Mike Alewitz

Dubya's gone, and there's not another viable Bush on the horizon. Life is good, right? Well, the problem with victory is that she's the twin sister of defeat, and ne'er these twins shall part. Does it really matter who gets the Oval Office in the fall? It matters not. What finally topples the status quo is a bunch of pissed-off people like Mike Alewitz screaming into the void until their voices gain traction.

Alewitz’s struggle spans the Reagan Revolution. The agitprop artist started creating his often incendiary working-man art – highly reminiscent of the best of the Great Depression – at the dawn of the movement, and he’s still going strong as it ends. The self-proclaimed “labor muralist” is unabashedly pro-union, and many of his brawny, proletarian works are commissions by the likes of the Teamsters and the Centralia (Washington) Union Mural Project.

In town for an appearance at last weekend’s Local to Global Justice Teach-In – speaking of collected voices raised to the heavens – Alewitz makes a pit stop at Changing Hands to sign his new book, Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz.