Art has always been political

The laundry has reached a state of sentience. I’m fairly certain the pile of Peppa's dirty dog sweaters in the corner of my bedroom has developed a primitive form of government, and frankly, they’re doing a better job than most of the people currently running the world. I stood at the kitchen sink this morning, staring at a crusty dog food bowl and wondering if the universe would notice if I just... didn't. If I just sat down on the kitchen floor and waited for the heat death of the cosmos to take me.

But then I saw it. This tiny, defiant postcard stuck to my fridge (with a cat butt magnet... all y'all have cat butt magnets, too, right?) - a print of a Dorthea Lange photo of the Migrant Mother. And it hit me, right between the ribs where the existential dread likes to nest: we have been doing this forever. We have been tired, we have been broke, we have been governed by idiots, and we have been using art to scream about it since the first person figured out that charcoal makes a mark on a cave wall.

Politics and art. It sounds like a college course you might sleep through, but it’s actually just the long, messy history of human beings refusing to shut the fuck up.

The Canvas as a Crime Scene

Let’s talk about painting, because nothing says "I’m losing my mind" quite like spending three hundred hours meticulously rendering a scene of political chaos while your house probably smells like turpentine and unwashed hair.

I think about Goya. Poor, deaf, brilliant Goya. The man was living, and serving the Crown, through the Napoleonic Wars. He painted The Third of May 1808, and it isn’t some "ra-ra, look at our brave boys" piece of propaganda. It’s raw. It’s visceral. It’s a guy in a white shirt, arms out like a sacrificial lamb, staring down the barrel of a firing squad.

That painting is a middle finger to the inevitability of oppression. It’s Goya saying, "You can kill these people, but you can’t make it look pretty." Every time I feel like the world is a dumpster fire - which is usually around 10:00 AM, daily - I remember that art isn't just about making something beautiful for a wealthy person's foyer. It’s about evidence. It’s about standing in the middle of the rubble and pointing at the truth.

Resistance isn't always a riot in the street. Sometimes it's a woman in a drafty studio in the 17th century—looking at you, Artemisia Gentileschi—painting Judith beheading Holofernes with so much localized rage that you can practically feel the spray of the blood. She wasn't just painting a Bible story; she was painting back at a world that had tried to break her. That’s the energy I’m trying to bring to ... well, really, ANYTHING this week. Pure, unadulterated "don't fuck with me" energy.

The World’s a Stage (And We’re All Forgetting Our Lines)

Then you’ve got theater. God, I love the theater (show of hands, who knows that I went to theater school at the Florida School of the Arts? "We thought it would be like FAME, but it was more like DELIVERANCE"). I love live theater, but why can't I be the only one in the audience? You have to put on pants, leave your house, and sit in a dark room with strangers—half of whom are definitely coughing—to watch people pretend to be other people. It’s absurd, but I love it.

Theater has always been the ultimate Trojan horse for politics. You think you’re going to see a play about a king who’s a bit of a jerk, and suddenly you’re realizing the playwright is actually calling out the current administration for being a bunch of corrupt vultures.

Back in ancient Greece, Aristophanes was writing comedies that were basically the Saturday Night Live of the Peloponnesian War. He wrote Lysistrata, where the women go on a sex strike to stop the men from fighting. Imagine the sheer audacity! In a society where women had the legal standing of a particularly nice footstool, here is a play suggesting they could bring the entire military-industrial complex to a screeching halt by controlling access to their own vaginas. (Women of today, I'm looking at us....)

It’s irreverent. It’s funny. It’s hopeful in a way that makes you want to weep. Because it suggests that even when the men in charge are hell-bent on burning everything down, there is a collective power in the "little people."

Fast forward to the 20th century, and you’ve got Bertolt Brecht. The man lived through the rise of the Nazis, and his whole vibe was basically: "Don't get comfortable." He didn't want the audience to get lost in the story; he wanted them to remember they were in a theater so they’d go home and change the world. He used "Alienation Effects*" to keep people sharp. It’s like when I’m trying to have a deep thought about the collapse of democracy and my cat barfs on my foot. It snaps you back to reality. It reminds you that you have work to do.

*in case you don't know, that's not the title of one of his plays - it's a term used in theater when actions force the audience to remember that they are in fact just watching a play, and they should question everything... including how actions in the play can relate to actions being played out in real life all around them. There's a lot more to it than that but that's the TL;DR version.

