Across the US, in the streets and in their studios, artists and arts workers are resisting the cultural crackdown instigated by President Donald Trump. A joint statement calling for “collective courage” and affirming a commitment to “artistic freedom and independent thought”, organised by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in New York, had gathered nearly 1,000 signatures in just two weeks after its release at the end of August. And efforts by other groups and individuals are currently under way.
Among them is The People vs Project 2025, a new nationwide movement to mobilise artists and cultural workers through co-ordinated live and streaming performances. The group was due to hold its first action on 20 September when we went to press, a flashmob-style dance choreographed to Snap’s 1990 hit The Power, performed simultaneously at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza and other locations. Incorporating performance helps to more effectively capture the public’s attention and unite participants looking to oppose a growing authoritarianism in the country, according to Andrew Wood, a member of the movement and the executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. “Everyone’s talking past each other these days; nobody’s really engaged in debate anymore,” Wood says. “If we come up with something that’s really visual, then people remember that and they remember the issue.”
Demos for midterms
The group plans to hold further demonstrations in the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, which will decide which political party controls congress. The focus will be on swing states and locations in Middle America. “We want people in Lincoln, Nebraska,” Wood says, “where they’re feeling isolated and where people don’t feel empowered.”
The People vs Project 2025 is also working on a set of demands to rebuild the country’s cultural infrastructure, including agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which have been decimated by the Trump administration. “We want the NEA back better or we want a Department of Cultural Affairs that has a seat at the table with the President’s cabinet,” Wood says.
On 1 October, more than 550 actors, film-makers, musicians, comedians and artists—including Elliott Hundley, Jody Uttal, Lara Porzak and Whitney Bedford—relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment, which was originally formed in the 1940s to oppose the activities of US senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
And, on 21 and 22 November, the artist-led initiative Fall of Freedom—whose organisers include the artists Dread Scott, Cassils and Robert Longo, as well as the curators Laura Raicovich and Melissa Levin—is organising a “nationwide wave of creative resistance” to be staged in galleries, theatres, museums, libraries and other venues across the US.
Resistance infrastructure
On the East Coast, the Artists’ Rapid Response Team (ARRT) was started by artists in Maine to design banners, yard signs and props to be used during protests and activist campaigns. The group has recently expanded into New York, where artists have taken over bus shelters to install posters denouncing anti-immigrant sweeps and the war in Gaza. “A lot of artists want to get involved in resisting this far-right drift or this fascist moment,” says Noah Mayers, a member of ARRT in New York, but“there’s not necessarily existing structures to plug into”. Groups like ARRT help solve that, through monthly meetings where creatively inclined individuals can share their expertise and organise activities. Mayers adds: “The grand, overarching idea behind this is just to create an infrastructure behind resistance.”
Having artists involved in these efforts not only makes them more effective in communicating with a wider public; it also makes them more appealing. “There’s a big difference between a protest that has music and visual spectacle and the ones that don’t, in terms of the kind of coverage they get and how it feels to be there on the ground,” Mayers says. The most important thing is that these artistic interventions might inspire others to stand up to authoritarianism. “When artists take over these spaces and take risks, even if they’re not huge risks, it’s trying to encourage more people to take small risks,” he says.
Incremental change will take time and those involved need to be prepared for a long fight, Mayers adds. “It’s not like in the movies where someone hacks into the satellite and broadcasts the truth, and then the totalitarian state comes down instantly.”
Artists as persuaders
The New York-based artist Julie Peppito has been an activist since before Trump’s first term in office, and is once again dedicating more of her time to creating protest art, including the eye-catching banners and props that led the “Hands Off” and “No Kings” marches in Manhattan earlier this year. Admitting that she felt demoralised when Trump was re-elected, Peppito decided it was time “to rethink everything”, so she started to study “how other people have fought fascism, what it takes and how artists have been involved”.
Artists were involved in making props and banners for “No Kings” marches held around the US earlier this year
Photo: © David L. Griffin
Among the strategies she has absorbed are those discussed by the political messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio, who hosts the Words to Win By podcast, and the journalist Anand Giridharadas, who wrote The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022). Peppito has learned that there are three key elements to success: “social proofing”, in which the act of publicly displaying or pronouncing your belief can convince others to copy your actions; building community; and expressing joy. “I realise that all those things happen in a protest, so I just have really been focusing on that,” Peppito says. “I’ve been doing these massive art builds with 50 people involved in them; many of them are not artists, but it gives them the experience of making something and feeling tangibly invested in the object they’re going to carry in the protest.”
She is now working on a massive eagle puppet that will be carried in the second “No Kings” March in New York, due to take place on 18 October. Peppito would like to see more artists putting their skills to work on protest art. “There’s so much creative strength in this city; why isn’t it out on the street?” she asks. While she understands that “making any kind of art is political”, artists need to remember there is strength in unity. “Our voice is stronger when we’re together,” she says. “Otherwise, they will just pick us off one by one.”
Finding the focus
Kamari Carter, whose exhibition Vexillary opened at Microscope Gallery in New York just before inauguration day and included prescient works such as Frozen Flag (2024), an American flag encased in ice symbolising a country paralysed by its own fraught history, acknowledges that it can be difficult to know where artists should focus their efforts when there are so many critical issues at hand—and whether the public will even be receptive.
“I was just having a conversation with a colleague yesterday about feeling a little apprehensive and calcified to the idea that you could make the most important, prolific work in the world, and if it’s not seen, who knows whether or not it will have the cultural impact that you feel it’s necessary to have?” he says. Carter and his interlocutor came to the conclusion that it is more important to keep producing. An artist’s purpose is “using your resources and time to do something that you feel is impactful enough that it keeps you up at night, that it keeps propelling you forward”. Carter is now working on a series about the policing of the Black body in America.
The new culture wars
The performance artist Martha Wilson, who experienced the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s firsthand, sees parallels in the turn cultural conversations are taking today. “What was interesting about the culture wars is they just lied; the religious right, the political right, they just made shit up” about the work artists were creating as a way to stoke outrage among the public, she recalls. “Now we have a president who’s making shit up.”
This month, Wilson is publishing a book to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Franklin Furnace, the New York organisation she founded to promote, document and produce avant-garde performance work. Back to the Present: Fifty Years of Free Expression with Franklin Furnace includes essays by art space directors, curators and activists involved in the previous culture wars, such as the “NEA Four” artists—Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller— whose work was at the heart of the supreme court case that led to the NEA ending its grants to individual artists. The book features additional texts by contemporary socially engaged artists and writers, such as Aruna d’Souza, Carlos Motta and Sarah Schulman.
The book also invites a younger generation to consider how they can respond to the present crisis. “Artists are doing what they’ve always done, which is speak to what concerns them. For example, before the Aids crisis was recognised, there were artists who were doing art about Aids,” Wilson says. “So artists are going to do the same thing today. They’re going to complain in every possible way that they can, and some of them will probably get arrested.”
