Take One Action

Curated by Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen
with assistant curator Shameekia Shantel Johnson

Take One Action is a public campaign that calls on artists to explore how their creative practice can support democratic freedoms amid widespread fascism. As the American public becomes more embroiled in the effects of authoritarianism, the pressure on everyday people trying to survive rises. In the wake of a crashing economy, deteriorating medical and educational infrastructure, wars manipulating financial markets, and an upending AI revolution led by techno-oligarchs, public dissent ensues and sparks defiance. Such pressures become a catalyst for many artists to examine the political systems that define our personal lives, inspiring them to develop strategies that best support collective well-being. Through Take One Action, artists from across the United States are prompted to use their visual practice as a basis for presenting step-by-step actions that everyday people can take to save democracy. The initiative enacts a call-and-response between the people and their government. 

The current American administration aims its legislative and social powers at the groups of Americans that don’t align with its ideals or categories of humanness, leaving people of color, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ folks, women, and the natural world vulnerable to accelerating and calculated exploitation. All of these atrocities are happening under the weight of their pen, or even their iPhone keyboard. Thus, Take One Action becomes an outlet for artists who oppose systematic, environmental, and identity-based harm, prompting them to use their creative expression as an act of collective resistance. Take One Action orients viewers to embrace their responsibilities to our social world—both virtual and physical—to restore or prevent all freedoms lost. As absurd, perplexing, and Orwellian as our society has become, rather than succumbing to a dystopian future as a fixed prediction, we’re resetting into an alternative reality that can adequately hold our differences. Through this campaign comes a kaleidoscopic view of creative ingenuity, grassroots organizing, and communal labor that transfers between the artists and the public. 

Finding common ground in various social realist and radical movements, Take One Action honors the power of art as a liberatory tool for the people. As a wheatpaste campaign, Take One Action uses public space in New York City’s Lower Manhattan to display a series of art posters that interact with passersby. Artists selected from the open call will present their work alongside Robert Longo, Sasha Styles, and Shawn Leonardo. As an online exhibition, Take One Action is an everlasting repository of hope and a resource library of social movements. Overall, this initiative embraces the ethics and aesthetics of a social practice based on regenerative and diverse logics. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, we make art during such revolting times to “praise the grandeur of life and all attempts to live as beautifully and fearlessly as one can under completely impossible circumstances.” Amidst such impossible circumstances in America today, artists are offering people a spark and a flame to reach new possibilities—one action at a time. 

Shameekia Shantel Johnson

Untitled (Ripped Flag in the Wind), 2026
Robert Longo

Action:
Vote! Use It or Lose It!

I.C.E. Scream. 2026
Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez

Defend, 2026
Shaun Leonard

Action:
'Block by Block, Know and __________ Your Neighbors.'