The Arts v Project 2025
San Francisco Bay Area Template
We are asking artists to think about the types of outdoor public performative actions they could take working in collaboration with other sectors threatened by Project 2025.
Our goals include to:
- Use the performing arts to attract media attention and to educate the public about the threats posed by Project 2025.
- Live-stream and publicize all of the actions in tandem with artists from around the country who are coordinating similar local events at the same time.
- Work with artists, arts organizations and other sectors who are in locales where elections are highly contested to offer vocal support for communities who want to highlight the problems caused by Project 2025.
We want to give a national public platform to the voices and opinions of everyone who wants to oppose Project 2025. Every voice matters and no-one should feel isolated or that their opinion does not count.
Project 2025's policies impact a wide range of individuals and groups within the United States. Areas targeted by Project 2025 include:
- Immigrants: The project advocates for mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, and dismantling the asylum system. It also proposes restricting pathways to legal immigration, increasing detention resources and targeting legal immigrants who show dissent to the Trump administration (or who are arrested simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time).
- LGBTQ+ Individuals: Project 2025 aims to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ people, legalize discrimination, to only recognize two genders – male and female, prohibit gender affirming care for minors, exclude transgender people from the military and from disaster assistance.
- Women and Those Seeking Reproductive Healthcare: The project proposes banning abortion medications, restricting access to emergency contraception, and potentially criminalizing those who send or receive abortion medications. It also calls for increased monitoring of pregnancies.
- Civil Servants: Project 2025 suggests eliminating job protections for thousands of federal employees, replacing them with political appointees who are loyal to the administration.
- Institutions of higher learning: under the stalking horses of DEI or antisemitism, the administration seeks to impede independent critical thought and dissent on campuses.
- Low-Income Individuals and Families: The project proposes cuts to social safety net programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, and ending programs like Head Start.
- Individuals and Groups Participating in DEI Initiatives: Project 2025 explicitly calls for the erasure of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities. This includes: LGBTQ+ people (see above), women and people of color.
- Individuals Engaged in Lawful Protest or Dissent: The project suggests invoking the Insurrection Act to suppress protests and target political opponents.
- The Environment & Climate Change. As the Trump administration goes about gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments of government with responsibility for regulating and reporting on ecological disasters and climate change.
The above list is suggestive, not exhaustive.
Optimally, the artist and the P2025 threatened entities will have a pre-existing relationship. I.e. if an artist has a track record of creating work about immigrants’ rights then, if possible, work with the same groups. Incorporate their members or constituents into the action.
If this is not the case, artists should focus on the area(s) listed above that are of most interest to them. Reach out to representatives of the community you want to work with. If needs be, we can work together to find an appropriate partner.
The idea is that the actions are visible, outdoors, colorful, eye-catching and media worthy from both mass media news and social media perspectives.
We also need projects to be logistically relatively straightforward, not too time consuming in terms of preparation or rehearsals, etc. and inexpensive.
If possible, include movement or text from existing repertoire that can be taught to non-artists quickly.
Mass choreography 101. Basic techniques that can be used to devise movement and language for groups of non-professionals – one color, one prop, one verbal slogan (message), two-three movement phrases. Live music when possible.
We will stage these actions at multiple sites throughout the Bay Area with staggered start times. We want some people to be able to see more than one action live. But the primary goal is to be able to live stream all of them, post to social media and have something happening whenever a television news program stops by with a camera and a reporter.
Plans should be made for the video recording of the event and live streaming, which the festival will initiate and coordinate.
Arts Community Demands
Artists have a history of creating work that transcends ordinary demonstrations turning them into spectacles. The nature of demonstrations means the artists often do not get paid for this.
In lieu of payment in this instance, we need to have a key demand that the arts community wants – that any sector we collaborate with – should agree to and offer support for, in return for our finding common cause with them.
Andrew’s proposal is we ask our allies to support a building back of the NEA as a cabinet level Department of Cultural Affairs. Or at the least to what it was in the 1980s when the budget was much larger and artists and arts organizations could apply multiple times a year.
This message needs to be refined and modified by the folks doing government advocacy so that it can resonate and sound believable to law makers.
Timeline
We want to initiate a first prototype action in 2025 after the school summer holidays but before the rainy season. In San Francisco, this means before the second half of October.
We also want to avoid the weekend of Indigenous People’s Day (October 11-13) – also Fleet Week (Blue Angels). Directly following this weekend is the Dream Works conference.
We settled on the next Equinox (when the orbit of the planet is in equilibrium with the sun and moon), which falls on Monday September 22, so the weekend September 20-21.
The idea is to take what we learn from doing these actions and plan for a more substantial series in the summer of 2026 in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
