image credit:
Anonymous artist: South side of Chicago
In 2017, before we had signed the lease on our first storefront location on 1112 N. Ashland Ave., the twelve members of the newly formed artist collective were seated around Larry Kamphausen's dining room table. Larry and Gretchen Hasse had made the original call for potential collective founding members. We were debating what we should call ourselves.
True to form, I was listing references to alchemy in Medieval Latin I'm a smart ass. We were all coming up with pretty random stuff. Fred Nitch, another founding member suggested, "Agitator." The room went silent. We all stared at each other, dumbfounded save for Fred who was aghast. His pleas of, "I'm kidding. Really! " were useless."
Eleven of the twelve of us plainly knew this was the only choice. With some misgivings, Fred agreed as well.
The name has been a standard to live up to repeatedly over the nine years of our existence.
I'm grateful to the twelve original members who so readily embraced the name, Agitator. I'm grateful to the subsequent members, past and present for working steadtastly to build and preserve an entity that's bigger and more ambitious and more meaningful than any one of us alone could have made. I'm grateful for those who have shown with Agitator, done gigs at Agitator, and just supported us over the years.
Agitator has been a source of headaches and real angst. It's also in every real sense, saved my life.
To the members of Agitator, our friends and allies, and the artists who are contributing to Stand and Bear Witness, please know you have my deepest gratitude and very real admiration for taking this collective stand with us.
Thank you for fearlessly allowing Agitator to be the bullhorn, the platform, the communal voice, standing against injustice and tyranny.
We bear witness to our stories, to our shared truths, and to any hope for tomorrow.
-Luna Rail,
Stand and Bear Witness curator
Agitator Artist’s Co-operative member
Christopher Vaughn
Photography of people striving to make a difference.
Jane Thorn
~ a painting of a picture taken by an unknown photographer of an ICE agent pointing his firearm at the photographer.
Debra Rodriguez
People of color menaced by an ICE agent.
Ray Caspio
THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T (Self Portrait, 1979-2025)
Ray Caspio
In Hiding In Plain Sight: the Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, Sarah Kendzior writes that time during a nation’s transition to authoritarian rule “…spirals forward and lurches backward. Your memories of political events become blurred when you try to reconcile your initial reactions with the revelatory backstories behind them, forcing you to process your country’s history — and your own — in new and painful ways…My own internal calendar lacks a clear chronology. My memories are often reduced to images tied together by the logic of feelings.” A lightbulb went off when I read this in 2020. The way I’d been experiencing time, both personally and societally since Election Night 2015, finally had an explanation. It inspired a new way of working rooted in psychophysical movement and Automatic processes.
When COVID lockdown began in March 2020, I found myself compelled to write, but no piece of paper was large enough. I didn’t know what the writing would be about, I just felt I had to write and I needed a lot of space. I decided to use a 6’4” x 6’4” section of wall in my studio that I’d been using for self tape auditions. I’d been practicing Automatic Drawing and Writing, so whenever I felt moved to begin writing, I’d grab a General Cedar Pointe #2 Pencil, find the section of the wall I was called to, and begin writing. When the energy exhausted itself, I was done. This would continue for the next 18 months during my time in lockdown. I didn’t read anything I wrote until I transcribed the text into a book after it felt done.
The text turned out to be an expressionistic, subconscious exploration of autobiography and society during a time of transition to an authoritarian government. It explores the nature of Self, dreams, the intersection of personal and political trauma, and historical patterns of marginalization of the Queer population — that we then take into ourselves, and, hopefully, learn to undo; learn to trust our own beings, impulses, and desires. It explores desires and traumas living in my body that hadn’t been given voice. It explores the experience of death and grief. External and internal homophobia. The text asks: What is truth? Who has the power to shape it? What power do secrets hold over us? Whose lies do we assimilate in order to be “respectable” and cling to an illusion of normalcy? Why do we adopt the words people say about who we are as our own true experience? And what happens when we embrace our present experience over memory, linear story and time, to step completely into the unknown together?
Clarisse Casalino
With each piece, I strive to shed light on the profound and often misunderstood emotions that shape the inner worlds of those suffering from mental illness. In the chosen medium of collage, I aim to offer a space to challenge our perceptions and encourage us to question our assumptions about those we deem "crazy." There is an underlying interest in healing. The pieces foreshadow an uneasy thought that each of us faces at some juncture in our lives, that the self-inflicted pain is perhaps the most lethal malady of all.
