Smashing Bank Windows Is Violence Against Queer Graphic Designers

The window you smashed at TD Bank contained forty-three hours of my labor as a queer graphic designer. Before it became a surface onto which you projected your feelings about capital, it was a paid commission by a living artist, with a hand-drawn floral border and lettering developed from my grandmother’s handwriting. You may have understood yourself to be attacking a financial institution. The person who stood across the street the next morning, trying to photograph her portfolio piece through a sheet of plywood, understood the encounter differently.

I designed the branch’s Pride installation after a period in which three prospective clients had asked whether they could simply generate something similar. TD paid an actual fee, accepted my pronouns without discussion, and gave me room to explore belonging through color. At a moment when creative workers are being told that our lives and training can be replaced by AI SLOP, a bank chose to support REAL ARTISTS. That fact belongs in any serious account of what happened to its windows.

The people defending the damage keep sending me information about the bank’s investments, as though a spreadsheet can answer an experience of harm. I did not approve those investments, and the people who commissioned my work are in an entirely different department. My contact, Danielle, spent two calls helping me negotiate an additional revision fee. Flattening her into “finance capital” erases a woman who used the institutional power available to her to move money toward a marginalized person.

There is a familiar hierarchy operating here, in which certain forms of labor become politically legible while others remain decorative. You can imagine a worker building something with a hammer, but you struggle to imagine a worker adjusting the spacing between letters until a message of inclusion feels welcoming rather than compulsory. I spent an entire Sunday on that spacing. When you insist that the window was merely bank property, you reproduce the employer’s legal understanding of my work at the very moment you claim to be challenging it.

One organizer asked whether the bank would pay to replace the installation. I found the question revealing, because compensation does not retroactively make violence acceptable. Yes, I have been offered a second fee, and yes, the photographs of the damage have brought more attention to my practice than the original campaign received. Neither development gives strangers the right to decide that a queer person’s visibility is an acceptable casualty of their political education.

I am also troubled by the assumption that people entering a bank should have to encounter your anger without consenting to it. Queer and trans people have bank accounts; disabled people use ATMs; immigrants send money to their families. My mural was intended to help those people feel that they belonged in the financial system. Covering it with a demand to abolish that system tells everyone who has fought for inclusion that their hard-won place inside it remains contingent on the approval of a small group of people dressed for a confrontation.

We need a model of protest that accounts for the people an institution has chosen to uplift. Before targeting a branch, organizers should consult the artists, community partners, and brand collaborators whose work might be affected, with honoraria reflecting the labor involved in that consultation. If your movement cannot afford to compensate us, that is a capacity issue for your movement to resolve. It does not entitle you to proceed as though our consent has no value.

TD has asked me to propose a new installation about resilience, and I have invited several of the organizers to participate in a listening session. The session will center my experience, so we will not be relitigating the bank’s lending practices or using the space to debate whether the institution should exist. There will be an opportunity to apologize, followed by a facilitated discussion of how future demonstrations can remain visible from the sidewalk without interfering with the windows. I hope they come prepared to do the work.