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Type: Culture and Art clear filter
Friday, September 4
 

2:30pm CDT

Sing, Struggle, Organize: Movement Songs, Political Education, and Collective Power
Friday September 4, 2026 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
From picket lines to protest movements, songs have always been weapons of struggle. This interactive workshop teaches movement songs while unpacking their histories and political function, showing how culture builds consciousness, collective identity, and power. Participants will actively practice using culture as a tool for organizing.
Speakers
avatar for Steff Reed

Steff Reed

Steff Reed is an award-winning musician, cultural organizer, scholar, and liberation theologian whose work uses music and faith as tools to build cultural resistance, political consciousness, and collective liberation. Reed is a GRAMMY-nominated music educator whose collaborations... Read More →
Friday September 4, 2026 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
Jackson Park C

4:30pm CDT

Introduction to Theatre of the Oppressed
Friday September 4, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
Play Time! Brazilian Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed provoked director Augusto Boal to develop the Theatre of the Oppressed. He wanted a theatre that the working class could use as community building and as a weapon for revolution. This workshop invites all to participate in TO’s very fun game structures that create instant working relationships. No experience in performance or theatre is required.
Speakers
Friday September 4, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
Jackson Park C
 
Saturday, September 5
 

12:00pm CDT

Art and Propaganda: On Learning from Paul Robeson, Why the Artist must Take Sides
Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Join award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams for a discussion of his new book, Song My Mother Taught Me: Why The Artist Must Take Sides, a clear-eyed exploration of radical poetry, art, and the role of the artist in these times.
Speakers
avatar for Saul Williams

Saul Williams

For nearly three decades, writer, musician, poet, director, and actor Saul Williams has occupied a singular place in Black culture, resisting the confines of genre across music, literature and film, and using art as a transformative device.

Raised between church traditions, hip hop, revolutionary literature and the liberating chaos of downtown poetry scenes, Williams learned early that speaking over music could carry the same emotional force as singing. He traces the lineage through Black church sermons, through... Read More →
Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Grant Park AB

3:00pm CDT

Printing the Revolution: The Role of Art in Organizing and Building Community Resistance
Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Art is too often seen as an extra when building social struggles. Sometimes its seen as an important part of mobilizing people. But too rarely art is treated as a way into organizing and building an alternative to our crisis-ridden world. These artist-activists will bring their rich insights from combined decades of experience to explore art's role in building a better world.
Speakers
AP

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. is an American printer, book artist and papermaker best known for social and political commentary, particularly in printed posters. 














DC

Dio Cramer

Dio (they/them) is an artist, organizer, printmaker, and geographer currently living on occupied Dakota lands in so-called Minnesota. Their work is focused on placemaking, community building, and organizing through the arts, and facilitating collective and collaborative art-making... Read More →
RL

Ricardo Levins Morales

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.He was born into the anti-colonial movement in his native Puerto Rico and was drawn into... Read More →
Sponsors
Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Jackson Park B

6:30pm CDT

Songs for Liberation
Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT
Songs for Liberation is a Chicago protest music collective that sings at protests, fundraisers and community events. They were formed in response to the genocide in Gaza, and for several months were the "house band" on Friday mornings at anti-ICE protests in Broadview. Hear the collective sing, and stick around afterwards to discuss how to duplicate our model!

(in case of rain, join Songs for Liberation in Hyde Park B)
Saturday September 5, 2026 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT
Outside on the lawn (weather-permitting)
 
Sunday, September 6
 

3:00pm CDT

Poetry for the People: Creating Your Own Community-Based Poetry Workshop, A Training for Facilitators
Sunday September 6, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
June Jordan’s Poetry for the People followed principles radical both in their context and today. Poetry for the People cohered around the ideas that poetry is a “medium for telling the truth,” and that participants are creators of today’s literature not detached students of “the canon.” In this workshop we will discuss June Jordan’s groundbreaking blueprint for teaching poetry and collapsing the divide between the university and the community. We will talk about facilitation, collaboration, venues, funding, and readings &prompts.
Speakers Sponsors
Sunday September 6, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Hyde Park B

5:00pm CDT

The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took over the World
Sunday September 6, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
Join Vicky Osterweil on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney's movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, union organizers, and Disney “adults” alike, Osterweil unearths reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt's own animated villains blush.
Speakers
DM

Daniella Mazzio

Daniella Mazzio is a Chicago-based, award-nominated culture writer, screenwriter, accessibility consultant, and performer, who has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Indiewire, Autostraddle, Slate, the Boston Globe, WBEZ Chicago, and more. In 2025, she launched a new film podcast... Read More →
VO

Vicky Osterweil

Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker and the author of The Extended Universe and In Defense of Looting. She is a member of the anarchist journal CAW and has written about the intersections of film, politics, and culture for publications such as The... Read More →
Sunday September 6, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
Jackson Park B

5:00pm CDT

The Power of Speculative Fiction in a Shifting Political Climate
Sunday September 6, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
Join best-selling author, reproductive rights activist, and civil rights lawyer Vaishnavi Patel for a conversation about the power of speculative fiction to make real world struggles more accessible. The session will explore themes from Patel’s new book, We Dance Upon Demons, including confronting apathy and exhaustion in the face of continued injustice as well as finding strength and hope through community.
Speakers
avatar for Sareena Kamath

Sareena Kamath

Sareena Kamath is an editor publishing SFF, speculative, horror, and genre-bending imaginative fiction of all kinds, but especially those projects which shed light on underrepresented perspectives, take place outside Western contexts, and grapple with contemporary sociocultural themes... Read More →
Sunday September 6, 2026 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
Adler ABC

9:00pm CDT

The Neo-Futurists present THE INFINITE WRENCH
Sunday September 6, 2026 9:00pm - 10:00pm CDT
The longest-running late-night show in Chicago, THE INFINITE WRENCH is thirty original plays in sixty minutes. Each play offers something different—funny, profound, topical, irreverent, musical—inspired by the lived experiences of the cast. Ongoing, ever-changing, always honest, always transformative. The Neo-Futurists perform 49 weeks a year in Andersonville. 
Sunday September 6, 2026 9:00pm - 10:00pm CDT
Jackson Park CD
 
Monday, September 7
 

10:00am CDT

Art is Politics: Making Movements Irresistible
Monday September 7, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
Art is a part of movements, but how can it best serve the struggles it emerges from? This panel brings together three political artists who work in a diverse range of contexts to present and discuss what they think art can and should do for movements, and where radical imagination can help to build popular power.
Speakers
WE

William Estrada

William Estrada is an arts educator and multidisciplinary artist in Chicago. His art and teaching are a collaborative discourse, critically re-examining public and private spaces with people to engage in radical imagination. He is currently a faculty member at the UIC School of Art... Read More →
MV

Margaret Vail Palmquist

Margaret Vail Palmquist is a DSA member living in Queens, NY originally from St. Paul, MN. She credits the experience of identifying shared emotions through art as her first and deepest relationship with the collective. Though they’ve been ruminating on and expressing ideas through... Read More →
RP

Roger Peet

Roger Peet is an artist, printmaker, muralist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative and has been making visual materials for left movements for the last thirty years. He organizes with the Portland chapter of DSA and served... Read More →
Monday September 7, 2026 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
Dusable ABC
 
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