How to Leverage Your Art for Activism
Three Ideas to Get You Started
Artists play an essential role in activism. From political cartoons to guerrilla marketing for social change, to popular gallery shows, art can illuminate so many different spaces and minds with messages advocating for change. Artists like Moneta J. Sleet Jr. and Barbara Jones-Hogu were integral to capturing and illustrating the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Judy Chicago’s images and Lauryn Hill’s music signal-boosted the second- and third-wave feminist movements respectively. And, of course, artists like Josephine Baker, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Ifti Nasim, and so many other artists of colour were integral to breaking down barriers and building momentum in the movement for LGBTQIA2s+ rights.
As protests build in the United States and Canada in support of Black lives, communities are powerfully denouncing systemic racism and brutality within police and societal systems. People are speaking out more widely than I’ve ever seen against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. And it’s making a difference. We have seen police services de-funded, school contracts with police cancelled, arrests of violent police officers secured, and more. In the wake of a series of tragic and needless deaths across the United States and Canada, we say their names — Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Regis…
