Bill Cleveland: 00:00:00

Hey there. It's been a while now. So what? Art space, tools and tactics are emerging out there to meet the MAGA storm.

,: 2026

It's our periodic check in on how activists, artists and arts communities are responding creatively to the cascading authoritarian drift in our politics and policies.

In this episode, you'll hear how artists across the country are turning public space into sites of creative resistance and why local place based cultural responses in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and beyond are becoming frontline laboratories for cultural democratic practice and how innovative artist led networks and cultural organizers are teaching resistance as a craft.

Part 1 visible freedom in our last episode, for obvious reasons, we focused on Minneapolis, Minnesota to share hard and inspiring stories rising up from the federal invasion there.

In this episode, we're going to cast a wider net to talk about tactics, tools, strategies that are being used by creative change agents all around the country. We begin with a short reprise from last week's episode.

On January 10, tens of thousands marched through downtown Minneapolis to protest the murder of Renee Macklin Goode and demand accountability in a kind of culturally inflected protest that had dance, rhythm and collective performance at its center. In these marches, the choreography of bodies, music, banners and communal song has become central.

Not mere demonstration, but cultural resistance and mourning.

Enacted in a public space following a memorial at Minneapolis's San Pablo Lutheran Church, community members became a marching, singing, vigilant, moving together through the Phillips neighborhood as part of a citywide outcry over ice presence and the fatal shooting. This is for our neighbors who are locked inside. Together we will fall inside.

These actions blend spiritual performance and protest elements in a way that feel like culture in motion, people using collective voice, movement and ritual to name loss and build solidarity. Residents in the Twin Cities are also engaging in DIY grassroots expression around protest sites and makeshift memorials.

Murals, signs, poetry and culturally inflected protest symbols have appeared organically near where organizers and neighbors gather. A spontaneous arts ecosystem responding to crisis.

nd,: 2025

In New York City alone, participatory action video installations and guerrilla projections took place in places like Madison Square park and Jackson Heights subway station.

Groups like NYC Resistance Salon displayed political cartoons and critical media on rolling digital billboards, and the Banned Book Brigade marched with sandwich boards bearing covers of censored books on the steps of the New York Public Library. A benefit concert at Pioneer Works featured performers like Sheryl Crow and Maggie Rogers to raise funds for civil liberties protections.

Artists behind the project said that the goal was simple create moments that make freedom visible and remind people that artistic expression and the rule of law are inseparable. Part two Stories to Learn From now at this point in the story, I think there's something important to name.

It's easy to hear all this the masked agents, the unmarked vehicles, the weapons, the fear moving through neighborhoods and come away thinking that artists and cultural organizers are just improvising. You know, lone actors, isolated gestures. People make it up as they go because there's no math.

But that's not actually how this work emerges or how it survives.

There's a parallel infrastructure out there, mostly informal, poorly funded, and almost never visible on the evening news, where artists and cultural organizers study each other's moves, trade lessons learned the hard way, and leave usable knowledge behind for whoever comes next. Some folks call them case studies. I call them stories.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, one place to start is the center for Artistic Activism. Their artivist toolbox isn't inspirational wallpaper. It's a field manual.

Campaigns broken down, tactics unpacked, Risk named artists talking honestly to other artists about what power responds to and what it punishes.

Then there's Beautiful Trouble, which has been quietly assembling one of the most useful collections of creative resistance documentation and training anywhere. What they document isn't just actions but patterns. Humor as shield, visibility as leverage, story as strategy.

A reminder that imagination isn't decoration, it's infrastructure.

If you want to understand how today's work grew out of earlier experiments, the moment when community cultural development was still arguing with itself in public, the Community Arts Network archive still matters a lot. Essays, project notes, debates from people trying to name what they're doing while they're doing it.

In this vast archive of first voice cultural reporting, you can hear the field thinking out loud.

And if you're interested in the physical traces of movements, the posters, zines, banners, and handmade culture that circulate when official channels are closed, the interference archive holds that memory not as nostalgia but as evidence, zoom out a little further and you'll find Animating Democracy, which has spent years documenting how artists work at the intersection of culture, civic life, and democratic practice, translating cultural action into the kind of language institutions can't easily dismiss without draining it of meaning. Taken together, these aren't just websites they're a distributed memory system. They tell us that none of this work appears out of thin air.

It's built by watching, borrowing, adapting, by learning from colleagues we may never meet but whose experiments travel further than they ever expected. And and that matters right now.

Because when people are trying to figure out how to resist without getting hurt or disappeared, inherited knowledge is not optional. It's how movements stay alive.

Part 3 Stories from the bottom up, back to the moment at hand, where we see how these national impulses, current and past, are connecting to local stories.

