MOVEMENT ART IN THE FIGHT FOR THE ROOF DEPOT
This Fall 2025 Semester at Augsburg, I had the incredible opportunity to join the Sabo Center as a Community Changemaker guest speaker and workshop presenter, leading a three part event series centered on the role of artwork in movements. This programming was part of a collaboration and partnership between the Sabo Center and the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI).
From January, 2024 to June of 2025, I served as the East Phillip Neighborhood Institute’s Director of Community Outreach and Engagement. In that role, I helped to ensure that community members were kept up-to-date and East Phillips residents’ dreams and desires were reflected in the planning process through a wide array of community outreach and engagement tactics.
I led and oversaw a Community Outreach Team of 30+ member-volunteers, including representatives from partner organizations, community leaders, and East Phillips residents. Our community outreach team hosted monthly Community Meetings with rotating topics, often in a world cafe style format, and helped collect community input to shape a novel community ownership & governance model.
We also spearheaded EPNI’s community outreach efforts in East Phillips / Little Earth, engaging constituents, residents & stakeholders through popular education and bi-monthly office hours, and convened a Community Advisory Group and held intake meetings with prospective tenants.
Prior to joining EPNI as a full-time contractor, I was a community volunteer who helped to create large hand-painted banners and screen printed artwork in support of the neighborhood’s struggle to build upon a historic environmental justice victory, working to realize the community’s vision of an Indoor Urban Farm (not toxic harm). Throughout my time at EPNI, I sought to weave movement art into this historic environmental justice fight, whether that was hosting art builds to create giant paper-mache vegetables and signs, or hand-painting a series of banners for the annual Harvest Moon Block Party in Little Earth / East Phillips.
I am immensely grateful to Community Engaged Learning Program Manager, Jenean Gilmer, for the incredible opportunity to engage with the Augsburg campus community through this series which included a talk followed by two unique workshops!
SEAN’S WORKSHOP SERIES
Workshop 1 – Sean Lim: Making Movement Art Talk
On Wednesday, November 19th, I hosted a talk at Augsburg’s Oren Gateway Center, discussing the role of artwork in various social justice moments, with key case studies in the Twin Cities. I discussed my work as a local community organizer who weaves artwork and mutual aid into the organizing projects I lend my capacity to, and my work through the Spill Paint, Not Oil (SPNO) art collective. I highlighted how art is invaluable in the toolbox of organizing. Artwork in all of its forms, whether that be poetry, murals, signage, plywood, prints, song and dance, spoken word, and everything in between, can lend itself to advancing the rapid response narrative messaging needs of on the ground causes we care deeply about. During this talk, we co-ideated concepts and drafts alongside Augsburg faculty and students for a screen-printed poster to the Sabo Center’s programming, and a hand-painted banner for the Augsburg Campus Kitchen.
Workshop 2 – Sean Lim: Movement Art Workshop – Banner Making
On Monday, November 24, I brought a traced muslin banner for Augsburg’s Campus Kitchen, and hand-painted the design with acrylic paint alongside campus community members at the Christensen Center, East Commons. This banner, adorned with paintings of fresh produce and all of the offerings of the Campus Kitchen program, will be hung at the Sabo Center’s office, and can be used by the Campus Kitchen program at events across the campus for tabling and event fairs.
Workshop 3 – Sean Lim: Movement Art Workshop – Screen-printing Posters
On Monday, December 1st, I hosted a live screen-printing workshop in the lobby of the Christensen Center to teach students and faculty members the steps of printing their own silk-screen printed poster in various colors. Over the course of the workshop, we made 150 prints for the Sabo Center to distribute to members of the Augsburg Campus community. The poster highlights six different on-campus programs offered by the Sabo Center: the Community Garden, Community Change, Community Engaged Learning, Campus Kitchen, Augsburg Local Businesses, and Bonner Community Leaders.
ABOUT SPILL PAINT
Spill Paint Not Oil is an autonomous network of artists, organizers, friends, and mischief-makers, primarily based in Mni Sóta Makoce (Minnesota) who’ve held various roles across movements, art projects, and campaigns.
We’ve been, and continue to be, shaped by resistance movements to prevent fossil fuel expansion, and fight social and environmental injustices. Since 2021, our collective has stewarded a community studio space that hosts regular art builds and assisted many ongoing community art projects. We screenprint, make banners, signs, and occasionally dip our fingers into paper mache. Hundreds of people come through our studio space every year, some on a one-time basis, others as more consistent collaborators.
We believe that art making is world building. Together we engage in the necessary and shared work of envisioning better and more just worlds. We are committed to responding to the urgencies of daily life under late-stage capitalism. We are committed to the long, intensive, and slow work of relationship-building, mutual-aid, skill sharing, and collective transformation. We believe in participatory and collectivized world-making. Grab a paint brush.
ABOUT SEAN / BIOGRAPHY
Sean Lim 林佳軒 (he/him) is a first-generation Malaysian Chinese American, the eldest child of immigrants; born on the East Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis – a lifelong resident of Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota).
Sean is a community organizer, artist, and mutual aid practitioner who has spent the past 8 years building community power — from electing historic candidates into office, to passing legislation, and winning monumental issue campaigns. His advocacy has consistently centered youth organizing, education, housing, & environmental / climate justice.
His near decade of on-the-ground community organizing experience spans projects and organizations including the Minnesota Youth Collective (MNYC), St. Paul Camps Support (SPCS), East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE Local 59), Art Shanty Projects (ASP), The Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project, The Paper Lantern Project (PLP), and many others.
Since 2021, Sean has been part of a core team of artist-organizers who steward the local art collective and community third space, Spill Paint Not Oil (SPNO, spillpaint.org) where his artwork in solidarity with movements helps facilitate rapid response to assist the messaging needs of local organizing efforts, in real time. Sean’s project, “Movement Art for Mutual Aid” seeks to get screen-printed posters out into the world, while raising and redistributing grassroots funds to local mutual aid projects in need of resources.
He currently works as a freelance graphic designer and literature designer in local politics for various candidates for office… building the bench of local elected leaders, having worked on the campaigns of over 30+ local candidates for various levels of office from School Board to Congress.
As an arts educator, he was an Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) Arts Impact for Individuals 2025 Grant Recipient for his workshop series, ‘Banners for a Better World.’ You can find Sean at the Spill Paint studio, or online at @SeanLimMN on Instagram, X, or Bluesky.