Ben Fink and Arnaldo López speak at the School of Visual Arts in NYC

This event at the School of Visual Arts featured Art in a Democracy's editor Ben Fink, who spent many years in the Roadside Theater ensemble making theater and organizing in the Kentucky coalfields and with allies across the country, and Arnaldo Lopez, managing director of Pregones Theater in the South Bronx. Roadside and Pregones collaborated together for decades, producing plays like Betsy! and, together with Junebug Productions, Promise of a Love Song. Through sharing and discussing stories from Roadside and its collaborators, as well as from our own experience, they probed the legacies of American populism, the connections between art and politics at the grassroots level, and the possibilities of making a democratic way of life.