Northeast sculptor Kordula Coleman helped create giant puppets that appeared at the Hands Off protest at the Minnesota State Capitol on Saturday, April 5. (Karen Kraco)
If you were one of the 20,000-plus people who attended the April 5 Hands Off demonstration at the Minnesota State Capitol, you probably noticed the huge papier maché heads of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Towering over the crowd at the top of the steps, they stood out, even from a distance.
That was the idea, said Northeast sculptor Kordula Coleman, one of about a dozen people who were involved in creating the puppets.
“We needed to give the media something visual, something big,” she said.
Coleman felt that the mainstream media hadn’t really covered the previous demonstrations and said that her friends in Germany — she’s a German-born U.S. citizen — didn’t even know that people in America had protested the president’s actions.
Coleman got involved when her friend and fellow artist Heather Friedli posted the idea, then created a puppet-making event in the 50501 Minnesota Facebook group. The movement 50501, with its tag line “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement,” has chapters across the U.S. and has been sponsoring demonstrations throughout the country against the actions of the Trump administration, advocating for “the upholding of the US Constitution and the end to executive overreach.”
Friedli said she was inspired by news reports of protests in Europe that featured large displays of art and “really cool” puppets. Starting about two weeks before the April 5 protest, a rotating group of people helped build the puppets, first, in Friedli’s St. Paul studio and then, when Friedli needed the space for a show, at group member Connie Kasella’s home in St. Paul.
Coleman described the painstaking construction, which involved creating a cardboard profile of the head, then placing cardboard oval ribs perpendicular to the profile, shaped and sized to make the facial features — imagine the framework of a ship’s hull, Coleman explained — then filling the spaces between the ribs with packing materials, and eventually covering the whole thing with a plastic skin.
The Elon Musk puppet towered over protest participants at the Capitol. (Karen Kraco)
Then came the part that hearkens back to grade school art class. They dipped newspaper and paper bags in glue and layered them on the skin, followed by making a mulch of shredded newspaper and glue that they used to sculpt features like the nose, lips, eyes and eyelids. Then the temporary scaffolding and packing material came out, and another group member replaced that with cardboard and wooden slat reinforcing structures. They painted the heads. One person fashioned a PVC pipe frame that was attached to the head and to a backpack frame worn by the puppeteer. Kasella “brought it over the finish line,” Coleman said, working until 2 a.m. the morning of the protest.
For Kasella, the artmaking was a channel for her anger and an extension of other political art projects, like the 3-D posters and other art she made for other demonstrations. “I was just so angry. I mean, every night watching the news and something new, you know, five things new every day, just all intended to gaslight us, and I was just losing my mind. So one night I was crocheting, and I just decided to just crochet Donald Trump’s head.” She said she had been contemplating making a marionette for the April 5 protest when she saw Friedli’s puppet-making invitation.
Friedli was motivated, in part, by her children. “I want to show them a good example of what standing up for your rights looks like, as well as what it means to work together to preserve democracy. I want to make sure that we’re on the right side of history for our children and our grandchildren.”
Kasella, Coleman and Friedli all said that they appreciated the way the project brought together people who previously didn’t know each other. “It was a really great way to do something direct and get creative while opposing the regime. What fun. We made new friends. Now that’s really, you know, half the battle, right there, building community, right?” Friedli said.
That community was very important to Coleman, who said that it reminded her of how volunteering years ago at her kids’ school made her feel more part of her adopted country. The puppet-making was heartening for her. “There are more people like me that will use their time and energy to fight this, and that might then get more people on board. It’s really this contagious optimism and this feeling of not being alone.”
She said she perceives the current political situation to be similar to that in her native Germany before she was born. “It hits so close to home. … It is this eerie echo of all these stories my mom told me, like suddenly her Jewish classmates were disappearing, you know, and everybody was afraid to even ask.” Simply asking about their absence made a person suspect, she said.
“That’s why I think right now is the time to speak up and do everything we can, that it doesn’t come to that point when our courage really is going to be tested like that, or we have to make these impossible decisions. Do I decide for what’s right in principle, or for myself and the survival of my family?
“I hope more people realize that this is not a time to be neutral or complacent. You know, really, democracies do fall,” Coleman said.