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Cultural workers across the United States and beyond are presenting hundreds of events this weekend as part of Fall of Freedom, an art and activism series staged against the dramatic political backdrop of President Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. Exhibitions, performances, interventions, and more will begin on Friday, November 21, and run through the weekend. Some are on view much longer, interpreting the “urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance” for months to come. Hyperallergic has compiled a list of 16 events, including an anti-fascist zine fair in San Francisco and an exhibition of Palestinian embroidery in Upstate New York. Check out the full Fall of Freedom line-up here.
An Incomplete Haunting at 601Artspace
Friday, November 21, 6–8pm (Saturday gallery hours 1-6pm)601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, the Bowery, Manhattan
Curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, this show coalesces various research-driven creative practices rooted in illuminating and reclaiming suppressed histories. Among the featured artists are Nicholas Galanin, Alicia Grullon, Yevgeniy Fiks, Dread Scott, Kenneth Tam, and the late Nona Faustine — each known for restaging harsh American truths and what they’ve yielded for marginalized populations across the country through photo, video, sculpture, installation, and reinterpreted archival materials.
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Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Reading Room
Friday, November 21, 12–6pmLeslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, SoHo, Manhattan
The Leslie-Lohman Museum, dedicated to LGBTQIA+ art and artists, has carved out a devoted space for queer literature and resistance that invites visitors to read, reflect, and converse with others in the same space. Museum catalogs and other published works from the institution’s store will populate the reading room and be available for purchase at a discount on Friday, November 21, during normal operating hours.
soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body at 12 Franklin Street
Through Saturday, November 2212 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
An exhibition view of soft weapons at 12 Franklin Street (image courtesy Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles)
This group exhibition’s closing day is aptly timed around Fall of Freedom’s programming. Curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, the show includes 29 artists’ acknowledgements and subversions of bodily surveillance and suppressed autonomy. “Like a weed sprouting between the cracks in pavement,” as Hyperallergic’s Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang puts it, “the exhibition asserts a living, corporeal presence that refuses elimination against all odds, if only for the moment.”
Cancel This Show! at The Clemente Center
Friday, November 21, 6:30pm; on view through December 20The Clemente Center, 107 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Cancel This Show! features work at the intersection of art, activism, and dissent by artists including Molly Crabapple, Jenny Polak, Shellyne Rodriguez, Theodore A. Harris, Dread Scott, and Todd Ayoung. The exhibition takes influence from the 1967 artist-led Angry Arts Week in New York City and the nationwide campaign Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America in 1984.
“PRESS” Performance by Britt Thomas
Saturday, November 22, 12–2pmThe Jack, 5219 Cochran Street, Houston, Texas
Houston-based artist Britt Thomas is set to stage a public performance acknowledging dwindling press freedom and shrinking newsrooms nationwide. Adjoining performers will shovel soil into rectangular mounds and imprint them with a carved granite gravestone with the word “press” as Thomas recites from a list of censored headlines and reported instances of intimidation of, violence against, and killing of reporters and journalists. The public act of mourning visualizes and emphasizes the gravity of free press’s decline, also asking: “What else is buried when journalism is silenced?”
Joseph DeLappe’s “United States Apologies Desk”
Friday, November 12, beginning 12pmOutside the US Embassy, 33 Nine Elms Ln, Nine Elms, London
Across the pond, Joseph DeLappe is setting up shop in front of the US Embassy in London with his “United States Apologies Desk” (comically shortened to “USAD”), offering passersby his earnest remorse for the failure of the American project. The “act of public atonement,” in the words of the US-born, Edinburgh-based artist, will invite anyone interested to engage in a conversation with DeLappe; those who participate will walk away with a hand-signed apology card.
Remaining Native at DCTV Firehouse Cinema
Multiple screenings from Friday, November 21, to Thursday, November 27DCTV Firehouse Cinema, 87 Lafayette St, Chinatown, Manhattan
A film still from Remaining Native (2025) depicts teenaged Ku Stevens running in rural Nevada (image courtesy Remaining Native)
Aligned with the Fall of Freedom schedule, DCTV has organized multiple screenings of this new, Native-directed documentary centered on 17-year-old Yerington Paiute teenager Ku Stevens. Coming from a tiny town in rural Nevada, Stevens trains independently to run for sport on a collegiate level, and reflects on how his own experiences and desires intersect with the historical reality of his great-grandfather, who orchestrated his on-foot escape from an abusive residential school for Indigenous children. Between Friday and Saturday, screenings will include Q+A sessions with the director, Paige Bethmann (Haudenosaunee).
ABC No Rio, “You Still Have the Right To …”
Saturday, November 22, 12–2pmThe Fountain at Madison Square Park, 11 Madison Ave, Manhattan
Join ABC No Rio at noon in Madison Square Park for a participatory outdoor art activation and performance outlining the freedoms we’re being stripped of, paired with live music by the political marching band Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Zines with information about community-building and local mutual aid resources will also be available.