In New York, for example, the Natalie Carr Gallery hosted an exhibition entitled Don't Look A Defense of Free Expression, not as a conventional show, but as an archive of artists who have lost opportunities, residencies or exhibitions to censorship pressures.

The works themselves, from Daniel C. Walker's G is for Genocide or Khan Nguyen Hong Gu's Miami Beach, Gaza protest window installation that was pulled down, became narrators of a larger story about what it feels like when creative speech is erased or sidelined.

The curators and artists involved said they hoped the show would make people feel the lost and as much as the art itself, since sometimes loss is the most visible marker of where freedom is actually at risk. Switching coasts In Los Angeles, the intersection of art and political urgency is also visible in artworks that embody resistance.

The durational performance of Police State by Pussy Riot artist Nadja Tolo Konikova, performed first at MOCA Los Angeles and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, reconstructed a prison environment as an installation and live performance, blurring boundaries between spectatorship and experience.

Nadia Tolokonikova: 00:10:33

The piece started, and in a couple of days the raids started happening in Los Angeles. ICE raids. Families being separated, pregnant women, women being arrested.

And people decided to step up and made a little demonstration against it initially. And then Trump decided to bring National Guard to Los Angeles, which prompted a bigger response from Los Angeles community.

So effectively, in two days after my performance started, the Police State performance broke the fourth wall and spilled into the city. So today I can say that National Guard is performing Police State instead of me.

Bill Cleveland: 00:11:29

Critics and audiences alike described it as a work whose urgency grew out of real proximity to militarized control police presence, especially as protests and ICE raids happened nearby. Now these aren't comfortable museum shows they are experiences that make you feel the politics of the world in your body and in your bones.

Meaningful art, in other words, isn't always pretty, and sometimes it's kind of pushy. Across our country, local strategies have been just as varied as the places themselves, and so have the responses.

In Denver, an artist named Madeline Drunot found herself at the center of a community debate when a local museum excluded a depiction of members of the Asian American community alongside critical images of state politicians from a Little Saigon project. What could have been a quiet controversy became a national conversation about who gets to tell whose stories.

The exclusion drew responses from free speech advocates and sparked dialogue about community voice representation and whose presence matters in public narratives elsewhere, Long standing cultural collectives continue to do what they've always done knit art back into the fabric of civic life.

Groups like Think Again, an Artist Activist Collaborative, have been using mobile billboards, outdoor projections, and public artwork to engage communities in conversations about economic inequality, immigrant rights, and civic participation. Their work literally alters the visual landscape of cities to make discourse public again, not hidden behind newsroom paywalls.

And in Manhattan's Chinatown, the Chinatown Art Brigade, a collective of artists, media makers and tenants, rights organizers continue to link cultural storytelling to the fight against displacement and gentrification.

Their public projections and collaborative installations turn public facades into forums for language and presence that communities can claim as their own.

Nadia Tolokonikova: 00:13:55

So we projected across the street from a building where tenants were organizing against a landlord who's using predatory tactics to displace them. And so we projected their stories in Chinese and in English.

Bill Cleveland: 00:14:08

Imagine your dirty little secret projected up on a wall on Main Street.

These local stories don't feel like protests so much as invitations, invitations to imagine community differently, to walk into a space and feel like you belong there not as a customer but as a citizen, a neighbor, a bearer of collective narrative.

And then there are artistic responses that bridge geography and theme, like the Artist Rapid Response Team, which originated in Maine but has expanded into New York, designing banners and props for protests that aren't just slogans but visual arguments helping people express themselves in ways that resonate beyond a single protest march.

What all these have in common, from the west coast to the east, isn't just opposition to authoritarian drift, its activation making culture act as a connective tissue between people and the world they want to shape or protect. There's a deeper pattern here.

When formal institutions retreat or neutralize cultural expression, artists and communities don't just push back, they invent new structures of engagement. They create culture where there is silence and they make public space where there is apathy.

They invite others into collective action where there was withdrawal. That's not compensation, that's innovation. It's also a reminder culture does not wait for permission.

Before we close, here are three things I want you to carry with you, if you might. First, art is isn't just reflective, it's worldview making.

When artists put creativity into public action, they can rewrite what people think is possible.

Second, resistance that resonates across communities doesn't just shout louder, it listens deeper, invites others in and builds new relationships of trust.

And third, when art and activism blend, the purpose isn't to comfort the already converted, it's to expand the circle, to invite people into a shared public life that's worth defending. So thanks for listening and thanks for the work you're doing. And thanks for staying in the conversation.

Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson.

Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235. So until next time, subscribe, stay well, do good and spread the good word. Once again, please know this episode has been 100% human. Sa.