Art Against Empire

Art Against Empire examines the intersection of creativity and politics through conversations with artists, craftspeople, and activists who use making as a form of resistance.Hosted by recovering political pundit and textile artist Ian Danger Capstick, each episode dives into the radical history of craft traditions, profiles contemporary makers disrupting systems, and shares practical projects that merge beauty with dissent.From textile workers' strikes to guerrilla street art, from Indigenous craft sovereignty to anti-capitalist maker spaces...we explore how human creativity has always been a tool for liberation.Art Against Empire is produced and edited by Shawn Dearn, and is a production of Secret Agents.

Art Against Empire is a arts podcast hosted by Ian Danger Capstick, with 14 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Ian Danger Capstick hosts Art Against Empire, a arts show with 14 episodes published.

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  Episode #13

  Sports & Queer Spirits Featuring Maria Molteni

  May 8, 202635 minS1

  <p >A queer artist in Boston crochets basketball nets and paints whole courts like quilts. This is what happens next.</p> <p >Maria Molteni makes hand-crocheted basketball nets and paints full-size basketball courts at the kind of scale you can only see from a drone. Their courts have won a National Public Art Award. Their collective, NCAA (New Craft Artists in Action), has collaborators around the world. They sell the pattern book by donation and give it away free to anyone who can't pay.</p> <p >Maria is also a Shaker scholar. Their family farm in Tennessee sat thirty minutes...

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  Episode #12

  Looms and Algorithms (1946-Present)

  Apr 24, 20261h 4mS1

  <p >This is Part 3 of 3 of our documentary. The Freedom Quilting Bee, where sixty Black women in Alabama built a cooperative while fighting for the right to vote. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, forty-four thousand panels on the National Mall. Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag. Palestinian tatreez. Rana Plaza, where the locked door was the same locked door from the Triangle fire a century earlier. And then the turn: Potemkin AI, the Cricut Revolt, farmers jailbreaking their own tractors, and what happens when the Empire stops coming for the fabric and starts coming for the software.</p> <p >Featuring Cleve Jones, Grace...

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  Episode #11

  Cleave Jones: Creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt

  Apr 11, 202654 minS1

  <p >A Queer Legends × Art Against Empire crossover. Ian Danger Capstick sits down with Cleve Jones, the activist who conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt on a cold November night in 1985 with a stack of posterboard and Harvey Milk's old bullhorn, given to Cleve after Harvey was assassinated. </p> <p >The two talk about the afternoon Cleve first walked into Castro Camera, the morning Gilbert Baker raised the first rainbow flag, the grandmothers who could not find the words, and Seven Days in June, the mobilization Cleve is building to mark forty-five years of HIV and AIDS. Close to an hour, cl...

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  Episode #10

  Live Working or Die Fighting (1901-1945)

  Mar 26, 202650 minS1

  <p >Part two of our three-part documentary special picks up where "Who Owns the Cloth" left off and traces textile resistance from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of World War II. From global factory uprisings in Lodz, Rio Blanco, and Bengal, to Clara Lemlich's famous call to strike in 1909, plus the impacts of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, suffragette banners stitched behind prison walls, Mother Jones and the March of the Mill Children, the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, and Gandhi's spinning wheel taking on the British Empire.</p> <p >Featuring archival recordings from the U...

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  Episode #9

  The Loom and the Empire (1600-1900)

  Mar 12, 202634 minS1

  <p >This is Part 1 of a three-episode documentary special tracing seven centuries of the same fight: who owns the cloth? Co-creator Shawn Dearn narrates the history while actors read from primary sources, including Lord Byron's furious defence of the Luddites, Charity Clarke's 1769 letter about "a fighting army of amazones, armed with spinning wheels," and Queen Liliuokalani's memoir from inside her occupied palace.</p> <p >From medieval Flanders to the Jacquard loom's punch cards to a deposed Hawaiian queen stitching the dates of her overthrow into a quilt.</p> <p >Featuring: Zak Foster, Stephen Towns, Sara Trail, AJ Young, Carrie Reichardt...

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