From October 26, 2024-February 17th 2025 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts premiered the exhibit Power to the people: Art and Democracy in hopes of showing the Promise, the Practice, and the Preservation of Democracy. Originally the exhibit was created in response to the recent event of the 2025 election as well as the results to come from the votes, however the exhibit also sets to remind individuals the original foundations of democracy beginning in Ancient Greece and how these ideals have eroded overtime. 

The first section of the exhibit titled The Promise looks at the idealization of democracy as well as original promises stemming from democratic ideas. Democracy can best be defined as a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elective representatives. In the piece Artists band together Bandana by Barbara Kruger there is a call to action asking passerby who read the cloth to wonder: Who is free to choose? Who is beyond the law? Who dies? Who laughs last? In the context of today’s America these questions tend to linger in others’ minds more often than not. The use of executive aggrandizement is prevalent in today’s government as Trump’s executive as well as the legislative branch are heavily influenced by a Republican majority and agenda. According to many new articles such as the Washington post and the HIll the only thing technically stopping Trump’s executive orders centered around taking autonomous rights such as gender affirming or birth-right citizenship is the courts. The once promise of democracy that is “run by the people” has turned into being run by a person, overall leading closer towards that of an authoritarian government rather than a democratic one.

In the second section of the exhibit titled The Practice the art seeks to give insight into the importance of voting rights, public service, and the recognition that many groups still have yet to be included in democracy. With these themes comes the idea: what actually makes a democracy? Some norms centered around ideas of democracy are the use of forbearance and mutual toleration. Mutual toleration is the idea that competing political parties accept each other as rivals, typically within election settings, while forbearance is an idea of restraint among politicians in deploying their institutional prerogatives. In terms of Trumpism today, the divide between elitist democracy and representative democracy only grows wider with Trump’s employment of Elon Musk in the White house and the deportation of many US immigrants. This begs the question: who can vote? And whose vote matters in U.S issues? Pieces such as Anti-Slavery Badge and Vote! by Julia Ward Howe and Shepard Fairey leads the audience to think of the power of voting, a power that is slowly being eroded in the US today

The last section of the exhibit titled The Preservation focuses on the first amendment that is slowly being limited in today’s America, the freedom of speech and right to assemble. For example, Trump holds a history of attacking speech during and outside of his elections, often to marginalized and underrepresented communities, as well as the recent development of seeking to dismantle the Department of Education in the U.S. This poses a great threat to rights such as freedom of the press, and also begs the question of what is to occur if Trump is to be defied. In a piece such as Freedom of the Press-do not meddle with it! by Honoré Daumier created when freedom of the press wasn’t so free in France, Daumier was beaten and his work confiscated as he distributed the inflammatory caricature of King Louis-Philippe. In a sense these same punishments are being exploited amongst those who defy Trump as gender affirming care is set to be taken from the LGBTQ+ community and Trump is trying to make it easier to fire federal employees, specifically the Treasury Department. This overall erodes democracy and leads towards a more authoritarian regime as people lose their power to influence governmental ideals.