started making posters.

The moment didn’t wait. Events were moving fast.

I designed. I printed. I trimmed. I put posters on walls the same day. There was no time to overthink things and no reason to wait for permission, funding, or institutional approval. I simply kept making work and putting it into the world.

That’s when something shifted.

People started finding me.

Not through advertising, but through attraction. They saw the work, recognized something honest in it, and followed the thread back to where it came from. Organizers. Artists. Journalists. Neighbors. Strangers who eventually became collaborators.

What began as a response became a community.

The work started traveling. People carried posters to other cities. They were reprinted, shared, and preserved. Designs found their way into exhibitions, Co-Prosperity in Chicago, The Torrance Art Museum in Southern California and other institutions around the country. The Rebel Loon Archive collected many of them as historical documents evidence of how ordinary people responded when power showed up and demanded a response.

The urgency evolved, but the model never changed.

Every print is still designed, printed, trimmed, and packed by me. Everything is produced on archival materials using equipment I operate myself. Sizes range from small posters to pieces large enough to stop someone mid-stride on a sidewalk.

The work is made to exist in public.

On storefront windows. Community boards. Apartment walls. Studios. Gathering spaces.

Not in a storage tube.

Not as a digital file disappearing into an algorithmic feed.

Physical media has weight. It occupies space. It ages alongside us. You can fold it, carry it, tape it to a wall, save it in a drawer, and rediscover it years later. Digital images travel farther. Physical prints stay put.

That’s part of their power.

It’s also how I think change actually happens: locally, tangibly, and through real relationships.

The support generated through print sales doesn’t move through grant programs or application processes. It moves directly between people. A young woman trying to leave an abusive relationship. A couple in recovery raising a one-year-old child while struggling to make rent. Friends facing impossible situations.

Real people.

Specific names.

Direct cash.

No forms. No waiting. Just trust.

That trust wasn’t built through marketing. It was built by showing up.

At protests. At gallery openings. At community events. By helping artists print work they otherwise couldn’t afford to produce. By treating organizers as collaborators rather than customers. By becoming known as the person who makes things happen instead of the person who sells things.

Word of mouth is how this spreads.

Not because it’s a strategy, but because it’s the only model that makes sense for work that’s supposed to remain local, accountable, and human.

When you buy from Ice Out of Mpls, you’re supporting a one-person print shop in Minneapolis.

Everything is hands-on.

Everything is accountable.

Everything is authentic.

You’re supporting an artist who believes physical media still matters, and you’re helping direct resources toward people in this community who need them right now.

The work is made to be seen, carried, shared, and remembered.

That’s the model, from day one to today it remains the same.

Hunter Hawes

Minneapolis, MN