ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers

What makes the difference between a community where artists simply survive… and one where creativity becomes part of the living infrastructure of democracy? Today we’re continuing our series exploring the building blocks of effective community arts practice. Joining me once again are activist poet, performer, educator, and creative change agent Alice Lovelace, along with educator, cultural strateg...

Ariel Fristoe: Theater as a Civic Commons What happens when theater stops asking audiences simply to watch and starts inviting communities to listen, speak, and act? In this conversation, Bill Cleveland talks with Ariel Fristoe, founder and Artistic Director of Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta, about a lifetime spent reclaiming theater’s oldest purpose—not entertainment alone, but civic life. Togeth...

In this episode we're joined by filmmaker, organizer, novelist, visual artist, and self described conjurer of stories, Paola Mendoza. For more than two decades, Paola has used every tool she can get her hands on. Film, theater, public art, organizing, and literature to tell stories that expand our understanding of who counts, who belongs. The daughter of Colombian immigrants, she's dedicated her a...

Who belongs in America’s story? As battles over immigration, public institutions, national celebrations, and freedom of expression intensify, a deeper struggle is emerging beneath the headlines: who gets represented, remembered, welcomed, and heard. In this Arts Freedom Weather Report, Bill Cleveland connects seemingly unrelated events—from the turmoil at the Kennedy Center and preparations for Am...

How do artists help communities survive violence, heal trauma, and imagine a future beyond conflict? In this episode of Art Is Change , Bill Cleveland speaks with activist, educator, filmmaker, writer, and peacebuilding scholar Cynthia Cohen about a lifetime spent exploring the relationship between creativity, storytelling, conflict, and democratic life. Drawing on experiences ranging from Jewish-...

What happens when a soldier comes home from war and discovers that music can heal the wounds the doctors missed? In this episode, I sit down with musician, songwriter, veteran, and outspoken truth-teller Sean Martin. Sean’s journey takes us from the redwood coast of Northern California to the battlefields of Iraq, through the struggles of PTSD, and ultimately into a creative practice rooted in hon...

What does it actually take to build a lasting cross-sector community arts partnership? In this episode, I return to a lesson I learned more than forty years ago in one of the most unlikely classrooms imaginable: the California prison system during one of the most violent periods in its history. At the center of the story is Verne McKee, an incarcerated artist and leader whose practical wisdom abou...

In this episode of ART IS CHANGE , theater artist and educator Derek Goldman shares how performance can become a civic practice — not simply entertainment, but a way for people to reconnect with themselves, each other, and the deeper responsibilities of citizenship. This episode is part of a special Art in Action series we're producing in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s Demo...

What happens when Artists are embedded inside the systems that run the world? --- hospitals, railroads, steel mills, shipping companies, government ministries... In this episode, we explore the the strange, funny, visionary, and unexpectedly influential story of Barbara Steveni and the Artist Placement Group — a loose coalition of British artists who, beginning in the late 1960s, attempted somethi...

Are Art and Upheaval totally incompatible or unavoidably connected? We’re rebroadcasting this episode from 2022, in part, because the ground beneath it hasn’t settled—it’s shifted, cracked, and in some places, caught fire again. The headlines keep reminding us: conflict, repression, dislocation, the slow erosion—and sometimes the sudden collapse—of trust in our institutions and in each other. And...

What happens when a society loses its grip on grief and numbers replace names? In this episode, social practice artist Suzanne Firstenberg turns national tragedy into human encounter, asking a simple but destabilizing question: Can art make us see each other again? From a field of more than 600,000 white flags on the National Mall to immersive installations on addiction and psychological trauma, F...

Active citizenship isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a life path that can be cultivated from a young age. That’s exactly what Ann Cleveland, a Waldorf educator, dives into with us. In our conversation she takes a deep look at how arts-infused education transforms kids into engaged citizens. Forget the boring lectures about democracy; here, kids are living it through music, movement, and storytelling. An...

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 diff...

What use is art making when freedom is under fire? 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. My name is Bill Cleveland This episode is part of a special Art In Action series we're producing in partner...

What does it actually take to build a democracy the people own? The Artist Proof story takes us to Johannesburg, where a print studio becomes a living laboratory for a new society. We also hear about: • A court built as art, where law and lived experience meet in the same space • A collective studio where artists divided by apartheid learn to work, argue, and make meaning together • A fire, a deat...

Is Community-Based Artmaking at the Heart of Cultural Democracy? In this conversation, community arts organizer, educator and theater maker Matt Schwarzman describes his mission to make collaborative art making a regular, normal, expected part of everyday life. A movement that has quietly grown for decades, but now faces a new test in a time of democratic strain. Along the way, he traces his influ...

What happens when artists step forward not just to create, but to defend the freedom to create? In this opening episode of a new Art in Action series produced with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Bill Cleveland speaks with Joni Doherty, Senior Program Officer for Democracy and the Arts. Their conversation begins with a rediscovered 1964 speech by Martin Luther King Jr. in Dayton, Ohio, and un...

You can feel it in the air. Across museums, national parks, libraries, and cultural institutions, the pressure around what can be said — and what must disappear — is tightening. But while federal policies attempt to narrow the public cultural space, artists, historians, librarians, educators, and cultural organizers are responding in real time — documenting what’s being erased, refusing complicity...

Arts On Prescription: What if your doctor prescribed an arts-based treatment for what ails you and your health insurance paid for it. YEAH RIGHT! Actually, Yeah, right, and REALLY! In this episode we learn all about it in Arts on Prescription: A Field Guide for U. S. Communities BIO's Dr. Tasha Golden directs research for the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins Medicine. As a national l...

How can a play devised by enemies, performed in four locations across a peace wall in the middle of a war zone help provoke lasting peace? In November 1999, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a community play called The Wedding brought Protestants and Catholics together to rehearse a shared future in the fragile aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. It wasn’t a feel-good arts project. It was risky, v...

In this episode I talk with Arlene Goldbard about her new book that I think takes on a quiet but consequential democratic problem: how, in unstable times, the hunger for certainty can slide into surrender—of discernment, of agency, and responsibility. Rather than offering answers or heroes, her book The Intercessor uses story to explore how people learn to stay in relationship, inquiry, and ethica...

What Arts-Based Tool & Tactics are Emerging to Meeting the MAGA Storm? This is the Arts Freedom weather report for February 11, 2026. In this episode you'll hear how Artists across the country are turning public space into sites of creative resistance Why local place based cultural responses in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and beyond are becoming frontline laboratories for cu...

What does it look like when artists and cultural organizers respond to authoritarian pressure—not with silence or fear, but with imagination, strategy, and collective action? This January 2026 Arts Freedom Weather Report comes from Minneapolis, a city once again at the epicenter of grief, rage, courage, and creative resistance. In the wake of multiple killings, intensified ICE activity, and federa...

So if democracy is under pressure, what role do stories, culture, and imagination play in defending it? In this episode, we're joined by Alan Jenkins, civil rights lawyer, former Ford foundation program director, Harvard Law School professor, and now comic book author, for a wide ranging conversation about story making and telling as a tool for social change. From Supreme Court litigation to graph...

When unchecked power rewrites the story of America, who gets to live, who gets to speak, and who quietly disappears? In this episode of ART IS CHANGE , Bill Cleveland shares next chapter in the continuing Weather Report, (now called the Arts Freedom Weather Report ) Rather than chasing single headlines or isolated outrages, this episode steps back to examine the cultural climate shaping 2026: how...