For these Seattle teens, resisting the current regime is an after-school art club

After Donald Trump’s election, Lauren Holloway wanted to do something, anything, to demonstrate her opposition to the new presidential agenda. So, she decided to organize a group of like-minded people at her workplace.

In Holloway’s case, those people were the students she worked with as a staff member at Franklin High School. Instead of a non-profit political group, Holloway started an after-school club: the Art of Resistance and Resilience.

Now Holloway hopes to give her students, and herself, an outlet for political opinion through hands-on projects.

The club has come a long way since Holloway founded it.

The first spring after the election, they made t-shirts and buttons. This year, she and the students have been working on the set design for a play called “Don’t Call it a Riot,” a look at two generations of Seattle activists. In between, the teens have teamed up with local artists to paint a mural commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Seattle Black Panthers and helped organize a Franklin High School sit-in.

Playwright Aumontaine Aurore heard about the club at mural’s public unveiling in November.

“I got a chance to talk to Holloway,” Aurore says. “It was exciting to see these young people be so interested in this historical time.”

Aurore considers her theater work to be a form of community activism. She saw natural ties with the high school group and invited them to work on the set of her play.

“It’s so much more fun to collaborate with different ages,” she says. But Aurore also liked the idea of bringing together different generations of political activists, something that mirrors the plot of her play, focused on two chapters in Seattle activism: the 1968 Panthers and the 1999 WTO protests.

“We want to have generational talkbacks with activists from yesteryear and from now, to bridge the gap and to see what are the issues, and how we can come together,” says Aurore.

Franklin High junior Alina Fowler is excited about her work with Aurore’s play, and with the Art of Resistance and Resilience club.

“I basically think of it as a different way to put out our ideas, especially since we’re younger,” Fowler says. “We can’t vote yet and some of us can’t go out to protests, so this is our way of getting our word out there in a different medium.”

“Don’t Call it a Riot” opens May 30th at 12th Avenue Arts on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.