Charleston is becoming a protest art town.
Art is reflecting the dissent that’s bubbling across our country. And Charleston is helping to drive the art of protest.
When the Trump administration threatened to mobilize the Oregon National Guard in Portland in October, federal authorities framed it as a measure against violent, organized “antifa,” despite the non-existence of such a movement. Instead dancing agitators in inflatable T-Rex and banana costumes gathered outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In November, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert presented singer-songwriter Jesse Welles strumming a folksy, withering ditty from the point of view of an ICE recruiter.
This month, the Minneapolis killings of mother-of-three Renee Nicole Good and nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti quickly prompted trenchant, elegiac verse from National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, writ large and shared widely.
Meanwhile, Charleston has been getting in on this artful activism, too–arguably no stretch for a place that prides itself on being a cultural hub. Whether by paint-to-poster board, words-to-music or cosplay packing a political punch, local protest art can galvanize masses, make headlines and move needles.
Brass acts
If puffy Portland dinosaurs and earnest poems seem to some like child’s play, that’s neither the aim nor the effect. Those disarming inflatables ingeniously crushed fear-baiting narratives. Gorman’s poignant stanzas breathed life, deeply felt and tragically lost, into our media streams as thousands upon thousands collectively mourned.
A gleaming glass case at the International African American Museum displays a trombone once played by Marcus McDonald, a musician who is also the leader of Charleston Black Lives Matter.
In 2020, McDonald brought the brass to the King Street protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. Moved to play an arresting noise, his notes were soon met with unified chants.
“Then somebody else with the horn came and joined me. And I remember that was a really powerful moment, too,” he said in a recent interview.
On July 27, 2021, at Marion Square, he sounded it at a Justice for Jamal protest calling for charges against Charleston County detention officers in the death of Jamal Sutherland, a mentally-ill Black man.
Earlier this month in Marion Square, as Martin Luther King Day parade crowds gathered, a sign with words from King’s “We Shall Overcome” sermon covered another: the recently erected road marker to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Developing stories
Performers step up for social issues, too. On Sept. 9, Nameless Numberhead, the comedy duo of Maari Suorsa and Henry Riggs, appeared at PechaKucha, the confab of Charleston creatives.
Rolling antically onto the Charleston Music Hall Stage, outfitted in rat suits, they delivered a 2025 Rat Report, coaxing mirth from the acronym RATS along the lines of “Rushing About Teaching Society.” Separating the “good rats,” who gather and build community, from the “bad rats” like “Realtors and developers Acting Too Selfishly,” they called out those “Ravaging Affordable Turf Shamelessly.”
In another art-powered censure of development in February 2023, unauthorized stealth street signs appeared, including one on Line Street reading “Be prepared to stop: Gentrification ahead.”
A few months earlier, the much-maligned cell phone tower that vexed locals with its resemblance to rolls of toilet paper caught the eye of digital artist Seth Abramson, who projected onto it images of the Great Cornholio from Beavis and Butt-Head. The Charleston City Paper dubbed the tower the “Toilet Roll Poll.”
The collective TINYisPOWERFUL, which links area artists, activists, educators, cultural workers, youth and tiny business partners, sprung from the multiyear conNECKtedTOO project to establish a more ethical and equitable approach to development.
From March 13 to May 22, Art/in/with/Community Lab as a 3rd space takes place at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture furthers these goals.
Field work
Artist and environmental activist Mary Edna Fraser is celebrated for highlighting natural treasures with her sweeping silk batik works offering aerial perspectives on coastlines in the Lowcountry.
She is also a folk musician who has penned and performed protest songs. During President Trump’s first term she wrote “Broken America”, calling out “white supremist angry shouts” and “rampant hypocrisy.” Drawing from her days protesting in coffee houses in Fayetteville, N.C., during the Vietnam War and college in the 1970s, she was inspired by timeless songs like Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin.”
Seeing chemicals allowed again in fields and food scares her. “The EPA’s eradication of human health concerns is not ethical. Big oil and AI are seeking to ruin the ACE Basin aquifer on the Edisto.”
Inside out
Many others build community through the arts, among them Charleston poet laureate Asiah Mae and writer and filmmaker Tyquan Morton, whose film High Water imagines life in Charleston in 2040.
Gallery walls and museum halls are activated, too. Arun Drummond of Drummond Studio Gallery’s recent group show For the People sought to bring art to all people and engage its East Side neighborhood. Artist Fletcher Williams III folds in the city’s socially loaded Palmetto roses, as well as the white picket fence, which he views as more a barrier than a welcome.
South Carolina artist Leo Twiggs, who examines racism in pieces including “Commemoration #3” that depicts stacked images of the Confederate flag, is primed for a retrospective, Revelations: The Art of Leo Twiggs. It is at the Gibbes Museum of Art through May 3.
Going global
Others have gone global. Charleston native Shepard Fairey’s Obey guerilla art movement spotlighting wrestler and actor Andre the Giant dominates building facades and plasters utility poles the world over. His Obama “Hope” poster was immediately iconic. A quote on his website sums it up: “manufacturing quality dissent since 1989.”
In December, Charleston-based artist Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann, also enjoyed worldwide play after his Art Basel Miami Beach show involving paper-pooping robotic dogs with creepily real heads of tech titans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos converged with artists Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, whose 1937 Guernica is a bar-setting antiwar work itself.
Winkelmann met Fairey three years ago at his Los Angeles studio, and the two stayed in touch.
“His art felt like proof that you could hijack mass culture and shove art straight into the public without asking permission,” said Winkelmann. “It reinforced for me that art doesn’t need to stay precious or polite.”
On March 21, the two artists will join forces when Beeple Studios presents Shepard Fairey: Obey and Resist, an art show featuring live street art, screen printing, art battles and more.
In May 2025, Charleston locals Walter Fiederowicz, founder of Charleston Literary Festival, and artist Richard “Duke” Hagerty joined an aid group called Zero Line, driving from Warsaw to Kiev to deliver critical supplies destined for Ukraine’s frontline. Back in Charleston, they enlisted Stevenson and Co. gallery in a fundraising art sale.
“These are people fighting for their country and for their way of life with a big bully,” Fiederowicz told the City Paper.
On Feb. 10 at 6 p.m., Hagerty and Fiederowicz will give a free talk sponsored by SINO (Silence Is Not An Option), a non-partisan group created to unite, engage, inform and empower all to take action in defense of democracy, taking place at Circular Congregational Church, 150 Meeting St.
The art of protest
In a desensitized world, activists sparking engagement and humanizing issues is crucial to moving others to bring about change. Rollicking RATS make us laugh, then think. Reconsidered Confederate flags capture our collective memories.
“Art bypasses rational defenses and hits people emotionally, which is where opinions actually form,” said Winkelmann. “It doesn’t change policy directly, but it shapes culture, and culture eventually forces policy to catch up.”
In McDonald’s downtown Charleston apartment, every inch of wall drives this home. A portrait of Malcom X with third eye envisioning pyramids coexists with a time-weathered rendering of the Dock Street Theatre. A small work with masked gunmen trained on the Grim Reaper rests atop a bright abstract by Julie “Gaetarina” Monroe.
“Organizing can be such an ugly and unsexy thing that we need people to be drawn to it,” said McDonald.
And that, Fraser observed, is the artist’s role.
“Artists are the megaphones of truth in society, often persecuted for saying out loud what we fear.”
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