Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
The artwork on the Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden shirt does something that most slogan tees avoid: it draws the metaphor instead of trusting the sentence. The phrase LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW surrounds four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — each shown with its roots visible in soil. The lettering forms a frame. The vegetables sit inside it, not beneath it. That compositional choice is the whole argument of the shirt, and it is worth reading closely because the design quietly refuses the reading its own words invite.
Start with the pun. “Root” in English carries two jobs. One is botanical: the underground organ that anchors a plant and draws water. The other is social: to root for someone is to cheer them on, to want their success without needing a share of it. The shirt stacks both meanings in a single word and then makes the visual literal. The vegetables have roots. The phrase has “root.” The design asks you to hold both at once.
But the second half of the sentence is where the trouble starts. “Watch each other grow” sounds generous. It is also the language of surveillance, of performance review, of the colleague who congratulates you on your “journey” while quietly noting that you have not been promoted. Growth is not neutral. In a work culture that treats constant expansion as the baseline, “watching each other grow” can mean watching each other for signs of slippage. The shirt does not resolve this tension. It prints it.
What saves the design from becoming a corporate poster is the vegetables themselves. They are smiling. Not smugly, not ironically — just smiling, in the flat, friendly way of children’s book illustrations. The carrot, the radish, the beet, and the onion each have a face. Their roots extend downward into soil. The soil is not detailed. It is enough to say underground without pretending to be a cross-section diagram.
The composition matters here. The text wraps around the vegetables in a rough rectangle, but it does not enclose them tightly. There is breathing room. The vegetables are not trapped by the sentence; they are held by it. That is a different relationship. A tighter frame would make the phrase a cage. A looser one would make it a caption. This one makes it a context — the conditions under which these four roots are growing together.
And they are together. Four different species, four different shapes, all in the same soil. The shirt does not say diversity. It does not say inclusion. It shows a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion sharing a root zone. That is a visual claim about mutual dependence, and it is more persuasive than the abstract nouns that usually do this work. Root vegetables do not compete for the same nutrients in the same way. They occupy different depths. They release different compounds. A beet and an onion can grow side by side without one erasing the other. The design does not explain this. It just draws it.
The phrase “let’s root for each other” is a call to action, but it is a soft one. Let’s is an invitation, not a command. It assumes a group — a we — that is already assembled or willing to assemble. The shirt does not specify who that group is. It could be a gardening club. It could be a team at work. It could be a group of friends. The ambiguity is the point. The shirt is a template for a social bond, and the wearer supplies the specifics.
That is also where the design becomes interesting as a piece of clothing rather than a poster. A shirt is a public surface. When you wear a phrase, you are not just expressing a sentiment; you are making a claim about yourself in relation to whoever reads it. “Let’s root for each other” is a low-stakes claim. It is hard to disagree with. But “watch each other grow” adds a note of mutual accountability. It implies that the rooting is not passive. It implies attention. It implies that growth is something you notice in someone else, not just something you demand for yourself.
The smiling vegetables soften that implication. If the shirt showed four serious root vegetables, the phrase would read as a performance metric. The smiles make it a garden. The difference is not trivial. A garden is a space where growth is expected but not scheduled. You do not watch a carrot grow in real time. You check on it. You water it. You wait. The shirt’s visual language borrows that patience and applies it to human relationships.
There is a risk in that borrowing. Gardens are also spaces of control. Weeding is a form of judgment. Pruning is a form of direction. The shirt does not show anyone weeding. It shows the happy part. That is not a flaw in the design; it is a limit. The shirt is not a treatise on mutual aid. It is a pun with a picture. But the picture is doing more work than the pun alone could do, and that is worth noticing.
What would it mean to wear this shirt critically? Not just as a nice sentiment, but as a reminder that “rooting for each other” is easy to say and harder to practice. The shirt does not tell you how to do it. It just puts the phrase on your chest and the vegetables in your line of sight. The rest is up to you.
I keep coming back to the roots. They are the part of the design that is easiest to overlook. The faces are what you see first. The phrase is what you read. But the roots are what make the pun work. Without them, “root” is just a word. With them, it is a picture of what support actually looks like: underground, unglamorous, and shared.