Alexandra Garcia Herrera
Through exaggerated color and clown-like distortion, I explore the weight of existing between a Latin community and white American society, never being enough for one, and always being too much for the other. The figures hold the tension of living as immigrants in a country that values what you can produce, but withholds full acceptance.
The theatrical elements suggest performance: the pressure to smile, to endure, to assimilate, and to carry humiliation quietly. They stand as symbols of sacrifice, used for labor, stability, and service, yet rarely recognized beyond their utility. This work confronts the feeling of being treated as disposable, of being reduced to a function rather than seen as fully human.
Sarah James Roman
This painting reflects on what it might mean to reclaim cannibalism as a mechanism of empowerment in our times of political devastation These days, we're reminded that cannibalism will ultimately always be about power, domination, and who gets to privilege the destruction of our bodies. Pain, death, and rape are the currency in our systems of domination and always will be. I recognize cannibalism's inherent connection to systemic domination -colonialism, racism, patriarchy -and I keep this legacy in mind as I investigate how reclamations of power can be found in radical acts of violence. To eat is to transform and to survive. We want to eat our darlings so they stay with us forever, just as we want to eat our enemies and systems of oppression to destroy them The reclamation of such an act of cruelty feels far and impossible, but this painting imagines a day where we persist, we transform our vulnerability, and we feast on everything that once tried to rob us of our life.
So yes, this painting says, eat the rich But also, eat it all -eat your father, eat the patriarchy, eat white supremacy, eat fascism
Bite it off and shit it out.
Damien James
Spray paint on paper.
Tiffany Grove
The painting that I submitted, titled Total Tranny Death, was created to capture the anxious state of being a trans woman exposed to immense fear and paranoia during the first months of the second Trump administration My goals is that the scale (60" × 48"), language, and violent imagery will overwhelm your senses in the same way that so many of us felt completely consumed. I was particularly drawn to the strange and contradictory places we occupy in the darkest and most hateful corners of far-right internet communities, as well as right wing media's preoccupation with the supposed "trans mass shooter." The work is highly textured and includes interplay between paint finishes.
Sydney Claire Bronson (ZeDoGiCa)
The work is a digital collage, featuring contextless screenshots of various things I've found on the internet over the years, reflecting an experience of "living on the computer/ phone". The alienation of it, the confusion of experiencing the world through media.
It explores disability, paranoia, technology, solidarity, time, community, labor & class warfare, history, empathy, exclusion, isolation, dreams, and dehumanization This is all done through the lenses of computers, phones, the internet; it juxtaposes those elements with the "Public world", buses, streets, bars, protests, restaurants, places you can't go to
on a computer.
It focuses strongly on disability, and how it can lead to a need to compensate for limited access to public spaces through socialization via technology.
It includes a grey and white "transparency" checkerboard pattern in the background, which serves to emphasize a sort of lack, something missing
The installation will not be a direct display of the piece, but rather a simple xerox poster containing sparse text explaining the piece (my name, then "Untitled (SCAN TO VIEW)") and a QR code, which when scanned, brings the viewer to a social media post containing the image. This means that it must be viewed on a small screen, and it cannot be fully parsed without zooming in to read the small text. This brings viewers into a new environment, the internet, as part of observing the piece, highlighting the inherently surreal and UNreal nature of the internet. In order to view this piece at a physical location you went to TO
Jeff Rivers
My art practice is centered on creating affective spaces of empathy, particularly in relation to African American culture. I work primarily in the mediums of painting, drawing, and photography as I blend these media through my process of image making My work advocates for a conflict theory lens of interpretation of visual culture. I believe power is always in a state of flux within relationships, and it is this constant struggle for power in all relationships that creates the moments of peace and conflict represented in my work. The visual language of my figures depicts our struggles for power within our own locus of control. I illustrate the extremes of power exchanges in relationships through scenes of paternalism and violence. My work represents violence as a cyclical act as a result of the inherent struggle for power within all community and interpersonal relationships.
Kateryna Tkachenko
My work is a visual project that tells stories about the war in Ukraine through a universal symbol. Instead of realistic war scenes, the dove carries brief notes and Ukrainian visual traditions, turning the image into a living war diary shaped by personal connection to Kharkix.
