Activism and art: In a good world, never shall the twain shall meet. But we do not live in a good world; some of us even live in California, where the two are intersecting on the taxpayer’s dime.

The California Arts Council (CAC), a taxpayer-funded state agency, has been forking money over to left-wing activist groups for years. This first came to my attention while researching the relationship between the city of San Francisco and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, which helped plan the Nov. 16 Bay Bridge shutdown (read my piece on this here). As it turns out, AROC received a $16,200 grant from CAC in 2019. It isn’t clear what art project, if any, this grant funded, given that the application doesn’t provide a description of the project. Instead, it has a description of the organization applying for the grant under the heading “Project Description.”

In fact, the organization summaries seem to also be the project description for all programs currently listed on the California Arts Council’s website. We reached out to ask why on Monday, but have yet to hear back.

AROC isn’t alone. I found more than a dozen overtly political organizations that received money from CAC in 2022 — and I almost certainly missed some, given that CAC’s glitchy website is nearly impossible to navigate. But generally speaking, these organizations can be divided into two camps. In the first are groups devoted purely to activism. They aren’t dance troupes, theater groups, film festivals, or any other type of organization for whom art is a primary concern.

AROC is a good example, as is Vigilant Love, a Los Angeles-based organization that “creates spaces for connection and grassroots movement to protect the safety and justice of communities impacted by Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of violence in the greater Los Angeles Area” and received $57,000 from CAC between 2021 and 2022. According to Vigilant Love’s website, the group engages communities through “systems change organizing,” “arts and racial solidarity programming,” and “narrative and culture shift.” In other words, it’s an activist group that sometimes uses art as a medium for its work. Currently, its activism seems focused on stopping CP3, a federal counterterrorism program that works with local organizations to combat radicalization. The organization’s website decries CP3 as a racialized surveillance program that relies on “community policing to locate individuals on the ‘path to radicalization’ using indicators that criminalize the outward expression of Muslim, Black, indigenous, POC, immigrant, and refugee identity, political thought and religious practice.”

In the second camp are groups whose activism and art are inseparable, at least if you believe jargon-laden organization summaries they submitted to CAC. Take Queer Rebel Productions, which has received almost $140,000 from the state since 2015. According to the organization summary provided on CAC’s website:

Queer Rebels Productions (QRP) is an arts organization, providing visibility and financial sustainability to queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) artists, focusing on our marginalized voices. Our presenting, commissioning and residency programs provide visibility, stimulate financial sustainability for QTBIPOC artists, and provide marginalized voices a platform to share their experiences, point of view, and artistic visions. Our programs build community and serve as an incubator for emerging and mid-career QTBIPOC artists whose works challenge white supremacy, racism, trans-phobia, homophobia, and classism and authentically reflect the experiences of QTBIPOC.

Similarly, the organization summary for Queer Cat Productions, a “queer theater company” that received nearly $86,000 in taxpayer money from 2021 to 2022, ends with: “We know that Black queer and trans resistance has made our existence possible. To honor those Black leaders, we must dismantle white supremacy. You can read our commitments to fight anti-blackness here,” followed by a link to a page on the group’s website. This page, titled “Queer Cat Productions’ Commitment to Fight Anti-Blackness,” begins with a Maoist struggle session detailing how the group has been “complicit in anti-Blackness” by having white leadership, doing “race-blind storytelling,” and “creating opportunities for white donors to interact with Black artists in unstructured ways.” The group promises to do better.

But as far as left-wing activist signaling goes, Peacock Rebellion, which has received over $274,000 from California taxpayers since 2015, really takes the cake:

Peacock Rebellion is an Oakland-based, queer/trans/GNC Black, Indigenous, and people of color-centered (BIPOC) crew of artists, cultural workers, and community organizers with disabilities and chronic illnesses who use the arts to build cultures of safety and healing with trans and queer Black, Indigenous, and people of color (TQBIPOC) communities. We unfurl the brilliant iridescent plumage of an ostentation of Peacock artists, singing to BIPOC communities of our collective visions and the long-term survival of us all.

