What does it mean to wear your politics on your sleeve? Pittsburgh activist, retired coal miner, and public school teacher Kipp Dawson has an extensive collection of over 250 t-shirts from social justice movements dating back to the 1960s. Kipp organized on the frontlines of nearly every major freedom struggle, including the Civil Rights Movement, free speech movement, women’s movement, gay liberation movement, labor movement, and education justice movement, wearing and preserving t-shirts along the way.
Pittsburgh audiences have a chance to view Kipp’s collection in a new exhibit, “Wearing the Movement,” at the Susan Bergman Gurrentz ’56 Art Gallery on Chatham University’s campus, running from October 15 through December 12, 2025. The t-shirts on display illustrate her involvement in overlapping and wide-ranging movements.
“Wearing the Movement” is a collaboration of co-curators Catherine A. Evans and Jessie B. Ramey and designer Megan Urban. In what follows, each of us takes a moment to reflect on the “behind the scenes” process of bringing Kipp’s t-shirts to the public’s eye as we share images from the exhibition.
History as Radical Collaboration
Jessie B. Ramey, Ph.D.
Chatham University
I first got to know Kipp Dawson as the beloved middle school English teacher at the Pittsburgh Public School my two children attended. It wasn’t until the newly elected governor of Pennsylvania slashed a billion dollars from public education in 2011, and I started organizing in the education justice movement with Kipp, that I learned more about her impressive career. When I started talking to Kipp in 2020 about writing a history of her work in the long freedom struggle, she shared that she wanted to clean out her house and preserve some of her things. With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, we would chat on Zoom, and she would hold documents up to the camera including incredible psychedelic posters from the anti-war movement and speeches that she gave all over the country for abortion rights. It quickly became clear that before we could work on a biography, we needed to find someone to help organize the boxes and bags accumulated in her garage, closets, chests, and drawers.
We recruited Catherine Evans, who was just starting her graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, and she spent several years working closely with Kipp. We met with archivists from the University of Pittsburgh Library System, who agreed to preserve Kipp’s collection, to ensure that the materials were being handled and cataloged appropriately. While it can take years to process a new collection without financial resources, Catherine’s careful work streamlined the accessioning process, allowing the library to make items available to the public swiftly. The Kipp Dawson Papers now fill over fifteen archival boxes and include a wide range of rare movement documents, photographs, journals, scrapbooks, mixtapes, and campaign ephemera such as buttons, stickers, and t-shirts. Those t-shirts caught Catherine’s eye, and she started to incorporate them into her dissertation on queer media, hatching the idea for a gallery exhibition.
At the same time, I conducted 35 interviews with Kipp for the Women Miners Oral History Project (WMOHP) at West Virginia University. Using materials from the University of Pittsburgh and WMOHP, scholars and librarians from six universities collaborated to create a public history website. Designed and hosted by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship at Emory University, this peer-reviewed, public history, multimedia, open educational resource now includes an interactive component, “Wearing the Movement,” featuring the t-shirts from the gallery exhibition by the same name. Working individually and collaboratively across disciplines, the scholars connected to this broader Kipp Dawson project have created articles, conference papers, book chapters, dissertations, and public-facing scholarship. Supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), I am thrilled to be now writing Kipp’s biography, The Struggle is the Victory (under contract with University of Illinois Press).
My research for the book, website, archives, and related scholarship informed my work as co-curator of the t-shirt exhibit, helping to select, organize, and contextualize the objects. It was a joy collaborating with a talented interdisciplinary team to think about how to present artifacts in multiple modes, such as traditional display cases, wall text, digital projection, sound recording, an iPad station, and installation pieces like a laundry line display that allows visitors to see both sides of the shirts. Taken together, the exhibit reflects crucial lessons from the historiographies of movements and feminist epistemologies, including: the overlapping and interconnected social movements that comprise the long freedom struggle; the role of art and humor in building solidarity; intersectionality in the movements; the centrality of women as grassroots leaders; whose histories get told and who creates the narrative; and what counts as archival artifacts worthy of study and preservation.
Kitchen Table Fabrics
Catherine Evans
Carnegie Mellon University
I encountered the first t-shirt in the spring of 2021. Kipp and I sat at her kitchen table, pulling newspapers, letters, and diaries from a moldy box we had retrieved from her garage as we processed her archival collection. Between pages, we found a mangled, yellowed t-shirt proclaiming “Union Solidarity” across the chest. It sparked an hour-long story: Kipp had gotten this shirt during her time on a picket line in 1985 in solidarity with the Hormel P-9 meatpacking workers who were on strike. The shirt traveled from Austin, Minnesota, to her house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but also had been worn during a visit to the UK during the British Miners’ Strike and across various other picket lines over the years. This mangled shirt had a backstory.
In the months that followed, Kipp and I pulled over two hundred additional shirts from closets, drawers, garbage bags, basement bins, her daughter’s apartments, and in one case, from a cookie tin.
It was unclear to both Kipp and me what would happen to the shirts in the beginning. At one point, Kipp suggested we cut them apart and save just the logos. At another stage, someone offered to make a quilt. Neither of these solutions seemed viable. While the shirts didn’t fit into archival folders, they were bulky, wrinkled, and in some cases, moldy; we could not mutilate them. I began tracing the locations where Kipp wore them, and over the course of two years, I identified, dated, and located the place of origin for every single shirt. From here, the University of Pittsburgh’s team scanned them, enabling Emory to help design the “Wearing the Movement” component of the project website. As I see it, and the exhibit and website title suggest, the wear is a central part of the story. The worn shirts shed new light on Kipp’s lifetime of activism and the embodied nature of activism.