Reclaiming Our Collective Inheritance at ArtRage Gallery
Friday, November 21, 2–6pm; Saturday, November 22, 1–4pmArtRage Gallery, 505 Hawley Ave, Syracuse, New York
Palestinian thobes line the wall at ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse, NY. (photo by and courtesy ArtRage Gallery)
Based in Syracuse, the nonprofit visual arts space ArtRage Gallery presents Reclaiming Our Collective Inheritance, displaying multiple thobes (embroidered floorlength garments emblematic of the Palestinian identity) from the collection of diasporic Palestinian-American Ebtisam Al-Sharkawy. Al-Sharkawy cites the thobe and the symbolic tatreez embroidery, another cultural marker, as a major point of connection with her family and heritage as well as a form of preservation of Palestinian culture and history amid the ongoing killing and destruction in Gaza, as well as the violent and continued settlement expansion throughout the Occupied West Bank.
Protest Dance at the Kennedy Center
Saturday, November 22, 1–2:30pmKennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St NW, Washington, D.C.
Organize outside of the Kennedy Center for a protest dance in support of the Center’s unionized staff and in solidarity with the recently terminated Dance Programming team, alongside various other departments that have had the belt tightened or been eliminated altogether since Trump assumed control over the institution. Showing up is half the battle, as Kelly King, who staged the first choreographed protest outside of the center in February, notes that “our collective presence is the most powerful aspect of peaceful protest,” but you can also come prepared by learning at least the basics of the Nelken Line. Freestyle solos are welcome.
How to Be a Guerrilla Girl
On view through April 12, 2026Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles
Guerrilla Girls New York City group portrait (© Teri Slotkin, New York, 1994 and © Guerrilla Girls; photo courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust)
This exhibition, organized independently from the Fall of Freedom project, culls from the Guerrilla Girls’s archive to invite visitors behind the scenes of the anonymous feminist collective’s four-decade, multidisciplinary project of art, activism, and institutional accountability. The group’s matter-of-fact protest works and interventions calling out museum bias and prejudice could not be more timely in the face of President Trump’s chilling crackdown on diversity and equity in the cultural sector.
Anti-Fascist Zine Fair at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Saturday, November 22, 11am–5pmYerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco
Organized by Floyd Tangeman and Barry McGee, the Anti-Fascist Zine Fair is a one-day event that hoists the Bay Area’s smaller, independent, and radical publishers and collectives out from their niche community circles and puts them front and center at the YBCA. The event, according to the organizers, is a “reminder that print media does in fact serve as the ultimate key for liberation.”
Food Bank Monument at Dream Farm Commons
Friday, November 21, 6–8pmDream Farm Commons, 349 15th Street, Oakland, California
Dream Farm Commons, an artist-run space in Downtown Oakland, will facilitate a social sculpture of non-perishable food items brought by guests in response to government shutdown-related SNAP withholdings. All food items will be donated to a local food pantry following the creation of the temporary monument. The event is accompanied by the ongoing group exhibition Rad Tender, featuring 12 artists exploring the “energetic femme.”
“Democracy and Donuts” at Catharine Clark Gallery
Friday, November 21, 11am–1pm PSTCatherine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah Street, San Francisco, California
“The White House” (2018) (photo Jock McDonald, courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery)
Catharine Clark Gallery presents a conversation with local sculptor Al Farrow, artist of small-scale architectural creations composed of bullets and other munitions in Portrero Hill. Farrow’s “White House” (2018), made of ammunition and bullets, will be on view, accompanied by donuts and coffee. The event will also include a screening of an eight-hour recording of an ice sculpture spelling “Democracy” melting on the National Mall on October 15.
Franklin Furnace Archive’s “Connected by Air”
November 21 and 22Various locations in Manhattan
Tracing a path from Battery Park to Union Square on Friday and from Harlem’s Apollo Theater to Times Square on Saturday, artist Nima Nikakhlagh will walk the city while holding 250 multicolored balloons. Given the windy weather lately, this should be a feat in and of itself, but the artist will also be giving away the inflatable tokens — inscribed with words like “freedom,” “justice,” and “humanity” — to passersby in a performance that she describes as “both elegy and offering.”
Local Artists at Green Apple Books
Friday, November 21, 5–8pm PST1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, California
Adrienne Simms’s portrait of Hind Rijab in the series Portraits of Gaza (image courtesy Adrienne Simms)
Inside the quintessential San Francisco bookshop’s Inner Sunset location, local artist Adrienne Simms will host a pop-up display of her Portraits of Gaza zine on Friday evening. One of Simms’s portraits features the likeness of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in 2024, prompting global outrage. The event will also feature tarot readings benefitting the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, soap sales for Gaza mutual aid, a canned food drive, and refreshments.
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Become a member Tagged: Fall of Freedom, Featured, Protest Art
Rhea Nayyar
Rhea Nayyar (she/her) is a New York City-based staff reporter at Hyperallergic. She received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and has a passion for small-scale artworks, elevating minority perspectives,... More by Rhea Nayyar
Isa Farfan
Isa Farfan is a staff reporter for Hyperallergic. In May 2024, she graduated from Barnard College, where she studied Political Science and English and served as the Columbia Daily Spectator's Arts &... More by Isa Farfan
Valentina Di Liscia
Valentina Di Liscia is the News Editor at Hyperallergic. Originally from Argentina, she studied at the University of Chicago and is currently working on her MA at Hunter College, where she received the... More by Valentina Di Liscia
