At 10 PM Chicago time on October 28, Los Angeles experimental rock trio Autolux closed the anti-Trump design contest they’d launched two days earlier. Late that afternoon, local artist Tom Feltenberger (aka Creative Space Cadet) had started sketching his submission while still at work— he ran home and finished it minutes before the deadline.
“I was inspired, more than anything else, by the power of femininity,” says Feltenberger. “The movement supporting Trump has been that of a hypermasculine culture, and I felt the best way to deconstruct that was to make Trump visually submissive to the power of this woman.”
America has endured just two weeks of Trump as president-elect, and he’s already proved himself one of the most terrifying people yet to hold that position. The notion that artists have a responsibility to react to political disasters needs to be embraced more widely and urgently than ever before. It’s not musicians’ job to be political spokespeople, but they can hold a mirror to reality—and the best can do it subconsciously.