My intimate familiarity with Kipp’s shirts informed my curation of the exhibit, and working alongside Jessie and Megan brought the stories behind the shirts to life. One challenge we faced was that the collection more than doubled in size around the 1980s, a period when t-shirts became cheaper to print. During that decade, Kipp was working as a woman coal miner, traveling to many picket lines and protests. To capture the sheer scale of the 1980s actions in shirts, we stacked the shirts chronologically into “Sentiment Cubes,” an idea Megan had when she saw the boxes and boxes of shirts. Yet, outliers like Kipp’s “Women Miners Can Dig It Too!,” shirts she wore over and over again, needed their own space. The “Women Miners Can Dig It Too!” shirt is a direct example of Kipp using her body and fashion to challenge visual conceptions of who could be a miner. She wore the hell out of it, and yet, it survived.
To replicate the intimate stories Kipp had shared with me across her kitchen table and to avoid over-romanticizing the shirts, I prompted Kipp to select her “favorite” six shirts to share with visitors. We recorded our discussion, and with the help of designer Jason Dilworth, brought together the t-shirt scans, images from Kipp’s paper collections, and her voice in a nineteen-minute loop, which we installed in the gallery’s multimedia room. Kipp’s voice and laughter echo through the exhibit space as she talks through these special shirts, inviting viewers to consider their own politics of wear.
Engaging With An Archive Through Design
Margaret (Megan) Urban, Ph.D.
State University of New York at Fredonia
I have a particular fondness for humble and mundane archival collections that tell of daily life. The accumulation, categorization and juxtaposition of artifacts is integral to my design process—the physical manifestation of my research. Thus, I jumped at the opportunity when Catherine suggested I join the project.
One difficulty of exhibiting design is inviting the audience to view everyday objects as worthy of contemplation. After all, most t-shirts, like posters or packaging, are created en masse to be used and discarded. The fact that Kipp’s shirts did not end up as rags but were saved and accessioned into an archive is unusual. Their display needed to both refer to their nature and distinguish them from the ordinary. In that initial conversation with Catherine, within a heartbeat of hearing that there were 250 shirts to work with, I had a vision of the piles of t-shirts. Humble, worn and torn, given weight by their number and elevated in status through display atop a pillar and under a vitrine. The simple slideshows of the University of Pittsburgh’s scans over each “Sentiment Cube” allowed the 40 shirts in each cube to be shared in detail.
It says something about our collaboration that I can’t remember who first mentioned the clothesline, but it seemed an appropriate reference to the hard, unending, and often underappreciated work the shirts represented. We discussed stringing the clothesline around the space, but I felt that the shirts needed to be concentrated together on lines strung between t-poles for greater impact. The platform was a practical way of hiding the bases of the poles and providing a physical and conceptual barrier, differentiating the shirts as artifacts rather than garments.
The graphic elements grew from conceptual and pragmatic concerns; I decided to only use typefaces designed by women. Ella Roman, the stencil-style display face, was designed by the Spanish typeface designer Laura Meseguer. This was chosen as a nod to the informal lettering of protest signs and hand-made signage. The sans serif typeface that dominates the design is Program, by the Czech-American designer Zuzana Licko. While this is a highly legible and appealing face, I wanted to use the work of this designer, as Licko was one of the first female typeface designers who also helped pioneer the use of computers in the industry. The color palette was inspired by the original gay pride flag, a homage to Kipp’s work planning some of the first-ever Pride celebrations in New York City, but transformed using variations in shade and hue. The application of the halftone pattern to the images grew from necessity—we did not have the negatives or original files. This image treatment allowed me to enlarge small images and to unify the visual quality of different image sources.
The timeline was a later addition. We needed to contextualize the shirts and Kipp’s involvement in so many movements over time, drawing on Jessie’s historian impulse. We also wanted to showcase archival images and badges, which are as much a form of political communication as the shirts. I color-coded the movements and images on the timeline to visually unite with the shirts, a system carried through the object labels to provide an additional layer of information. The resulting bars of color begin with the year Kipp became involved in a movement and continue through the contemporary era, illustrating the ongoing, intersectional nature of her activism.
The final element expanded our collaboration: the catalog. We discussed the idea of a zine, and two of my students, Jonah Grace and Landon Lyons, came to mind immediately due to their interest in activism and zine culture. They were at first hesitant, but after I suggested approaching it like a graphic novel or a comix, they found inspiration. Their zine details the exhibit and Kipp’s history, but extends her shirts to the next generation of activists, imagining them on a diverse range of bodies.
Considering the long journey we each took to bring this exhibition together, it is amusing to think of Kipp’s comment when Catherine approached her about the exhibition: “But, I’m not a t-shirt person.” Catherine laughed at this as she folded and unfolded the shirts over the last two years. But, as we reflect now, Kipp’s right. The politics isn’t in the fabric; it’s in how you wear the movement.
The Susan Bergman Gurrentz ’56 Art Gallery is open weekdays from 11 AM to 7 PM on Chatham University’s Shadyside campus. Visit from now until December 12, 2025. You can also listen to Kipp Dawson’s lecture, “A Forward Looking Retrospective: Lessons from the Long Freedom Struggle,” delivered as part of the gallery opening.
