Look What We Can Make

What happens when protest becomes a creative act rather than merely an expression of opposition?

Protest makes private dissatisfaction publicly visible. It also tells us that a concern felt by one person is shared by many.

People rarely take to the streets for a single reason. Outrage may bring them there. So can shared values, identification with a larger community, or the conviction that acting together might change something.¹

But protest does something else that may be just as important.

It transforms I object into We exist.

Gathering with others and taking a public stand also changes the people doing the protesting.

Joining together for a common cause begins to make protest look remarkably like creative practice. You rehearse something together. You discover what other people can do. You experience yourself as an actor rather than an observer. You improvise. You encounter strangers. You temporarily inhabit a different version of public life.

So, in that sense, a protest march is not simply making a demand. For a few hours, participants may be practicing democracy.

Disruptive nonviolent protests tend to make people view the protesters themselves less favorably. Their attitudes toward the issue being protested, however, tend to change much less.²

But perhaps “Did the march convince people on the other side?” is the wrong question.

Maybe a better test includes questions like:

• “Did the protest increase participation?”
• “Did the event change what journalists covered?”
• “Did the action force a political body or institution to answer and act?”
• “Did the demonstration create an image, phrase, or story that traveled farther than the demonstration itself?”

Better yet, “Did we show the public what we are for rather than merely what we are against?”

Imagine protesting cuts to public education by temporarily creating a magnificent public classroom.

Imagine a demonstration about book bans that converts a city block into a participatory library.

Imagine a protest about immigration filled with a procession of stories, food, music, languages, and enormous portraits.

Imagine a demonstration defending democracy that incorporates an exercise in democracy, where thousands of people create, deliberate, or decide something together.

Suddenly artists aren’t decorating a protest. Creative practice is the protest.

Bread and Puppet Theater has spent decades carrying enormous puppets, masks, and pageantry into the streets. During the Vietnam War, its performers turned protest into public theatre, using scale, spectacle, and procession to make political ideas impossible to overlook.

Knitting pink pussy hats turned participation into something people could do before arriving at the Women’s March.

The inflatable Portland frog costumes were almost the opposite of conventional protest imagery. Their absurdity changed the picture: heavily equipped authorities confronting enormous, ridiculous frogs.

ACT UP’s die-ins were theatre. Instead of saying people are dying from AIDS, human beings became the visual representation of death. ACT UP understood that the audience included journalists and television cameras, and demonstrations were often connected to specific demands.

The George Floyd murals transformed boarded storefronts and ordinary walls into a decentralized public archive. The Urban Art Mapping project made it clear that these works weren’t simply decoration accompanying protest. They helped protesters around the world shape and preserve the narrative.

Creative practitioners in Germany flex their political imagination on Rosenmontag during carnival season. Sculptors, designers, and builders give complicated social issues enormous satirical form. Papier-mâché becomes political commentary.

The Nelken Line substitutes bodies, movement, and gestures for slogans. This makes it harder to reduce the participants to angry people shouting at an institution. The dance form itself communicates another conception of what public dissent can look like.

I’ve come to realize that protest has almost always started with someone else’s verb.

They banned. They cut. They arrested. They invaded. They fired. They threatened. They destroyed. They killed.

To which we reacted.

That gives power the first move. Someone else determines the subject, while the rest of us assemble in response.

But reaction doesn’t have to limit imagination.

In the months ahead, as people around the world gather to express their dissatisfaction, artists and creative practitioners can help change the verb. We can help demonstrate not only what people oppose, but what they believe could exist instead.

So, to Look what they have done, perhaps our most transformative response is:

Look what we can make.

A version of this post was also published by Randall White on Substack, Sep 13, 2026.

Image Credits

Creative practice can turn protest into participation, spectacle, memory, and shared imagination.

Left to right: Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress; Voice of America; Phillip Pessar, CC BY 4.0; NIH History Office; Another Believer; Matthias Kabel, CC BY-SA 3.0; TiersLieudelaVerrerie, CC BY-SA 4.0. Images cropped and combined for this graphic.

References

¹ Silvia da Costa, Dario Páez, Mariacarla Martí-González, Virginia Díaz, and Pierre Bouchat, “Social movements and collective behavior: an integration of meta-analysis and systematic review of social psychology studies,” Frontiers in Psychology, April 2023, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1096877/full

² Clara Vandeweerdt, “The effect of disruptive protests on public opinion,” PNAS Nexus, April 2026, https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/4/pgag082/8539209