Michele Pred Turns Handbags Into Protest Signs — and a Bullet-Studded Chandelier Into a Memorial
For New York artist Michele Pred, politics is not a theme she visits. It is the atmosphere she works in. Raised between the Bay Area and Sweden, her mother’s home country, Pred has long measured the distance between two ideas of equality. “Politics and feminism are in my DNA,” she said, recalling that even as a child she noticed women seemed to have more rights in Sweden than in the United States.
Those concerns sharpened into a sustained artistic engine after she became a mother in 2009, a life change that arrived “a surprise in the best of ways” when she was already in her 40s. Parenthood, she has said, pushed her to think with new urgency about reproductive rights, equal pay, and the everyday mechanics of patriarchy — not as abstractions, but as conditions that would shape her daughter’s future. (Pred’s daughter will turn 17 in May.)
Pred is widely recognized for wearable works that turn the handbag — a coded symbol of femininity and consumer culture — into a luminous platform for dissent. Since 2013, she has stitched politically charged slogans onto purses using electroluminescent wire, transforming accessories into light-up declarations that read like miniature billboards. In the current presentation, phrases including “we shall overcome,” “dissent is patriotic,” “stop ICE,” and “my body my business” appear as direct, legible statements, designed to be carried into public space rather than confined to a wall.
“I wish I didn’t have to do this work,” Pred said. “But things are getting worse and worse, and horrifically so in our country!”
The exhibition also reaches back to an earlier moment of American anxiety. The oldest work on view, “Confiscated (stack)” (2002), is composed entirely of scissors, corkscrews, and other objects seized by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at San Francisco Airport in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. What began as a material record of newly illicit items now reads, in Pred’s framing, as a prelude to a broader culture of surveillance and fear.
Pred draws a line from those confiscated tools to the present, arguing that the logic of seizure has shifted from objects to people. In her view, the language of security has helped normalize the removal of neighbors from public life amid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns on undocumented immigrants.
While Pred was completing the show, ICE shot and killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen who was protesting ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis. At the opening, Pred interrupted the evening for a moment of silence honoring Good, Alex Pretti, and other victims of ICE violence.
That act of collective pause centered one of the exhibition’s most charged objects: “Ice Storm” (2026), a vintage Swedish chandelier that Pred has embellished with bullets in place of crystals. The sculpture began as a commentary on domestic violence, but in this context Pred has presented it as a memorial. During the opening, she climbed a ladder to light the candles, turning the chandelier’s familiar domestic silhouette into something closer to a vigil — ornate, intimate, and unmistakably dangerous.
Pred’s work insists on the body as a political site and the home as a contested space, whether the object at hand is a purse, a pile of confiscated tools, or a chandelier refitted with ammunition. In a moment when rights and protections feel increasingly unstable for women and the trans community, her practice argues for visibility — not as spectacle, but as a form of public record.
The artist’s work is also appearing across town at the “Every Woman Biennial,” extending the conversation beyond a single gallery and into a wider network of feminist cultural organizing. For Pred, the message is not simply to look, but to carry it — into the street, into daily life, and into the future her daughter is already approaching.