So the next time you see someone wearing a shirt like this, look at the roots. They are not a growth chart. They are a diagram of a relationship. And they are smiling, which is either a promise or a warning, depending on how you read it.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
The shirt’s printed artwork is a warning sign. Not a metaphor for one, not a mood board version of one: the actual grammar of public safety signage, borrowed and repurposed. Across the chest, in the blunt lettering of a hazard placard, the words NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH sit above a yellow caution triangle containing a crossed-out hand. The composition is flat, frontal, and unapologetic. It reads the way a wet-floor sign reads: before you think, before you decide whether to smile, the shape tells you what to do.
What interests me is not the joke. It’s the decision to express a personal boundary in the visual language of institutional authority. A caution triangle is not a request. It is a directive issued by no one in particular, backed by the implied consequence of ignoring it. When you wear that triangle, you are not asking to be left alone. You are posting a notice. The difference matters, and it is the whole argument of the design.
Look at the hierarchy. The lettering is large, uppercase, tightly tracked. It does not whisper. The triangle is yellow, the one color reserved in industrial signage for caution rather than prohibition (red) or mandatory action (blue). Yellow says pay attention, not stop. The crossed-out hand inside it does the harder work: it converts attention into a specific instruction. Do not touch. The hand is not aggressive. It is a pictogram, stripped of gesture, reduced to a symbol that any viewer can parse in under a second. That speed is the point. A boundary that requires explanation has already failed in the moment it is needed.
There is a gap, though, between the picture and the caption, and the gap is where the shirt becomes interesting rather than merely clever. The triangle says caution. The text says not friendly. Those are not the same claim. Caution warns of a hazard. Not friendly warns of a disposition. One is about what might happen to you; the other is about what I am. The design stacks them, and the stacking produces a small comic friction: the wearer is simultaneously a hazard and a person with an attitude about being one. That friction is the shirt’s actual content. It is not a slogan. It is a self-portrait in the form of a compliance notice.
I keep thinking about the crossed-out hand as a visual quotation. In everyday life, that symbol appears on doors, on equipment, on packaging. It is almost never personal. It is almost never worn. Moving it onto a torso changes its address. A sign on a wall speaks to a general public. A sign on a body speaks to whoever is standing close enough to read it. The shirt does not distinguish between those audiences. It uses the same flat, public-facing tone for a stranger at a distance and for a friend leaning in for a hug. That is either the joke or the tragedy, depending on the day.
The design also refuses the usual escape hatch of introvert merchandise. There is no book, no cat, no headphones, no sorry. The warning is not softened by cuteness. It does not ask you to find it charming. It simply states a condition and attaches a pictogram to enforce it. For readers who spend their working lives decoding institutional language, this is a familiar move: take the form that has power over you and use it for your own purposes. The caution triangle is not a neutral shape. It is a shape that has been used to manage crowds, to limit liability, to move bodies through space according to someone else’s plan. Wearing it is a small act of appropriation. The plan now belongs to the person inside the shirt.
I am not going to claim this is a critique of anything. It is a t-shirt. But it is a t-shirt with a legible argument about how boundaries get communicated when words alone are too slow. The Not Friendly Do Not Touch warning sign shirt is available as a standard tee, and the design does not depend on context to function. It works at a party, on a train, in a group costume where everyone wears the same warning and the joke becomes a crowd. It works because the sign is already part of the visual vocabulary of anyone who has ever been in a public space. The shirt does not teach you the symbol. It assumes you already know it and asks what happens when you turn it around.
What happens, I think, is a shift in who holds the authority. A warning sign on a wall is issued by an institution. A warning sign on a body is issued by the body. The same triangle, the same crossed-out hand, the same blunt lettering, but the source has changed. That is not a small thing for anyone whose boundaries have been treated as suggestions. The shirt does not improve anything. It does not cure anything. It simply makes the boundary visible in a form that cannot be argued with, because it is not an argument. It is a sign.
The next time you see a caution triangle in the wild, ask who put it there and who it is meant to protect. Then ask the same question about the person wearing one.
Wikipedia’s notability guideline for creative professionals is not a neutral filter. It is a gate, and it is bolted shut in ways that disproportionately exclude queer and anti-assimilationist art practice. The mechanism is not a conspiracy; it is a documented set of criteria, applied through a documented deletion process, that privileges institutional recognition over community recognition. If you make work that circulates in artist-run spaces, zine networks, and queer archives rather than in blue-chip galleries and the art press, Wikipedia’s rules are structurally biased against recording you.
