It was the day before Valentine’s Day in New York City, where Kris Grey, 45, has spent much of his life. Roses spilled onto sidewalks, storefronts taped paper hearts to their windows and restaurants dressed themselves in extra romance and rearranged their floors into neat rows of tables for two. But Grey felt no sweetness in the air.
Last year, he recalled a dull sense of foreboding as he sat in front of his home computer, finger poised over the refresh key.
The page blinked, went white for a brief moment and returned in a slightly altered form.
The National Park Service’s website made exclusions on its webpage dedicated to the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, a landmark in the modern gay rights movement. The words “transgender” and “queer,” once plainly visible, were deleted from the page. Instead, the community was addressed as “LGB.”
Screengrab of Stonewall National Monument Landscape information page on National Park Service Website.
“I had a visceral reaction to that removal,” said Grey, a nonbinary and transgender artist. “It reminded me of other erasures of queer and trans history from the past and I was outraged by that.”
The changes followed an executive order by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, when he called for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.
Grey, full of rage, sought permission and salvaged discarded fragments removed during the renovation of the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center and transformed it into a 6-foot tall capital T. These pieces once lined the passageway to the dance floor at the original Stonewall Inn and were removed during renovations for an expanded Visitor Center, which opened in June 2024 on the anniversary of the 1969 police raid that spearheaded the Stonewall uprising and the modern Pride movement.
“It’s like a literal restoration of the letter that represents my trans history and our American history that had been removed from the National Monument website,” Grey said.
Capital T piece on display at the exhibition at 601 Artspace (Courtesy: Etienne Frossard/601Artspace)
By November, that sculpture debuted in 601 Artspace, a gallery on the Lower East Side, in protest against the current Trump administration. But it didn’t stand alone.
On Nov. 21 and 22, more than 600 other artists, galleries and museums showcased protest art across the country and abroad, all presented as part of Fall of Freedom, an initiative described on its website as “an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation.”
In Fairbanks, Alaska, a collection of banned books was displayed at a bookstore cafe.
In Moscow, Idaho, an arts center hosted a workshop on crafting group street theater performances, designed to be woven into future protests.
In London, England, performance artist Joseph DeLappe sat in front of the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square, apologizing to passersby who came to his “United States Apologies Desk.” He handed them a signed apology card and a pledge to “continue to resist Donald Trump and all forms of fascist ideology through civic and creative engagement.”
In Mérida, Mexico, the festival staged seven original 10-minute plays about life in the U.S., addressing deportation and other lived experiences.
Though spread across the nation and beyond, wherever these events appeared, so did an emblem: a hand lifting a torch, its flame replaced by radiating sunbursts in red, gold and cream, accompanied by the words Fall of Freedom.
As word spread and the initiative grew, subcommittees formed from public relations to video production and website design. Organizers were cautious, aware of the initiative’s limitations without sufficient funding, structure, or bandwidth to promote everyone’s work. Concerns over financial pressures also kept some institutions at a distance, particularly those reliant on federal support.
By November, even as a report from the American Alliance of Museums noted that one-third of museums had seen government funding or contracts canceled over the past year, organizers were ready. They launched what they envisioned as a “nationwide wave of creative resistance,” with artists, creators and local communities hosting independently organized events.
“It was like ‘we’re fed up and we’re creating an invitation to make a creative action,’” Grey said, likening the generous and overwhelming response to the elephant and rider metaphor, where the elephant represents the emotional and the rider represents the rational.
“Most of the people who are doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor right now on this project are motivated from the emotional. They understand intellectually what’s at stake if our freedom to express ourselves is co-opted by fascists, and they feel passionately about being a part of a resistance movement that publicly claims their dissent,” Grey said.
On a late November Saturday in New York City, drums thumped and tubas boomed through Madison Square Park in answer to that call. One drum carried a single word, stamped in bold letters: RESIST. About a dozen musicians held their ground by the park’s iconic fountain, playing a two-hour set.
Just in front of them, Scott Seabolt, another artist, crouched over the pavement with a bucket of white paint, a brush, and a set of stencils. He painted the words “You Have The Right To” on the sidewalk. They were prompts that invited passersby to complete the sentence in chalk with the issues that mattered most to them.
Chalk writings at Madison Square Park at the Fall of Freedom Event. (Credit: Lauren Ong)
“I thought it was an open enough phrase that allowed people to say: you have the right to bear arms, you have the right to be angry, you have the right to disagree,” Seabolt said as he gestured to the dozen or so words written in colorful chalk all over the ground.
