The art of resistance

In Los Angeles today, resistance is not just audible—it’s visible, tactile, alive. From the verses of Kendrick Lamar to the murals of East L.A., artists of color are pushing back against repression with every brushstroke, snapshot and beat.

Take Lamar, the Compton-born rapper who broke barriers when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018 for his album “DAMN.” His songs carry the weight of Black America—mass incarceration, police violence, systemic injustice. “Alright” became a national anthem for Black Lives Matter, while his Grammy performance in chains and flame exposed a country profiting from Black suffering.

But resistance here doesn’t stop at the microphone. It’s etched on walls, in streets, through the lens—especially by Latine artists confronting immigration, labor and gendered violence.

When immigration raids rattled the city in 2025, Claudia Ramos answered with an image: a Latina woman strong, grieving, defiant. It spread like wildfire online, a digital rallying cry that turned private fear into collective power.

Johanna Toruño, born in El Salvador, transforms L.A.’s streets into open-air galleries. Her “Unapologetic Street Series” – posters of bold affirmations for queer, migrant and marginalized communities – rejects the gallery system, meeting people where they live and struggle.

Photographer Christina Fernandez has for decades built quiet but insistent archives of Mexican American life, challenging erasure through images of immigration, labor and identity. Her work does not shout, but it refuses to vanish.

And Stephanie Mercado’s monumental mural “East Los Luv” celebrates the essential workers, marigolds, monarch butterflies and neighborhood icons that form the heart of her community. Her collage is both love letter and protest, declaring visibility for the city’s unseen labor.

What unites these voices is urgency. Ramos draws grief into the light. Toruño claims public space. Fernandez insists on bearing witness. Mercado wraps an entire community in affirmation. Together, they turn Los Angeles into a living gallery of survival and defiance.

This creative fire belongs to a lineage. In the 19th century, abolitionists wielded novels, photographs and lithographs to awaken conscience. New Deal muralists painted workers, not elites. Blacklisted writers of the McCarthy era smuggled truth through metaphor. The 1960s and 1970s rang with protest songs, Chicano murals, feminist performance and Black Arts poetry. Each generation has faced repression, and each has answered with art.

Now, as book bans spread, dissent is criminalized and marginalized voices are pushed aside, L.A. artists rise again. Their work is not ornamental—it is essential. It speaks the language of survival in paint, pixels, paper and song. To create under pressure is radical. To amplify creation is civic duty.

Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions – fame and invisibility, spectacle and erasure. But through its artists, it remains a city of resistance. Their message is clear:

We will not be erased. We will not be silent. We are here.

Let’s listen.