Working for Change

Sometimes you need a cloak of invisibility, sometimes you need a coat of armor, and sometimes you just need to go naked! I encourage any attempt to provoke positive change.


Social Malpractice in the Age of Cultural Compliance, by Ed Woodham, Hyperallergic, March 25, 2026.

What happens when the language of social practice becomes a tool of the very systems it once hoped to challenge?

We are living in a strangely apocalyptic moment where a perverse logic runs the machinery of public life while insisting everything is just fine. Around the world, political systems are tightening control over commerce, education, culture, and communication. Independent critical thinking is increasingly treated as subversive rather than a civic virtue. Public space, once the laboratory for egalitarian expression, is shrinking under surveillance, privatization, and corporate branding.

So where does socially engaged art fit into a world progressively hostile to independent thought? Read the whole article here.

Star Power Lights Up the Kennedy Center

Strong voices speak out against Trump’s attack on our freedom of expression.


Artists detonate attack on Trump at the Kennedy Center, by Ashley Murray, Indiana Capital Chronicle, AlterNet, March 28, 2026.

WASHINGTON — A host of celebrities outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Friday kicked off a weekend of protest against President Donald Trump’s expansion of executive power and his administration’s pressure on freedom of expression — from theater programming in the nation’s capital, to late-night television.

More than a dozen activist performers and creators rallied for Artists United for Our Freedoms, an event organized by the advocacy group Committee for the First Amendment. Read the whole article here.

From the Vault: Joey Skaggs’ 1979 Wall Street Shoe Shine

Dime for a shine? Fuhgeddaboudit!

In 1979, Joey Skaggs, SVA students and friends, make a statement about runaway inflation by charging ten times more than normal for a luxury shoe shine on Wall Street for workers who easily made ten times more than the average person.

Check out the story behind the Wall Street Shoe Shine here.

Art & Place Conference Keynote, May 2, 2025

I thought I was getting on a flight to Germany to deliver my keynote at the
Art & Place conference in Saarbrücken.

Instead, I wound up giving it via Zoom—from a prison cell.

Not literally, of course. But I dressed for the part. A fitting backdrop for a talk on creative dissent.

Guerrilla theater, unsanctioned public art, protests in disguise—these are the tools I’ve used to question authority and reclaim public space. Sometimes with humor. Sometimes with a bullhorn. Always with intent.

While my prison cell was symbolic, the consequences of challenging power are very real. So, this was a reminder: dissent isn’t just a right. It’s a necessity. And we need to protect the freedom to speak out—especially when it’s uncomfortable.

Thanks to the organizers for inviting me. And to everyone still raising hell where it matters.

Stop BioPEEP before it’s too late!

“Joey Skaggs: Stop BioPEEP,” the 10th film in the “Joey Skaggs Satire and Art Activism, 1960s to the Present and Beyond” oral history series, is screening at the New Jersey Film Festival at 7 pm on Friday, September 20, 2024. It’s also available to stream online for 24 hours. Details are here.