ART IS CHANGE – Art is Resistance

What happens when freedom of expression is under pressure? When speech narrows, fear rises, and the future feels smaller than it should?

In this episode, we explore how activist artists and cultural organizers have historically stepped into these moments—not as decoration or entertainment, but as essential agents of democratic life. Through vivid stories from different times and places, the episode reveals how cultural practice reshapes what people believe is possible.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• How public murals in post-revolutionary Mexico helped people see themselves as part of history
• How a single performance of “Strange Fruit” forced audiences to confront racial violence they had learned to ignore
• How participatory theater in Brazil turned audiences into active agents of change
• How a one-minute protest by Pussy Riot disrupted authoritarian control and spread globally

These stories point to a deeper truth: resistance is not only political—it is cultural, emotional, and imaginative. The episode offers a powerful reminder that movements endure when people can see themselves, each other, and a different future more clearly.

Listen, reflect, and consider: what are the cultural practices—large or small—that help keep imagination, connection, and democracy alive in your own community?

Notable Mentions

People

• Diego Rivera — Mexican muralist whose large-scale public works helped define post-revolutionary national identity by centering workers, Indigenous history, and social struggle. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Diego-Rivera)
• José Clemente Orozco — Influential muralist known for his stark, often critical depictions of revolution, human suffering, and political power. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Clemente-Orozco)
• David Alfaro Siqueiros — Politically engaged artist who advanced muralism as a tool for mass communication and revolutionary consciousness. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Alfaro-Siqueiros)
• Billie Holiday — Legendary vocalist whose performance of “Strange Fruit” transformed a protest poem into a defining moment of cultural resistance. (https://www.biography.com/musicians/billie-holiday)
• Abel Meeropol — Teacher and activist who wrote “Strange Fruit,” one of the most powerful anti-lynching works in American history. (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/abel-meeropol)
• Augusto Boal — Creator of Theatre of the Oppressed, a participatory approach that turns audiences into active agents in rehearsing social change. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Augusto-Boal)
• Paulo Freire — Revolutionary educator whose ideas on critical pedagogy and liberation deeply influenced participatory arts and social change movements. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paulo-Freire)

Organizations / Movements

• Mexican Muralism — A government-supported movement that brought art into public spaces to tell a people-centered story of Mexican history and identity. (https://www.theartstory.org/movement/mexican-muralism/)
• Theatre of the Oppressed — A global practice using interactive performance to help people explore and rehearse responses to oppression. (https://organizingengagement.org/models/theatre-of-the-oppressed/)
• Pussy Riot — Artist collective known for provocative public performances challenging authoritarianism and restrictions on free expression. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pussy-Riot)

Places

• Café Society — The first racially integrated nightclub in New York City, where Billie Holiday debuted “Strange Fruit” in 1939. (https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/cafe-society-and-strange-fruit)
• Cathedral of Christ the Savior — Site of Pussy Riot’s 2012 protest performance, symbolizing the intersection of religious authority and state power. (https://www.britannica.com/place/Cathedral-of-Christ-the-Savior)

Key Works / Concepts

• Strange Fruit — A haunting protest song written by Abel Meeropol and performed by Billie Holiday, confronting the reality of racial terror in the United States. (https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-640309/)
• Public Art as Civic Storytelling — The use of accessible, shared spaces to reshape public understanding of history, identity, and power.
• Cultural Resistance — Creative practices that challenge dominant narratives, sustain movements, and expand what people believe is possible.

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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

ART IS CHANGE? Art is Resistance

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art Is Change,

a chronicle of art and social change, where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders.

I’m Bill Cleveland.

Every time the political pressure rises…

every time governments tighten control…

every time public speech starts to narrow, and people begin to wonder what can still be said out loud…

artists show up.

Not because artists are especially noble.

Not because artists are fearless.

Because our cultural and moral imagination is where what is just, what’s possible and what’s next in the real world gets born

And if you want to understand how movements survive — not just protest, but persevere long enough with the power and influence needed to make real change — you have to look at moments when cultural practice altered the prevailing story about what people believed was possible.

Not decoration.

Not entertainment.

Not background music to history.

Moments when a song, or a play, or a painting, or a story helped people see power more clearly…

see each other more clearly…

or see a future the people in charge did not want them to see.

So today I want to tell a few of those stories.

Different places.

Different times.

Different art forms.

But each one a reminder that resistance is never only political.

It’s cultural.

It’s emotional.

Its heart centered

It’s imaginative.

And sometimes the thing that keeps democracy alive is not a law, or a speech, or an election.

Sometimes it’s something people make together.

One of the clearest examples of that comes from Mexico, in the years after the revolution in the early twentieth century.

The country had just gone through a violent upheaval.

Old power structures were collapsing, new ones were still uncertain, and the government was trying to convince ordinary people that this new nation really belonged to them.

There was one problem.

Most people couldn’t read, and most newspapers spoke for a very small but powerful elite.

So the question wasn’t just how to govern differently.

It was how to tell a different story about who the country belonged to.

A group of artists helped answer that question by recognizing that cultural institutions like museums are a story unto themselves. A story that often distored the relationship between the art they held and the people.

So, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros began painting enormous murals on public buildings — schools, government halls, union spaces, places where ordinary people already gathered.

These walls were filled with images of workers, farmers, Indigenous history, revolution, violence, hope.

These weren’t polite paintings.

They argued.

They accused.

They remembered things the official story had obscured or disappeared entirely.

And because they were in public space, people didn’t have to go looking for them.

They ran into them on the way to work, on the way to school, on the way to a meeting.

The murals didn’t just illustrate the revolution.

They helped make it real.

