Orienting as an artist in a disorienting liberal cultural landscape

From the Transparency Projects series, 2011, KGB Bar, National Arts Club

Since 2007, when I began exhibiting whole series in public spaces, I let my moral compass guide my creative outputs, a compass grounded in love and justice. Coming from Soviet Ukraine as Jewish refugees, my family was all too familiar with the ever-devolving oppressive realities of the socialist experiment. Inheriting a family history plagued by a State hellbent on sacrificing its own citizens through mass starvations of Ukrainian and Russian working people regardless of religion or ethnicity (Holodomor) to the ghettoization and extermination of Jews at a rate far exceeding that of the (equally heinous) Nazi monsters, right and wrong were clear as day in my heart. In 2011, I introduced my Transparency Projects for the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, warning Americans of the dangers of systems that sacrifice the individuals within them for the survival of the system—communism in a nutshell. To me, it was elementary, and it seemed, to those who consumed and lauded my art. I hoped what was resonating was a shared clarity of right and wrong, freedom versus oppression. 

Then slowly the words that my heart used to paint my artist philosophy were being co-opted by what I now clearly see as anti-American foreign agendas at play in the liberal education of my peers. Where there was once unity around anti-totalitarianism there was now overt rewriting of history for an agenda that sacrificed critical thinking and democratic values  to serve a twisted worldview prioritizing, as Gad Saad calls it, suicidal empathy towards regimes that would rather see them dead. From Queers for Palestine to anti-ICE solidarity vigils, the people who I had previously perceived as aligned with my humanistic views now were explicitly working against the social justice and humanitarian values, still using those words but in exclusionary and deranged ways. 

This year I reflected on my artist statement I had stood behind for decades. A bio peppered with a lexicon that, in 2026 actually has been weaponized against people like me. On October 7th, 2023 my cousin ran for his life at the Nova Music Festival in Israel. On October 8th, my colleagues at East Harlem Tutorial Program celebrated this massacre as a necessary step towards “social justice.” This was an organization where I worked as a digital media specialist and visual storytelling educator in a high school after school club. I overheard a colleague (who ran and continues to run the charter school networks robotics club) touting the amazing prospects of communism to students. I approached the group and interrupted with my own family’s history of extermination under communist regimes in the Soviet Union. In the weeks that followed other similar instances arose—a mosaic community artist partnering with the schools on a massive project spouting his disdain for the “gauche” hostage posters demanding the return of innocent people to their families—a parent of the children I was helping to raise calling me a white colonizer—a colleague running after school volunteering programs setting up an encampment in our shared office with the phrase promoting the renewed extermination of Jews (from the river to the sea…). It was moments like these where I slowly became aware of the fact that these were no longer my target audience as an artist. 

From the Imported Produce series (2023-2025), East Harlem

Upon being invited to produce a series of mural panels as part of an East Harlem group mural project, I was torn. The art I previously produced no longer felt safe to put out there, I feared it would be weaponized against the American values of freedom, democracy, and opportunity that my family proudly and explicitly embraced as the clear sane way to a bright forward movement for our country. 

So, I painted fruit. A kiwi, a mango, and a pomegranate—fruits that represented the diverse tapestry of NYC and American society historically comprised of those who saw and fought for the American Dream and the opportunity it represented for their families’ legacies. While communist forces have long attempted to erode these realities and values here, I wanted my art to remind people of this basic sweet opportunity we are undeniably afforded as Americans as compared to the places from which our families came. A gratitude I hoped my neighbors would return to, a realization of brotherhood across life-loving citizens of our America, and a unification against the death cults and those who echo their propaganda.

Charlie Kirk for NYYRC, 2026

I’m still praying for the realization of that vision channeled in my mural series, both among the patrons of my art and among the college chums, colleagues, young family members I once considered friends and allies in a shared hopeful fight for a bright future. In the meantime, I’m grateful to have found the New York Young Republicans Club and its Art Caucus, a community of people who do share that foundational vision of our great American legacy. As I constructed a portrait of Charlie Kirk for the club, I felt rejuvenated in my artist philosophy rooted in the fight against authoritarian and socialist diseases, rooted in the fight for our great American future. May our collective creative endeavors of the Caucus and beyond support a legacy in which we are truly able to Make America Great Again.