Activist works for change through art

Flip through photographs of Rowan O'Neal Hayes, and you might think you are looking at a half-dozen entirely different people. The one thing that doesn't change is the stylistic flair. There’s the skinny teen in a hard hat and red overalls, smiling on a sunny oil rig off Singapore on a visit to her dad’s job. Fifteen years later, she’s speaking at a No Kings rally on a gazebo in New Hampshire, wearing an inflatable green-and-blue planet Earth costume.

Since arriving in Providence in 2017, she’s cropped up in local rallies and protest actions in a number of guises, from wrapping herself in the red cloak and white wimple of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” to an American flag covered in bloody handprints.

Beneath the costumes and the theatrical effects lives a warrior.

Hayes, an environmental engineer with a strong hunger for justice, is always looking for ways to engage more Americans and help them understand just how dangerous our situation is.

For Hayes, 31, art and activism are inextricably entwined. Key to her efforts in Rhode Island is the ARTivism movement, which combines artistic expression with political activism to make demonstrations more engaging, visible to the media, and accessible to a broader audience.

For No Kings 3, the ARTivism goals include inviting local artists to perform or be featured along the march route. (To apply for a role in the March 28 No Kings 3 rally at the Rhode Island State House, click here by 8 am Monday, March 23).

Hayes is working on the project with local artists Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor and Kate Lohman, providing logistical support and planning. “My two goals for No Kings 3 are to bring ARTivism to the Rhode Island movement and to get the youth of our state way more involved,” she says, noting that she’s often the youngest person attending an event.

“I don’t know why the college and high school students aren’t out there, but I have to believe it’s not because they’re content with the country we’re currently living in, but because these generations are essentially both demobilized and demoralized.”

She notes the involvement in No Kings 3 of a number of student groups and ethnic activists, thanks largely to the work of the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which works with groups like ARISE, Progresso Latino, Youth Pride RI, the Providence Student Union, PrYSM, and Youth in Action. She hopes to see them and many others in the crowd on March 28.

Art may not seem like an obvious passion for Hayes, who has known since the sixth grade that she wanted to become an engineer. “My dad was a marine engineer and I was forced to take advanced math tutoring lessons because my teacher told my mom I should, and she made me, as any good parent would.”

She hated it at first, but by the end of the first year, she was in love.

In 2010, her sophomore year in high school, the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico changed her life. Sixteen years later it remains the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, and horrendous images of dead marine life, oil-soaked birds and blackened beaches inundated the world’s media for months.

Her father was working for Transocean, the company that owned the oil rig, although “he wasn’t stationed at, or even working on Deepwater Horizon,” she recalls. “But he talked to me and my three older sisters a lot about it. It’s safe to say that images from that oil spill are still burnt in my brain, and the event sent me down my road of environmental engineering [and] sustainability.”

A series of physical and emotional challenges deepened both her capacity for empathy and her desire to work to fix the various things she sees as wrong in society and culture. She experienced periods of depression and anxiety, exacerbated by a painful breakup last October. “I was trying (and failing, initially) to find anything that still brought me joy. I won’t lie, it was a pretty dark time.”

She ended up taking a three-month medical leave from work to attend a virtual, five-day-a-week intensive outpatient program at South County Psychiatry. As she worked through recovery through online group therapy sessions, counselors asked her what her “values” were. “I realized I had absolutely zero idea.”

Then they asked her what made her happy? She dryly answered, “Not much right now,” prompting a rare laugh in the online therapy group. Eventually, she began volunteering, which gradually pulled her out of the pit. “I slowly but surely realized that it was helping others that truly gave me joy.”

She worked with a few different advocacy groups across Rhode Island, eventually connecting at a State House anti-fascism rally and food drive with Michaela Keegan and Lee Clasper-Torch, who had already formed ties with artist Josiah-Faeduwor.

The four went on to found Indivisible Metro Rhode Island, which Hayes says has "truly changed my life, relit the fire inside of me and reawakened my inherent desire for helping folks." Metro is one of thousands of such groups across the country opposing the administration of President Donald J. Trump and a member of the Rhode Island Resistance Coalition that is organizing the No Kings 3 rally.

She calls the groups in the coalition “the most amazing community in Providence” and credits volunteering with stabilizing her life. Hayes says she works every day “to not be overly impacted by outside factors completely out of my control. [I am] no longer allowing the things I see on social media and the news to utterly destroy me. I’m not going to say there aren’t still some bad days, but it is so much easier to manage now that I am advocating locally in my community, and seeing and experiencing the impact in real time.”

Because, she says, we have no choice.

“If we do not stand together and demand an end to the patriarchy, the world we live in, our Mother Earth, is going to shake us off like a bad haircut.” She says if the ruling patriarchy continues thinking and acting as though humans are the center of the universe, “humans will most likely be extinct by 2050 due to apocalyptic climate change events.”

She rattles off a dozen acts by the Trump administration to reverse environmental protections, guaranteeing worsening pollution and faster global warming, and says it is up to us all to stop this environmental degradation. “Safe to say, if you think the flooding in New England is bad now, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”