The performance piece was put together by ABC No Rio, a nonprofit arts organization, in just three weeks, according to artist Vandana Jain who was one of the volunteers for the effort.
“I feel we’ve had a lot of protests like the No Kings Protest where we get a lot of people turn out, but then I feel like it’s kind of really easy to go home and feel like you’ve done your part,” she said. She described the event as one meant to remind people of what they can do every day, as she handed out flyers listing basic rights and resources on immigration encounters and food assistance. “I kind of really think that’s how we fight fascism.”
Artists have long been central to social movements in the United States, often engaging during periods of democratic backsliding or civic crisis. In the early 19th century, posters, cartoons, banners and songs were essential tools for labor and workers’ movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, songs served as the soundtrack to the Civil Rights Movement, fostering solidarity and collective identity through communal singing. In the 1990s, Keith Haring’s artworks became the symbol for fighting AIDS.
Organizers of the Fall of Freedom movement consciously draw on these historical precedents, including the U.S. government’s attempts to defund or censor artists in the 1990s, when several artists lost federal funding due to queer content in their work.
“These are not new tactics,” Grey said, noting that some of the movement’s early organizers experienced those funding cuts firsthand.
Yet, Fall of Freedom’s response is just as old, according to Ronald Eyerman, professor of sociology at Yale University, who studies cultural and social movement theory.
“They are at once spontaneously gathering and reacting to a long-standing tradition of artists mobilizing in the name of a political cause,” he said.
Still, Eyerman argues, the movement is somewhat distinct. Historically, artists have often aligned with broader social movements, such as the Civil Rights or labor movements, acting in supportive roles. In contrast, this movement has emerged with artists taking the lead, responding directly to threats in a “new authoritarian environment, where control and the management of ideas and expression seems to be an aim.”
“Individual artists faced with such a situation come to realize that they have a collective interest in protecting the right to free expression, which is at the core of the arts,” he said.
Fall of Freedom was organized in parallel with broader campaigns that have emerged since Trump’s return to office, such as the No Kings Protests, Kick Out The Clowns protest (a clown-themed demonstration against Trump), or Occupation Inflation which distributes free inflatable costumes to be worn at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests.
Lawrence Bogad, a professor who teaches political performance at the University of California, Davis described this wave of activism as a response to “the authoritarian onslaught of this administration.”
“The openly aggressive corruption and violence toward the populations that this government has determined is inferior or undesirable, all of this has galvanized a movement of artists, and of many people, to nurture a culture of resistance that hopes to preserve and expand democracy in our society,” he said.
Bogad, who’s also a performance artist, advocates for the use of “tactical frivolity” in protests as a strategic response to social movements in the U.S. being depicted as aggressive and threatening, a portrayal that authorities often use to justify violent crackdowns.
This approach follows a long lineage of humor and spectacle as political tools, from the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968 to the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, which Bogad co-founded in 2003 to stage satirical, clown-themed protests against the United Kingdom’s monarchy and political decisions.
In 2025, this took the form of protesters dressing as frogs at ICE raids, or as mailboxes at demonstrations to oppose efforts to halt vote counting when Trump led in early returns.
“Don’t be cliche; you wouldn’t tolerate or accept being cliche in any other art form, why with public protest when the stakes are so high?” Bogad said.
“If the movement’s actions are not interesting and tactically savvy, aesthetically compelling, there is always the risk that they will be too easily ignored or drowned out in the general noise of our information-overload society,” he said.
As artist Vandana Jain distributed flyers at Madison Square Park, she explained why art has become central to this resistance.
“I think art is a place that is harder to control than other venues,” she said, comparing it to the media.
“Artists, we’re very small and we can be very autonomous and we can be anarchistic. We kind of are by nature. Not all artists, but there is a tendency for art to do that so I think it dovetails really well with actions like this,” she added.
It’s a flexibility that larger institutions can’t match. And while Fall of Freedom hasn’t yet drawn a reaction from Trump, what matters most to artists like Grey is building something that lasts beyond any single action or headline.
“Art matters and courage is contagious,” Grey said.
“When we see other people showing up for creative events, everybody gains a sense of confidence and agency.”
About the author(s)
Lauren Ong is a MA Politics student at Columbia Journalism School specialising in foreign affairs.