Peacock Rebellion is completely led by TQBIPOC with disabilities and chronic illnesses, including our staff, Board of Elders, lead trainers, safety and accessibility teams, program leaders, production leads, and core program participants. Peacock Rebellion is the only Northern California arts organization that centers the leadership of multiple generations of BIPOC trans women, BIPOC trans femmes, and gender non-conforming BIPOC. We prioritize TQBIPOC throughout Ohlone land / the San Francisco Bay Area. Disability justice and racial justice are interwoven across Peacock Rebellion and our programs; we have lived experience as targets of structural and institutional ableism, and our entire organizational leadership lives at the intersections of surviving ableism, racism, and transphobia. Peacock Rebellion is part of a growing and ever-present movement of TQBIPOC and Two-Spirit cultural activism.

This description has everything: chronic illness, trans politics, ableism, “lived experience,” seven-character acronyms, a land acknowledgment, and terms like “racial justice,” “structural,” and “institutional.” However impressive and overwhelming, this activist bingo card tells us very little about the type of art Peacock Rebellion creates, so I visited the group’s website, where I was immediately distracted by the “Hxstory” section, which begins with the following:

Devi was burning out hard from unsustainable roles in social justice movements. All their friends were, too. When Devi asked around for tips, they got tons of stories from activists and organizers about the nonprofit industrial complex, or as Dylan Rodríguez wrote in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “the managed control of dissent.”

But the revolution was funded, to the tune of nearly $300,000, at the public’s expense, though I guess that’s all hxstory now.

The group does preachy drag shows or something. Also consulting. There seems to be quite a bit of that in the taxpayer-funded activism world. Diamond Wave, “a queer arts organization that produces diverse, queer-centered artistic and cultural events that bring together disparate segments of LGBTQ+ community in the Bay Area,” also offers “Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion” consulting, as well as “grant support.” Between 2021 and 2022, the group received $60,750 from California taxpayers through CAC.

Sometimes the activism is focused on the art form itself. In 2022, California taxpayers spent $30,000 to “advance the creative and professional success of LGBTQ+ dancers and challenge homophobia and gender norms in the dance industry,” which is a bit like funding an organization to advance the careers of black players in the NBA. Between 2021 and 2022, California taxpayers also spent $57,000 to redefine “the Latin dance community as a safer and affirming place for all genders and sexualities.”

But it's not all about inclusivity. Several of the programs that received grants are exclusively for members of certain groups. Consider Movement Liberation, which says its mission is to:

offer inclusive, accessible dance workshops & retreats for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, as well as guide the way to new paradigm [sic] of racial equity and justice on the dance floor, in our communities, and in our society as a whole. Through mindfulness & movement, social & racial justice education, and connection with nature, Movement Liberation offers safe and healing dance spaces in which BIPOC can regenerate their very roots, cultivate wellbeing, and strengthen resiliency within a supportive community. We believe that dance and mindful embodiment help to reawaken us into the right relationship we are meant to have to our bodies, each other, community, and the planet often directly contradicting how we’ve been conditioned by dominant systems of oppression. Through our practice, our gatherings and our advocacy in the community, we actively imagine and move-into-being a more just and free world for all.

Between 2021 and 2022 this organization, whose stated mission is to create dance workshops exclusively for non-whites, received $47,500 from California taxpayers.

If the numbers seem too low to you, consider that most of these organizations are very small, in some cases so small that CAC starts to look like a jobs program. Take pateldanceworks, which received three grants from CAC between 2021 and 2022, and “centers marginalized voices at the intersection of embodied research and activism, using dance and movement as a pursuit for liberation and decolonization by cultivating safe spaces and practicing listening and availability.” But really, it seems to center only one voice, Bhumi B. Patel’s. Despite being a member of America’s highest-earning ethnic group, she still considers herself a “marginalized voice.” To indulge this fantasy, California taxpayers have forked over $41,350.

It would be tedious to list every example of taxpayer-funded left-wing activism I discovered, but there are many, many more. This has been happening since at least 2015, and possibly before — CAC’s awful website doesn’t even list organization summaries for projects before then. A government agency that can’t even manage its own website shouldn’t be giving taxpayer money to anyone, but they still do.

The result is that through the California Arts Council, taxpayers are subsidizing racially exclusionary art programs, overt propaganda, ridiculous efforts to make the art world somehow even more politically left-wing than it already is, and political activism around issues as niche and controversial as eliminating specific federal counterterrorism programs. This agency is as broken as its website.

— River Page