The small bookshop buzzed with chatter as Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez set up a table in the back, and another outside. Around her, blank cardboard signs waited to be transformed. Buckets of paint sat neatly in an even line. Brushes and markers stood quietly, gently at attention, ready for the evening ahead.
Just hours later, a mix of words and phrases had come to life in the space, thanks to that setup. Liberation Not Deportation, read one sign, with bright flowers and butterflies across the front. Abolish ICE, read another in frosty blue and white. We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Chains, read another, in a nod to both the Communist Manifesto and Assata Shakur.
Those words—and the energized artists-activists behind them—came to Possible Futures on Friday night, as the 318 Edgewood Ave. bookspace hosted “Parallel Play,” a night of protest sign making and cultural community from the arts collective Fair-Side. For two hours, attendees had a chance to immerse themselves in art making, letting the stress of the week fall away with each brushstroke.
Launched by Gonzalez Hernandez in 2022, Fair-Side opens up opportunities for artmaking that are decoupled from capitalism, especially for those who need the space to create for the sake of creating. After the incubator held its first exhibition at the Fair Haven Branch Library in May 2023, it has hosted several iterations of “Parallel Play,” at locations that range from Erector Square and Bregamos Community Theater to Possible Futures.
Mason Angkapatyakit Photos.
This time, Gonzalez Hernandez said she was inspired by the “No Kings” protests that took place across the country (including here in New Haven) last month. Because “I figured those aren’t the last protests that are gonna happen,” she wanted to create a space for people to make signs, as a small and meaningful way for them to reclaim some power and unwind at the end of a long work week.
She credited Possible Futures, where she has held previous parallel play events, as the right venue for the cause. “The people here believe in justice,” she said.
As snacks and drinks materialized inside, friends Rebecca Maloney and Valeria Roncoli got to work, chatting about current events as they began to sketch and paint their posters. Both, Maloney later explained, wanted to find a way to turn their daily frustration and sense of helplessness at the Trump Administration into something useful. She found out about the event through Instagram.
“We were both upset and talking about how angry we are,” she said. As they painted, their signs absorbed some of that rage, turning it into art. Roncoli, who is herself an artist, fashioned a design with a quartet of melting ice cubes beside the words Uses For ICE, giving iced coffee and lemonade as examples.
Beneath them, she had added the sentence “I prefer my ICE crushed!” with an asterisk.
A good portion of the people who came also found out about it through a post on Fair-Side’s Instagram page, like Tal Correia. Like Maloney and Roncoli, Correia also came to help out the community. “I just have a lot of people in my life that could be affected by ICE,” they said.
Correia painting “NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND” in black on a green sign. Mason Angkapatyakit Photos.
Some people found out about it instantaneously, including writer and organizer Mell Massaquoi. On Friday, they had heard about it only 15 minutes prior to sitting down at the table in the back and joining in, after an invitation from Gonzalez Hernandez.
When asked about why they’d accepted her invitation, they replied that “I think protesting is important and I think signs make it more visible.”
Throughout the evening, event-goers floated around the inside and the outside of the bookstore, going to the back table to grab more paint and returning to their spaces to continue making their signs. Many chatted amongst themselves, talking about various topics such as the event itself to their days so far.
As the event’s end approached, people started filing out one by one out of the bookstore. Some people kept their signs and others offered to give them to the bookstore or anyone who was going to attend a protest. Meanwhile, Gonzalez Hernandez started tidying up the painting space.
In a phone call after the event, Possible Futures Owner Lauren Anderson praised Gonzalez Hernandez’s generosity and vision for the event. She noted how accessible the artist made it feel, both for those who were present and those who may need protest signs in the future, but don’t have the bandwidth to make them.
“People who wanted to contribute to the protests but couldn't due to personal capacity were still able to make signs and leave them for others to use,” Anderson said.
This article comes from the 2025 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. This year, YAJI advisors include Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao. Mason Angkapatyakit is a rising senior at Metropolitan Business Academy.