Wikipedia’s notability guideline for people states that a person is presumed notable if they have received “significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.” Primary sources, the guideline says, “may be used to support content in an article, but they do not contribute toward proving the notability of a subject.”
For creative professionals specifically, the guideline lists four pathways. A person is “likely to be notable” if they are “regarded as an important figure or is widely cited by peers or successors”; if they are “known for originating a significant new concept, theory, or technique”; if they have created a “significant or well-known work” that has been “the primary subject of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews”; or if their work has “become a significant monument,” “been a substantial part of a significant exhibition,” “won significant critical attention,” or “been represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.”
Read those criteria against the infrastructure of queer art in Berlin and elsewhere. “Widely cited by peers” sounds inclusive until you ask who counts as a peer and where citation happens. “Significant exhibition” sounds neutral until you ask who decides significance. “Permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums” is a direct institutional test: it requires that your work have entered the permanent collections of multiple institutions that Wikipedia editors already recognize as notable. Whether a given museum counts as “notable” under Wikipedia’s criteria depends on whether editors have decided it does, and that decision is made in deletion discussions, not in the guideline itself.
Wikipedia’s reliable sources guideline states that articles should be based on “reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.” It defines “published” broadly: “any source that was made available to the public in some form.” But it also states that “the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication.”
This is where queer art documentation dies. A zine with a print run of 200, distributed at a queer art space in Neukölln, is published. A community archive that collects flyers, correspondence, and ephemera from a decade of anti-assimilationist performance is published. A small-press queer art journal with no institutional backing but a rigorous editorial process is published. But none of them have “a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy” in the sense Wikipedia editors mean: a reputation legible to the editors evaluating the source. The guideline says reliability “depends on context” and that “editorial judgment” is indispensable. That judgment is exercised by editors who, in aggregate, are more likely to recognize Artforum than they are to recognize a Berlin-based queer art publication that has never been indexed by JSTOR.
The guideline also states that “sources do not have to be available online or written in English.” This is technically true and practically irrelevant. In deletion discussions, editors search Google, Google Books, and Google News. The Articles for Deletion process explicitly instructs nominators to perform “a normal Google search, a Google Books search, and a Google News search.” If your coverage exists in a German-language queer art journal that has never been digitized, or in a print catalogue from an exhibition at an artist-run space that has no online presence, the search will not find it. The guideline says notability is based on the existence of sources, not on whether they are cited in the article. But the process is based on what editors can find in seven days.
Articles for Deletion (AfD) is where notability is adjudicated. The process is described on Wikipedia’s AfD page: articles are listed, discussed for at least seven days, and closed based on “community consensus.” The deletion policy states that “if there is no rough consensus, the page is kept.” But consensus is not a head count; it is a discussion in which participants are “encouraged to explain their opinion and refer to policy.”
In practice, this means that an article about a queer artist can be deleted if the editors who show up to the discussion do not recognize the sources cited, or if the sources cited do not meet the reliable-source guideline as those editors interpret it. The artist’s peers, collaborators, and community may never know the discussion is happening. The AfD process does not require notification of anyone outside Wikipedia. It requires notification on the article’s talk page and, if the article is about a living person, compliance with the biographies of living persons policy. There is no mechanism for the communities that produced the work to participate in the decision about whether the work is notable.
The deletion policy also allows for proposed deletion (PROD), which can result in deletion after seven days if no one objects. For biographies of living people, the proposed deletion process requires at least one source, “reliable or otherwise,” but if no reliable source is provided, the article can be deleted after seven days. This is a lower bar than AfD, and it is faster. An article about a queer artist with sources that a Wikipedia editor does not recognize as reliable can be deleted through PROD with minimal discussion.
This is not a problem unique to Wikipedia. It is the same gatekeeping logic that operates in the art world. Funding applications and jury processes often ask whether the artist has “national or international recognition” or request a list of exhibitions at “recognized institutions.” Auction catalogues assign value based on provenance: which galleries, which collectors, which museums. The criteria are different in form but identical in function: they require that the artist have already been validated by institutions that the evaluators recognize.