When people could see themselves on the wall — not as victims, not as spectators, but as part of the story — it changed the way they understood their place in the country.

And, it stands to reason, once people see themselves as part of history, they are harder to push out of it.

That idea — that culture can make people see themselves differently — shows up again and again in movements for freedom.

Sometimes on a wall.

Sometimes on a stage.

And sometimes in a song that makes it impossible to pretend you don’t know what’s happening.

It was one of the few integrated clubs in the country at the time, a place where Black and white audiences sat in the same room, listening to the same music. Even that was controversial.

Late in the evening, near the end of the set, the lights would dim, the waiters would stop serving, and the room would go quiet.

Billie Holiday would walk to the microphone and sing a song most people had never heard before.

“Southern trees bear strange fruit…”

The song was about lynching.

Not metaphor.

Not suggestion.

Not coded language.

It described bodies hanging from trees in the American South, in plain, unmistakable words.

Record companies didn’t want to release it.

Radio stations refused to play it.

Police harassed Holiday for performing it.

The club owner insisted on a ritual whenever she sang it.

No talking.

No applause until the end.

Lights out immediately after.

Because this wasn’t entertainment anymore.

It was confrontation.

People who thought they understood their country suddenly had to hear something they had learned not to hear.

And once you hear it, you can’t quite go back to not knowing.

That’s another way cultural resistance works.

Not by winning an argument.

Not by passing a law.

But by spreading the story in a way that makes it unavoidable

And by changing what people feel before the impulse to filter and deny takes over.

And once the heart starts to change, sometimes the head has no choice change with it.

Sometimes that movement stays in music.

Sometimes it moves into the streets.

And sometimes it moves into the theater — where the audience is no longer just watching the story, but stepping into it.

Censorship was tight.

Political organizing was dangerous.

People disappeared.

Public speech narrowed in ways that felt familiar to anyone who has lived through authoritarian times.

Boal had been working in traditional theater, writing and directing plays about social issues, but he began to feel that something was missing. The audience would come, sit in the dark, watch the story of injustice unfold, and then go home exactly as they arrived — frustrated, maybe moved, but still powerless.

He started asking a simple question.

What if theater wasn’t something you watched?

What if it was something you used? Something everbody did?

Out of that question came what he called Theatre of the Oppressed based on the liberatory teachings of his colleague the revolutionary educator Paulo Freire

In these performances, actors would present a scene — a landlord evicting a tenant, a boss threatening a worker, a police officer abusing authority — and then the play would stop.

The audience could interrupt.

Anyone could come on stage.

They could take the place of the character and try something different.

Argue back.

Refuse.

Negotiate.

Organize.

The stage became a rehearsal for real life.

People practiced what resistance might look like before they had to risk it outside the theater.

The government understood exactly how dangerous that was.

Boal was arrested, tortured, and eventually forced into exile.

Not because he was carrying weapons.

Not because he led an army.

Because he helped people imagine themselves acting differently.

And once people have rehearsed freedom, it becomes harder to convince them they don’t have it.

Today, versions of Theatre of the Oppressed are used all over the world — in schools, in prisons, in community meetings, in places where people are trying to figure out how to speak when the rules say they shouldn’t.

It’s not about performance.

It’s about practice.

And that idea — that even a small act in public space can open a crack in a system that looks solid — shows up again in more recent movements, sometimes in forms that look less like theater and more like disruption.

They were wearing bright masks, winter coats, ordinary clothes. Nothing about them suggested that what they were about to do would travel around the world in a matter of hours.

They ran to the front of the church and started singing.

Loud. Fast. Chaotic.

The lyrics called out the growing alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the government, accusing both of helping to shut down dissent and tighten control over public life.

The performance lasted less than a minute before security dragged them away.

But someone had recorded it.

Within days, the video was everywhere.

The group — Pussy Riot — was arrested and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, a crime that carried real prison time.

The message from the government was clear.

You can’t do this here.

You can’t say this here.

You can’t embarrass power in public.

But the performance had already done what it needed to do.

It showed that even in a system built on control, the script can still be broken.

It showed that a cathedral could become a stage.

That a song could become a protest.

That a minute of sound could travel farther than a speech that took years to write.

The action itself didn’t bring down the government.

Most cultural acts don’t.

What they do instead is something quieter, and in the long run, just as dangerous to authoritarian systems.

They make people see that the story is not finished yet.

And once people understand that the story is still being written, they start looking for their place in it.

That’s what connects all of these moments — the murals in Mexico, the song in a New York nightclub, the theater experiments in Brazil, the masked performance in Moscow.

Different times.

Different risks.

Different art forms.

But the same underlying question.

How do you keep people human when the system is trying to make them afraid?

How do you remind people that they belong to each other when power is trying to separate them?

How do you help people imagine a future that doesn’t look like the one they’re being told to accept?

Authoritarian systems understand the danger of those questions.

That’s why they censor artists.

That’s why they cut funding for culture.

That’s why they rewrite history, ban books, control media, and attack universities.

Not because art is decoration.

Because art is memory.

Art is rehearsal.

Art is imagination.

And if people can imagine a different world together, it becomes much harder to convince them that the one they’re living in is the only one possible.

That’s why these stories matter.

Not as nostalgia.

As instructions.

Every generation ends up facing some version of the same moment —

when speech narrows,

when fear grows louder,

when the future starts to feel smaller than it should.

And every time that happens, somewhere, someone makes something.

A painting on a wall.

A song in a dark room.

A play where the audience walks on stage.

A performance that lasts less than a minute but refuses to disappear.

Not because it’s safe.

Because it keeps the imagination alive.

And as long as the imagination stays alive,

democracy still has place to grow.