The Art of Activism

Spotlighting the efforts of artists who are engaged in the struggle for social justice and are helping build the movement through their work.

2020: A Year in Pictures

Protesters holding a black lives matter flag and walking

Anthony Crider is a professor of Astrophysics at Elon University in North Carolina. He is also a photographer with a keen eye for capturing just the right moment. Photographing both social justice protests and far-right mobilizations, Crider has…

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Danbee (Deb) Kim is a Chicago-based artist who supports social justice movements and organizations through visual storytelling and design. Originally on the path to become a social worker, Kim now focuses full-time on centering art in movement…

Rae Senarighi is a painter, designer, and muralist based in Portland, Oregon. The front cover of the Summer 2018 issue of The Public Eye features a piece from “The Love Series,” which he conceptualized after a cancer diagnosis. Senarighi decided…

Cover art for PE Winter 2018, showing the words "Protest makes America great," and several important moments of protest of American history.

As a Filipino-American printmaker, illustrator, comic artist, and educator, Karl Orozco’s work often grapples with the legacy of colonialism, seeking to “challenge assumed notions of race, family, migration and power.”

A student looks at the remaining boots of a toppled statue.

Our fall cover artist, Jennifer Luxton, describes herself as a “journalist by training, designer by profession, illustrator by passion, and amateur taxidermist by moonlight.”

The cover artist for the summer issue of The Public Eye, Ashley Lukashevsky, was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she was involved with activism from a young age. Her life took a detour, however, when she attended University of Southern…

This spring’s Public Eye cover artist, Erik Ruin, is a Philadelphia-based printmaker, shadow puppeteer, and paper-cut artist whose work has been called “spell-binding” by The New York Times. He describes his art as oscillating “between the poles of…

The Artists of The Public Eye

Since a re-design in 2013, The Public Eye has featured the work of activist artists both on the covers and inside. Here’s a look back at what some of our featured artists had to say about the “Art of Activism”:

Nansi Guevara, a visual artist and activist based in South Texas, has been creating art for as long as she can remember. “The circumstances in my household, a crafty and costurera mother and a father that left construction materials all over the…

“A History of the War on Drugs”

The Public Eye Artist in the News

On September 15, hip-hop artist Jay Z and author and illustrator Molly Crabapple collaborated (along with dream hampton, Jim Batt, and Kim Boekbinder) on a short, animated video, “A History of the War on Drugs, from Prohibition to Gold Rush,” for…

Putin stands in front of the Eastern Orthodox cross and the geographical outline of Russia.

Joshua McPhee, our Winter 2016 cover artist, didn’t go to a traditional art school to learn his craft, but rather what he calls “the punk rock school of art,” where he became part of a politicized sub-culture and learned to work in a wide variety of…

Influential figures pour resources into the Church, with representation of tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for Medicare.

Amelia Spinney, a visual artist and arts educator in the greater Boston area, created the cover image for the Fall 2015 issue of The Public Eye. Spinney describes being politicized as an artist and a person in two particular moments. When they were…