Wikipedia’s notability guideline is a jury scoring sheet. It asks whether the artist has received “significant coverage” in “reliable sources.” It asks whether the artist’s work has been in “significant exhibitions” or “notable galleries or museums.” It asks whether the artist is “regarded as an important figure” by “peers or successors.” Each of these criteria is a proxy for institutional recognition. Each of them can be met by an artist who has been validated by the mainstream art world and failed by an artist whose practice is rooted in community, in DIY infrastructure, in anti-assimilationist spaces that deliberately reject the institutions that Wikipedia’s criteria treat as arbiters of significance.
What gets lost is not just individual artists. It is a record of a practice. The queer art ecologies of Berlin—the artist-run spaces, the temporary exhibitions, the performance nights, the zine launches, the archives that collect the ephemera of a movement—are not just venues. They are the infrastructure through which a practice is documented. When Wikipedia deletes an article about an artist who worked primarily in those spaces, it does not just erase that artist. It erases the evidence that those spaces produced art worth recording.
Community archives hold materials that document decades of queer art practice in Berlin. Those materials are primary sources. Under Wikipedia’s notability guideline, primary sources “do not contribute toward proving the notability of a subject.” They can support content in an article, but they cannot establish that the subject merits an article. This means that the most comprehensive documentation of a queer artist’s practice—the archive that holds their flyers, their correspondence, their unpublished writing, their performance documentation—cannot be used to establish that the artist is notable. Only secondary sources can do that, and secondary sources are produced by the institutions that Wikipedia’s criteria already privilege.
This is not a call to abolish notability. It is a call to recognize that the current criteria encode a specific set of institutional relationships and call them neutral. A different set of criteria would ask different questions. Does the artist have a documented body of work? Is that work held in community archives? Has it been the subject of critical engagement within the communities it addresses? Has it influenced other artists, even if those artists are not yet notable themselves?
These questions would require Wikipedia editors to recognize sources that they currently do not: zines, community archives, small-press publications, oral histories, performance documentation. They would require editors to treat community recognition as a form of significance, not as a failure to achieve institutional recognition. They would require a different theory of what notability means.
Wikipedia’s guideline says that notability is not about fame or popularity. It says that “notable” means “worthy of notice” or “remarkable” or “significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded.” Those words are capacious. They could include the queer artist who has never had a solo show at a museum but whose work has been seen by thousands of people in artist-run spaces, who has influenced a generation of younger artists, whose practice has been documented in a community archive that will outlast the galleries that ignored them. The question is whether Wikipedia’s editors will read those words capaciously, or whether they will continue to apply criteria that were written to describe a different kind of artist.
Does Wikipedia’s notability guideline explicitly exclude queer artists?
No. The guideline does not mention sexuality or gender identity. But its criteria for creative professionals rely on institutional recognition—significant exhibitions, notable galleries or museums, permanent collections—that queer and anti-assimilationist artists are less likely to have, especially early in their careers or when their practice is rooted in community infrastructure rather than institutional validation.
Can a zine or community archive be used as a reliable source?
Wikipedia’s reliable sources guideline says that “published” means “any source that was made available to the public in some form,” and that sources do not have to be online or in English. But it also says that reliability depends on “a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy” and that “the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication.” In practice, zines and community archives are often treated as self-published or non-independent sources, which means they cannot establish notability.
What can artists do if their Wikipedia article is nominated for deletion?
The AfD process allows anyone to participate in the discussion. Artists and their communities can provide sources, explain why those sources are reliable, and argue that the subject meets the notability guideline. But the process is time-limited (at least seven days) and requires familiarity with Wikipedia’s policies and formatting. There is no formal mechanism for community consultation outside Wikipedia.
Is this a problem specific to Wikipedia?
No. It is the same gatekeeping logic that operates in art-world institutions: jury scoring sheets, application forms, auction catalogues, and museum board decisions all rely on proxies for institutional recognition. Wikipedia’s notability guideline is one more gate, and it operates with the same biases.
What would a more inclusive notability guideline look like?
It would recognize community archives, zines, small-press publications, and oral histories as legitimate sources. It would treat community recognition as a form of significance. It would ask whether the artist has a documented body of work and whether that work has been the subject of critical engagement within the communities it addresses, rather than whether it has been validated by institutions that Wikipedia editors already recognize.
If you have ever cited a Wikipedia article about an artist, or relied on Wikipedia to tell you who matters, you have participated in this system. The question is not whether Wikipedia’s criteria are biased. The question is whether you will keep treating them as neutral.