The Sound of the Resistance

And then there’s music. Music is the one that really gets me, because it bypasses the brain and goes straight for the throat. That, and I was raised on Vietnam and Civil Rights protest music.

There are a lot of names from that time; Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez. But if you want to talk about music as resistance, you start and end with Nina Simone. When she sang "Mississippi Goddam," she wasn't just performing; she was throwing a brick through a window. She took the trauma, the exhaustion, and the bone-deep weariness of being a Black woman in America and turned it into a weapon.

Music is the heartbeat of every revolution we’ve ever had. From the folk singers of the 60s to the punk scene in the 70s—which was basically just a bunch of kids realizing they didn't need to know more than three chords to tell the government to go jump in a lake—music provides the soundtrack for when we’ve finally had enough.

There’s something so profoundly hopeful about a protest song. It’s an admission that things are bad, yes, but it’s also a promise that we’re still here to sing about it. It’s the sonic equivalent of planting a garden in a war zone. It’s saying, "I am tired, I am scared, and I am incredibly annoyed that I have to keep doing this, but I am not quiet."

Side note, I have a Spotify playlist you're welcome to if protest music is your jam - Your Struggle is My Struggle. I've got everyone from Nina Simone to Woody Guthrie to N. W. A. to The Clash.

The Art of Not Giving Up

So, why does any of this matter when I’m waiting for yarn club to dry and am working on three different ceramic custom orders and two box custom orders? When I'm spending so much energy on art this week that I don't have any left for loud protest?

Because we’re tired. We are so, so tired. We live in a world that demands our constant attention, our constant outrage, and our constant productivity. We’re expected to be informed citizens, perfect parents, efficient workers, and somehow also find time to hydrate and do "self-care" (which usually just means crying in a slightly more expensive bathtub) (I love my bathtub).

It’s overwhelming. It’s enough to make you want to crawl under the covers and stay there until Ragnarök.

But then I look at the history of art, and I see a long line of people who felt exactly like this. People who were overwhelmed by the plague, or the king, or the war, or the industrial revolution, or the sheer, grinding monotony of poverty. And instead of just disappearing, they made something.

They painted the struggle. They acted out the absurdity. They sang the resistance.

Art is the proof that we have survived before. It’s the record of our resilience. When we look at a mural on a city wall or hear a song that makes us want to march, we’re tapping into a reservoir of human defiance that has been filling up for centuries.

It tells us that we aren't the first ones to feel like everything is on fire. It tells us that even in the middle of the flames, someone was brave enough to grab a paintbrush and say, "Look at this. Remember this. This isn't how it has to be." This isn't how it has to be.

I think we often feel like our small acts of creativity don’t matter. We think that if we aren't painting a masterpiece or writing a symphony, we aren't part of the "Great Resistance." But I think the resistance is in the choice to see beauty when everything feels ugly.

It’s in the way you arrange the flowers you bought at the grocery store because they were 50% off and slightly wilted. It’s in the way you hum a song while you’re scrubbing the floor. It’s in the way you tell a joke to a friend who is having a bad day, because humor is the ultimate act of defiance against a world that wants to keep us miserable. Art is the ultimate act of shining a defiant light in a world that wants us to live in the dark.

History is heavy. Politics is a nightmare. But art is the light we carry into the basement so we don't trip over the boxes of our own despair. It’s messy, it’s loud, it’s often confusing, and it’s occasionally covered in cobwebs, but it’s ours.

So, if you’re feeling like a hot mess today - if you’re feeling weary, if you’re feeling like the world is too big and you’re too small - just remember: Goya was probably stressed about speaking out and losing the money the Monarchy gave him. Shakespeare had a family he didn't pay enough attention to because he had to work his feelings about the times out in the written word. Nina Simone probably had days where she didn't want to get out of bed any more than any of us.

They did it anyway. They left us a map. And even if all you can do today is doodle a little smiley face on a sticky note while you’re on a soul-crushing conference call, you’re part of that tradition. You’re resisting the grayness. You’re choosing to make a mark.

And honestly? That’s enough for today. The revolution starts with a cup of coffee and the realization that we’re still here. We’re still loud. We’re still making or appreciating art, be it sculpture or paintings or music or theater or photography or graffiti, that recharges our crushed souls.