Arts, the Oldest Form of Protest

Merriam-Webster defines the Arts as “painting, sculpture, music, theater, literature, etc., considered as a group of activities done by people with skill and imagination,” and Protest as “to show or express strong disagreement with or disapproval of something; something said or done that shows disagreement with or disapproval of something.” When it comes to the arts, there are three common forms of protest pieces: protest art (painting, photography, drawing, etc.), protest theatre, and protest writing.

Protest art uses creative visuals; protest theatre uses performances; and protest writing uses various literary and functional formats as powerful forms of expression, all to challenge and question authority as well as spark social change against unfair laws, wars, political and social systems and issues.

The oldest recorded protests in the form of the arts occur about 3000 to 4000 years ago in Ancient Egypt in 1100 BCE-2000 BCE. They took the forms of art in monuments, sculptures, architecture, and the defacing and erasure of these, and in the forms of writing in philosophical monologues, records of labor strikes on tomb walls, poems decrying state corruption, social inequality, and foreign occupation. After the death of Pharaoh Akhenaten, Pharaoh Tutankhamun systematically erased Akhenaten’s name and re-carved or repurposed his statues and other art works to restore them to the old pantheon of gods. This was in direct protest of Pharaoh Akhenaten turning the Egyptian religion on its head to worship a single sun god instead of the traditional gods of the Egyptians.

About 2600 years ago in Greece, in the 5th century BCE, we see the oldest form of protest theatre in the Greek satyr plays that were a loud, political style of theater mocking the current leaders, wars, and social rules, and in the Greek tragedies which had a particular style to preserve the structure and characters of a traditional tragedy while creating a happy atmosphere and a rural background.

The arts as a protest have continued through history up until modern times. Paul Revere’s “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street,” a 1770 engraving that highlighted the Boston Massacre, became a very powerful piece of protest to help raise outrage and, in turn, support for the American Revolution. In 1517 Martin Luther made his own form of protest when he nailed his 95 revolutionary opinions to the doors of Castle Church in Germany, sparking the Protestant Reformation. In 1953 a powerful piece of protest theatre came to the forefront in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. According to Miller, the piece was written in response to and in desperation of what was happening at the time. He used the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory for the Red Scare, when people were afraid to speak out against the injustices of time for fear they would be labeled Communist.

In more recent times we see protests in the arts with The Guerrilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists who wear gorilla masks in public to maintain their anonymity. Founded in 1985 in New York in response to the racism, sexism, and corruption in the art world and pop culture, they use disruptive art and hard data to expose these issues.

For as long as there have been the arts, there have been protests. At some point in time we have all done a silent form of protest with the arts, whether it was a poem, a painting, a note, blacking out the tooth in the picture of someone we didn’t like, even putting Xs over the pictures of people in our yearbooks. Maybe you made a poster and marched in a protest.

We as humans have used the arts to our advantage; we write, we draw, we paint, we do theatre, we read banned books, we write opinion pieces in the papers, we write reviews.

We use the arts to show our protest, to show what we care about and what we believe in.

We use the arts to say the things we can’t say otherwise.

We use the arts to raise our voice.

Elizabeth Graves lives with way too many animals and not enough sanity. She is passionate about the arts, especially theatre.  And she enjoys any reason to dress in a costume.