“I’m not mad at you, dude,” Renee Nicole Good, a poet and mother living in Minneapolis, told her eventual killer, a masked ICE agent.
Good’s death—captured on video—has made global headlines and added fuel to the ongoing mobilization of Minneapolis’s civilian population against ICE. Her last reported words, uttered moments before the agent opened fire into her SUV, have appeared at protests in Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago—cities where President Donald Trump has ordered a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Beginning at sunrise on Tuesday in New York City, another “sanctuary city” now beset by federal troops, an artist began repeating Good’s words outside the local ICE field office as an act of dissent.
“I stand with innocent people living under systemic violence. By speaking these words aloud in public, I invite passersby to reckon with what is too often unseen, unheard, or ignored,” reads a statement from Maria De Victoria, a performance artist who immigrated to the United States from Peru. (She is represented by Desnivel Gallery in New York’s East Village.) Wearing a coat emblazoned with Good’s words, De Victoria has been chanting with near-constant focus in front of the heavily barricaded Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in downtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from the New York Supreme Court.
“As an immigrant and once-undocumented American, I carry these words as both personal testimony and social critique, honoring all whose humanity is met with indifference,” she said.
The work concluded at sunset the evening, with De Victoria not acknowledging observers, allowing her attire and mantra to speak for themselves. The piece ended with a silent vigil.
“Right now is a massively critical time to be talking to our senators. I called [New York Senator] Chuck Schumer on Friday and emailed him on Saturday,” Lynne Lakshmi Pidel, a friend of De Victoria who was present at the plaza, told ARTnews. “Victoria is chanting this mantra over and over again, right in front of all these officers.”
The artist has a long record of endurance performances. Last June—during Pride Month in the US—she attempted to sing for 24 hours at the NYC AIDS Memorial Park to honor lives lost to the AIDS epidemic, with particular attention to the disproportionately high number of people from marginalized communities worldwide affected by the virus. “If my actions move you in any way, please sing with me,” she told audiences during the performance. She has also staged activations in bodegas, laundromats, and hardware stores, and in 2024 co-founded Artists and Mothers, an organization that awards grants to emerging and midcareer artists who identify as mothers, recognizing the economic and social barriers they face in an exorbitantly priced city.
“Even if you march by yourself, somebody else will join, and eventually you will create a movement,” De Victoria said in an interview with Impulse magazine. “That’s really important to keep at the forefront of your thinking when you’re doing things: good ideas start with one person, and then they evolve.”