Rooted in the heritage of Ukrainian icon and Baroque art, the series speaks in a distinctly Ukrainian visual language. Its purpose is to make the daily reality of the war understandable to non-Ukrainian audiences
Harper Veresiuk
This painting was made in 2022 when the full scale invasion just started, I've always had a protective nature when it came to children So when I wanted to paint about the war, I mostly thought about the children who will suffer the most. This is a Ukrainian refugee child put into a setting/position of one of William Bouguereau, one of my favorite artists. The idea for this was that children should be experience happiness and love and beauty of the world and not war.
Bouguereau painted plenty of children in "their natural state" (ofc it's dated because he painted in the late 1800s) so I wanted to put Ukrainian children into a safe and happy state yet still include their gaze from the war photos of children reminding us that unfortunately Ukrainian children are not safe or have a space to play and explore the world.
Gretchen Hasse
This illustration is based on real events in Chicago. Dressed in pajamas, a person defends their immigrant neighbor from a fully armed member of ICE. It is ICE who backs down. All we have is each other, and it is enough We will triumph over evil.
Mikki Jay
This is a drawing I made in reaction to the political landscape of the US descending into facism.
Jamie McGinty
This series was directly inspired by the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) movement, which started in Yugoslavia in the 1980's. Operating with a similar methodology these pieces take American WW2 era posters and recontextualize them to display how divergent from our "golden era values we have truly come under the current regime. What were once scenes and descriptions of the most heinous actions of our enemies have become immediately recognizable actions of our government against "the others". The hope is that through the reflection on what was once unconscionable, we can circumvent the trauma, exhaustion, and rekindle a call to resistance against crimes against decency, morality, and ethics that all decent people hold against the brutalizing face of tyranny.
Darya Foroohar
Death to the Dictator is a 4 color risograph comic published by Moody zine in October 2025 that details the 2009 Iranian elections and subsequent mass protests. Not only does it provide context for the curent protests, it also offers an interesting look into what makes a revolution fail and invites readers to think about what can be changed for the future.
Pat Battle
I am a hip hop lyricist and producer whose work is heavily political.
Self-produced album "Call Me By My Rap Name", which despite being released in 2018, is now more relevant than ever:
Searchable on both Spotify and YouTube
Gabriel Patti
is a Chicago based visual and sound artist with roots in jazz and improvisational art and music. He has exhibited artworks regionally and internationally. Often he renders cityscapes and fleeting moments of urban life where memory and invention are merged together in vibrant paintings. Gabriel is compelled to serendipitous juxtapositions, impermanent or transitional moments, random interactions or chance encounters that shift awareness. Sunsets, weird stuff in alleys, wires and melting ice, burning or destroyed buildings, smashed televisions, are examples of recurring subjects for his art.
Sarah Rieser
The executive orders of this fascist administration have decimated funding for cultural programming, stripped essential protections for society's most vulnerable, and sold out our nation's promises of liberty and equality, while in turn providing unparalleled support for federally sanctioned extremist bigotry, placing Americans who believed in the basic human decency of democracy under outright attack As an artist in these terrible times, if you wanna call out the Mango Mussolini, you've gotta "Do It Yourself*. Vintage crochet coverlet (81" × 88") appliqued with fleece & yarn asking, 'Who Has Robbed Americans Of Their Humanities?'. The rainbow embroidered scarf worn by the Trumpy Poopins silhouette answers, 'Super Callous Fascist Racist Sexist Not My POTUS!'. This piece was installed with wooden clothes pins on a laundry line stretched across the front porch of my parent's suburban home for the "Do It Yourself" Terrain Biennial from October 1st through November 15th, 2025.
Joe Fournier
Joe is a Multi media artist.
His work is: Wildly Varied
Mark Nelson
Hands on multi-media works on social justice.
The Townie
Radicalized by basic human decency, my work is a direct response to the injustices plaguing America as we know it. Growing out of my continued frustration with our political climate, I use visual culture to confront and give voice to the harm that has occurred to me, my neighbors, and my friends under fascism. My work is grounded in the purpose role of the shared responsibility we have as a community and artists because no one is free until all are free.
Alex Wilson
Relic #2 (Depave Lake Shore Drive) Screemprint on fabric, 11" × 13", 2003, NFS.
Taken from a screen printed T-shirt made in 2003 advocating for the depaving of Lake Shore Drive and Daniel Burnham's vision of a "forever free and clear" lake front for the people of Chicago to access and enjoy Lake Michigan. The image references the Hokusai print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and replaces Mount Fuji with the skyline of Chicago with the wave tossing cars off Lake Shore Drive. Catch the Depave Wave!
