Chire Regans:                    Activism is basically action for a purpose.

Lou Anne Colodny:                          Activism, to me, is not screaming and yelling and burning bras and raising flags and doing all that.

Chire Regans:                    Activism doesn’t look the same for everyone, and I think that’s the misconception that a lot of people have, and that’s what discourages people to act.

Lou Anne Colodny:                          Activism to me is to really understand situations and to quietly, but stealthily, go about trying to get my point of view out.

David Rohn:                      I see a lot of artists doing different things. Some artists are demonstrating. Some artists are making art on different topics. In my case, it’s pretty much about just a couple of topics.

Lou Anne Colodny:                          And to support whatever point of view I have and see if there are others like me, and to do it in a more quiet, but steady kind of pace.

Alessandra:                       It gave me complete panic attacks. I had total flashbacks of growing up in Venezuela under a quote-unquote democracy. Yes, you know, rife with injustice and corruption, but with somewhat of a different social class stratification, with, you know, basic civil liberties, and this guy who was a joke came into the political scene. And everybody laughed him off, and everybody thought he was a joke, and they said, “Hahaha, it’ll never happen. It’ll never happen. It’ll never happen.”

Lou Anne Colodny:                          I think that activism can take many forms, and that’s a good thing because you need both in order to get things done.

Oliver Sanchez:                I’m a huge fan of street art, and by definition, of graffiti art. These are the roots of activism. When there is no voice, when there is no platform, when you risk life and limb or take a knee for something that is bigger and more profound than any one personal experience, this is activism.

Chire Regans:                    Whatever it is that you are good at, that can be your means to act. And you can facilitate your activism through that. And since I am a visual artist, that’s the way that I act.

David Rohn:                      For the last something like two years, it’s had a lot to do with homelessness. I’ve done a long series, and probably an unfinished series, a continuing series of portraits of blue collar service workers, in particular, and older service workers.

Alessandra:                       And I don’t know if you know anything about Venezuela right now, but it is a full-on authoritarian regime. They’ve destroyed everything. I mean, people are starving. There is no medicine. They’ve destroyed the natural environment.

Protesters:                        This is what democracy looks like!

Alessandra:                       And Americans don’t have a point of reference and do not know what’s at stake and take for granted things like you can pick up a paper and get some semblance of reality.

Lou Anne Colodny:                          But if you are just a flag carrier, and don’t do anything further than that, then I’m not sure that that’s as meaningful as steadily plodding along to try to make change.

Alessandra:                       So I lost it, and I had spent my entire life trying to be really invisible, to be behind the scenes in all the work that I’d done up until then, and I threw myself out onto the streets. I had pushed myself outside of my comfort zone, and I started doing everything and anything I could to bring awareness to both social and environmental issues that were troubling me within my strengths and my skillset.

Gina Cunningham:           Definitely one of the movements that I respect the most was just a couple of years ago, when I went to Standing Rock reservation to witness the Native American water protectors go against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Chire Regans:                    It’s important to put a face to victims, especially victims of color.

Gina Cunningham:           The Native American youth, they told the world about what was happening through social media, and the people that came, including the United States veterans, faced incredible hardships.

Chire Regans:                    Because people think that, if you are a person of color and you die violently, then you must have done something to deserve that. And that’s usually not the case.

Gina Cunningham:           They faced local police, regional police, paid militia, oil corporation bullies, and the local community who tried to change the narrative.

Chire Regans:                    And the people whose stories that I tell, they were living their everyday lives. You know, they didn’t think that they would be shot down in the middle of the day in the middle of the neighborhood that they grew up in.

Gina Cunningham:           And everybody stood up against that strong. People were under constant surveillance. People went to jail. People endured war-style military tactics.

Oliver Sanchez:                And we’re all affected. No one is disconnected from the things that are happening in our names, without our consent, somewhere else in the world. This is why activism is important.

David Rohn:                      When you go far, far right and you go far, far left, it’s really more like a circle than a linear thing, and they meet at totalitarianism. I’m not interested in extremes of either type. I don’t think that we’re each other’s problem. We have a system where the bigger you are, the more you can buy in political and government policy. These people have voted for the guy who is president now. That’s a symptom of something. I just, on one side, people are like, “Oh, they’re all stupid.” Well, they’re all frustrated. That’s for sure. I’m not sure who’s stupid. You know? Maybe we all are to have let it get this bad.