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Patrisse Cullors: Art Is Liberation

Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors says cultural work will be the key to shifting the system and imagining a world after MAGA.

After BLM: Since leaving the abolition movement she cofounded, Patrisse Cullors is using her work as a performance and visual artist to imagine a post-Trump world.

Patrisse Cullors’s art studio is one of five nestled inside the crenshaw Dairy Mart in Inglewood, California, a building that opened in 1965, a day after the Watts Riots, and once served as a convenience store. To reach her studio, I had to get past a six-foot-high steel picket fence encircling a community garden, the other studios, a gallery—all part of a quiet perimeter between the noise of the busy street and the sanctuary inside—and a brawny security guard.

Surrounded by clothing racks of voluminous white gowns and the large textile sculptures streaming across the walls, Cullors sits in a mid-century-style brown-leather swivel chair. The cofounder of Black Lives Matter is arguably one of the most notable figures in the contemporary Black liberation movement, but since 2021, she has retreated from the spotlight of BLM to refocus her work on the performing arts and culture. Cullors explained to me that she cofounded the Dairy Mart in 2020 as an artists’ collective where members of the community and the artists in residence could safely come and create art centered on abolition, healing, and ancestry. The collective hosts workshops, events, and programs in collaboration with other local organizations. In the weeks following the July 2025 raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Los Angeles, the space opened its doors to honor anyone affected by the agency. People brought flowers and arranged them in a large “500,” representing the number of those “kidnapped” by ICE in LA since the start of federal immigration raids on June 6.

“Those first few weeks, witnessing ICE and the National Guard in LA, I had straight-up PTSD,” says Cullors, who is 42. “Watching them run after brown people, I was like, ‘Oh, I lived through this already.’ It was so overwhelming and deeply infuriating, because I was like, ‘We said this already. We warned you that this [overpolicing] was going to come, because it happens to Black people first in this country. We are the tests. And if you don’t fix what’s happening to Black people, then it’s coming for everybody else.’ And now here we are,” she says.

I first spoke with Cullors a little over a month before Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were 37 years old and white, were executed by masked federal agents in Minneapolis just blocks from where George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a police officer five years earlier. When I reached out to Cullors after the shootings, she simply said, “This country doesn’t listen to Black people.” I would add that it especially doesn’t listen to Black women.

If you were someone who protested the murder of Floyd in the summer of 2020 and felt the energy of those around you as you stood among millions chanting “Black lives matter,” you might have thought that maybe, just maybe, you were witnessing real change in America.

Fast-forward to Donald Trump’s second term, and everything BLM warned about is now a full-fledged, horrifying reality.

The United States has become a police state, one that not only continues to murder and lock up Black people but also operates a mass-deportation machine that has deployed federal troops in cities across the country, instilling fear in communities and decimating local economies. Further, thanks to bloated budgets under Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are weaponizing the very laws meant to protect American citizens against them by, for example, conducting unlawful home raids or using administrative subpoenas to suppress free speech.

At the same time, in May 2025, the Justice Department dropped the consent decree that had overseen the federal regulation of police departments like the Minneapolis PD, which had employed Derek Chauvin, Floyd’s killer. And a presidential memorandum in September 2025 came with an order to “investigate” and “disrupt” groups labeled as “domestic terrorists,” defined as those promoting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

When I ask Cullors why she thinks so many Americans didn’t heed the warnings of BLM, she explains that it is because white people have historically found it difficult to “take seriously or listen or pay attention to or have sympathy or even empathy for marginalized communities.”

“Listening to us [Black people] means that they have to agree and believe that white supremacy first and foremost exists, that it’s a danger to all of us, and then they have to do something about it. They have to relinquish power, then perceived safety. And so this takes a lot of work—psychologically, spiritually, culturally. You have to undo hundreds of years of training that whiteness ultimately will bring you safety. And that the power structures that currently exist won’t ever throw you under the bus, and what happens to Black people is their problem.”

“But now we’re living in MAGA’s America,” she adds, where the violence once inflicted predominantly on Black and brown communities is now an issue for every American, no matter their race.

The walls of Cullors’s small studio are layered with images that trace the arc of her performance-art exhibits. In several, people are wearing white robes: a motif in her work, representing healing, spiritual reclamation, and ancestral return. Another photo shows Cullors immersed in a bathtub of salt, and nearby hangs a portrait of her father at age 17, taken for his entrance into the military.

Although Cullors has not completely given up her resistance work, she decided in 2021 to step down from her role as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity behind the BLM movement, and embrace her art practice more wholly. As a leader of a mass movement, Cullors has been the target of attacks and became embroiled in drama and accusations that she says were trumped up.

“This chapter of my life is really amplifying the art-cultural work, trying to remind people that art and culture actually is what shifts the whole system,” she says.........

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