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Defiant voices in color: Reckoning of a Nation through Protest Art from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter
- Bipasha R.
- Aug 6
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 7
Spanning across decades of American history, there have been times when voices in defiance were often painted in color. Art that echoed protest or satires of the unfairness of the times. When diplomacy was futile, and promises fell empty, artists took up brushes, scissors, spray cans, and screens—not to beautify, but rather to demand. More often than not, art and politics have stood as opposing forces, sparking movements that have driven meaningful change. In the face of unrest, protest art stands in for the unheard, memory for the erased, and consciousness for a nation that cannot see.
From the ashes of the Civil Rights Movement to the worldwide fury of the Black Lives Matter movement, a line of visual revolutionaries has been born—truth told with color, defiance, and hope. Artists have not only conveyed through expressions, but also reckoning. Artists who expose the wounds of racism repeatedly emphasize the beauty of resistance and keep rewriting the narrative of Black America. In mural paintings on walls across towns, in portraits in galleries, artists recall that to make art is to take a stand.
Painting Resistance: The Art of the Civil Rights Era
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, a tremendous wave of creative expression was taking place. The 1950s and 60s had not only transitioned into a time of marches, sit-ins, and speeches; they had become a point of color, collage, and canvas. Artists became historians, activists, and visionaries as they represented their societies, confronted oppression, affirmed identities, and were able to document the lived experience of a people who had been marginalized and oppressed for longer than they knew. Through both deeply personal and politically motivated works of protest art, artists documented America in light of resistance and the richness of Black experience- their works are a living art legacy that sustains our definition of justice, humanity, and culture.
Jacob Lawrence – Migration as a Movement of Memory
“I was not only trying to show what was happening but also why it was happening.”
— Jacob Lawrence: American Painter by Ellen Harkins Wheat (University of Washington Press, 1986)
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1940 - 41) depicts the great movement of African Americans away from the agrarian South and toward the industrial North. Although there was no explicit civil rights movement at this time, feelings of hope, displacement, and inequality were all relevant in the series. While each panel can be viewed as historiography, taking the form of historical depiction, it can also be viewed as an experiential assessment—where history is lived reasoning together. Lawrence's distinctive flat planes and colors drew and are a reminder of the continuance of a people in movement, who sought dignity from a nation that did not welcome them.
Romare Bearden – Collage as Cultural Chronicle
"I try to show that when some things are taken away, others come into focus."
— Romare Bearden in The Art of Romare Bearden,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Romare Bearden's approach was to layer realities in collage- urban existence, jazz, and generations of struggle. The Block was an example of populated complexity illustrating the beauty and weight of black life. Bearden's diverse colors, shapes and textures in The Block, visually depicted how identity is sewn together by memory, environment, and living through things (survival).
David C. Driskell – Behold Thy Son (1956)
"I had seen the open casket photograph of Emmett Till… and I could not erase it from my mind. So I painted him as a form of lamentation, as one would paint a martyr."
— David C. Driskell, in
"David C. Driskell: Icons of Nature and History
When Emmett Till’s mutilated body was taken from the Tallahatchie River in 1955, that was when the nation’s conscience cracked. A year later, David C. Driskell responded—not with a yelled outrage, but with a sacred lament. In Behold Thy Son, Till’s body is imagined as Christ’s, recast in the visual language of religious martyrdom. The title of the painting comes from Scripture, and yet at its core it resounds with modern tragedy. Driskell’s work demands a forced looking, an accounting, a remembrance. He transforms lynching to lamentation, reminding the nation and its people that its crucifixions do not end at Golgotha.
Charles Henry Alston – Walking (1958)
“I am expressing something I feel about people, the kind of people I know best and the life I am familiar with.”
— Charles Henry Alston, in
"Modern Negro Art" by James A. Porter (1943)
In Walking, nameless, faceless forms step forward—tired feet on Southern territories, on paths of resistance. Alston’s brush bestowed honor upon the everyday protester, the woman with groceries in the rain, the child arriving late to class, and the grandmother with a Bible grip. While the country watched a brigade of leaders emerge during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Charles Henry Alston sought to recognize those who walked—not so much into focus, but to work, to school, to freedom. These are the individuals who took the movement, step by quiet step.
Norman Lewis – Evening Rendezvous (1962)
"My work is not an escape from responsibility. It is a reflection of the society which I live in."
— Norman Lewis in Fine, Ruth E., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis,
(Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts/Yale University Press, 2015)
Among the most famous black artists, Norman Lewis evokes the haunting result of white supremacy as deep and unseen by the protections of false symbols of patriotism. Red, white, and blue swirl heretically like warning flares, and the ghosts of tiny white hoods linger at the edges. Lewis maps out the ritualized hate that is hidden in the cloak of Americanism. His abstraction draws us in from a distance, but keeps us at a distance when viewed up close. They are beautiful. They are brutal. They are truth undisguised and then disguised.
Jacob Lawrence – Soldiers and Students (1962)
“My pictures express my life and the lives of my people. They are not romantic. They tell it like it is.”
— Jacob Lawrence in Wheat, Ellen Harkins.
Jacob Lawrence: American Painter.
University of Washington Press, 1986.
Jacob Lawrence, the consummate storyteller, depicts a nation at war against its children. In Soldiers and Students, he portrays the duality of protection and persecution. Three armed guards stand beside Black students- both protectors and reminders of where and who they are. Lawrence's work is born of the bravery of the Little Rock Nine and the bravery of James Meredith at Ole Miss. It foretells futures forged in the fires of fear and knowledge pried from the jaws of hate.
Faith Ringgold – American People Series 20: Die (1968)
"I wanted to show a kind of abstracted riot… I was trying to deal with what was going on in the world."
— Faith Ringgold, in We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold,
(Duke University Press, 2005).
In Die, Faith Ringgold depicts America mid-eruption, mid-scream. At one level, her painting is inspired by the Long Hot Summer of 1967, which ignited people's fears like a raging fire. Her canvas explodes with chaos: fists flailing, bodies falling, eyes wide with terror. Ringgold does not separate Black and white, colonizer and colonized; each falls together within a storm of blood and bone. She is not offering comfort; she is offering confrontation.
Sam Gilliam – April 4 (1969)
"It’s about breaking through the frame and getting away from the painting as object to a state of being."
— Sam Gilliam, in Golden, Thelma, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
(Tate Publishing, 2017)
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and for a moment, the world fell silent. A year later, Sam Gilliam reacted - not with a shape, but rather with emotion. His abstract painting, April 4, is full of lilacs, violets and shadows. Gilliam stains the canvas with sadness, an invocation of absence, ultimately a hushed hymn, grounding us in a loud decade, for us to stop, inhale, and feel the pain of a promise granted.
A New Chapter: Art in the Age of Black Lives Matter
The world witnessed a new wave of protest at the tragic death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. From the back alleys of Berlin to the bustling bridges of Nairobi- murals emerged as not a remembrance but as a statement, too often being recalled to fill these concrete surfaces with art that depicts anguish and protest. These black protest art are a powerful reminder of injustice and develop a unity that does not have borders. These works, while portrayed in walls, remained eternal on conscience.
George Floyd Murals – Art as a Global Solidarity
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, murals began popping up across cities -- from Minneapolis to Nairobi. One of the most iconic murals, painted in Houston, transformed a building wall into a global call to justice. His face became a rallying image of a painful moment in time, transforming public space into sacred space.
Adrian Brandon – Incomplete Portraits, Double the Impact
In Stolen, Adrian Brandon completes eerie portraits of Black lives lost to police violence. Each drawing is intentionally incomplete, the time he spent coloring corresponds to how old the individual was when they were killed. The unfinished details shout louder than any words: stolen time, stolen lives.
Amy Sherald – Restoring Breonna Taylor’s Dignity
After Amy Sherald gained immense notoriety for painting Michelle Obama’s official portrait, she shifted her focus to painting Breonna Taylor. Sherald's portrait does not represent Breonna as just a tragic victim. Rather, Sherald’s portrait shows Breonna as a woman—calm, complete, glowing. The portrait captures her expression—calm and direct, daring America to think of her in totality as a human or, at the very least, a girl that deserved to be alive.
Titus Kaphar – Erasing to Reveal
‘Shifting the Gaze’ was depicted on the cover of TIME magazine. Titus Kaphar painted a Black mother holding a child that couldn’t be seen—both presence and absence are painted with haunting detail. Kaphar’s body of work works to erase painting, scrape off portraits, covering faces, or pulling apart history, forcing us to envision what we tried to wipe away.
Defiance that Mattered
From the very panel of Jacob Lawrence to every digital illustration on Instagram, there has always been an aesthetic component to protest art: brazen, definitive, colorful. Artists of every generation and every medium have not only chronicled history; they have actualized it. These protest art forms have transformed mourning into beauty, protest into permanence, silence into performance. Artworks from Civil rights to Black Lives matters have survived when speeches have faded. It outlives hashtags, it outlives headlines, and in the color, brush strokes, and shadows, we can find the reckoning and revolution.
The canvas remembers. The wall speaks and the image stays.
Does art inspire the spark in you? Urge you to voice your vision through creative strokes of color? TERAVARNA welcomes art that transcends beyond the canvas. Know more about us @ www.TERAVARNA.com
