About Alyce Wittenstein

Alyce Wittenstein is a world class attorney, blogger and filmmaker. She began working at the firm in 1985 as a managing paralegal, learning all the practices and procedures of the firm from Mr. Wittenstein and the staff. From 1995-1998, she attended CUNY Law School where she made a mark as a teaching assistant for Civil Rights leader Haywood Burns. She founded a Human Rights Delegation to Haiti and studied Constitutional Law with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Working at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commision (EEOC), she learned a great deal about Employment Discrimination matters. She brought her knowledge of the Personal Injury practice and her passion for Civil Rights to the firm when she was admitted to the Bar in 1999. In 2000, she became a partner and the firm name was changed to Wittenstein & Wittenstein, Esqs. PC.

Queens Is the New Brooklyn

Brooklyn used to be where artists went because it was cheap, flexible, and unpoliced. That version of Brooklyn is gone. What’s left is a real-estate brand with a cultural afterimage—galleries designed around sales, neighborhoods shaped by marketing decks, and an art scene that feels increasingly managed.

Queens is where the work actually happens now.

You can see it across the borough—in Ridgewood, Sunnyside, Forest Hills, Astoria, and Long Island City—not because there’s a single “scene,” but because artists here are still allowed to work without being pushed into a look, a market, or a lane. Queens hasn’t flattened itself into a style. It doesn’t need to.

That range showed up clearly at the Queens Says No Kings march. The art wasn’t ornamental and it wasn’t outsourced. Banners, signs, and visual systems were made by people who live here and know how to communicate in public space. It held together visually without being uniform. It looked intentional, legible, and serious—on a scale that easily rivaled anything staged downtown.

The same thing is happening indoors.

In Ridgewood, artist-run spaces like Transmitter and The Hollows continue to show work that doesn’t chase trends or price points. Artists such as Cynthia Daignault, Kathy Butterly, and Lisa Oppenheim have exhibited there, anchoring Queens as a place where serious work still circulates without hype.

In Long Island City, larger platforms coexist with working studios. MoMA PS1 continues to bring international attention to experimental work, while Socrates Sculpture Park puts ambitious projects directly into public space. Artists like Sanford Biggers, Agnes Denes, and Mary Mattingly have shown work there that treats Queens not as a backdrop, but as an active context.

Sunnyside and Astoria add another layer: smaller venues, pop-up shows, shared studios, and public projects that blur the line between art, community, and daily life. This isn’t a circuit built for collectors. It’s built for people who live here.

Smaller spaces matter in this ecosystem. At Yant Art Space, the reality of Queens art is visible in a very straightforward way: different kinds of work sharing the same room without needing to match. Shows aren’t built around polish or trend. They’re built around putting work on the wall and seeing what holds up.

Artists like Alyce Wittenstein and Steve Oistringer are part of that mix. Wittenstein’s work appears both in exhibitions and in public action, including the visual language used at the Queens Says No Kings march. Oistringer designed the posters for Betaville, No Such Thing as Gravity, and The Deflowering, the three films that make up The Multiple Futures Trilogy.

This isn’t about building brands or declaring movements. It’s about proximity—artists working near each other, sharing space, showing work, and moving between galleries, streets, and other forms of cultural production without asking permission or waiting for validation.

That’s what Brooklyn used to be.

Queens Is the New Brooklyn

Resist Flower™: How Art Funds the March—and Strenghtens the Movement

Resist Flower™: How Art Funds the March—and Builds the Movement

Resist Flower™ began as an image, not a fundraising plan.

A simple visual gesture: a flower that refuses to wilt. A form that looks gentle at first glance, then insists on staying. Over time, it became something more than an artwork. It became a shared symbol—one that people recognized, carried, wore, and returned to. And now, it has become one of the ways we are materially supporting the next march.

This matters, because movements don’t run on inspiration alone. They require permits, printing, transportation, materials, accessibility accommodations, food for volunteers, sound systems, legal support, and contingency planning. None of that is glamorous, but all of it is essential. Resist Flower exists at the intersection of those realities: it turns cultural energy into practical capacity.

Where to Support the March

If you want to help fund the next march in a real, concrete way, the simplest move is to shop the Resist Flower store on Etsy:

Resist Flower™ Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ResistFlower

Every purchase helps support march costs and organizing infrastructure—while also putting a symbol of resistance out in the world.

Why Art Works When Other Appeals Don’t

Traditional fundraising asks people to give because something is urgent or dire. Resist Flower asks people to participate.

When someone buys a Resist Flower sticker, tote, journal, or print, they’re not just donating—they’re taking the symbol with them. It enters their daily life: on a laptop, a notebook, a wall, a jacket. It sparks conversations. It signals values without requiring explanation. And it creates a visible, distributed presence long before a march ever begins.

This is not incidental. Movements that last understand visual language. They understand that repetition builds recognition, and recognition builds trust. Resist Flower functions as a kind of quiet infrastructure—one that spreads ahead of the event and lingers long after.

From Image to Action

Every Resist Flower item sold contributes directly to funding the next march. That funding supports:

  • Materials for signs, banners, and large-scale art builds

  • Printing costs for multilingual flyers and guides

  • Accessibility resources so more people can safely attend

  • Volunteer coordination and logistical support

  • The behind-the-scenes costs that allow a march to be organized responsibly and legally

In other words, the artwork is not adjacent to the action. It is part of the action.

This model matters because it keeps the movement independent. It allows us to raise money without relying on corporate sponsorships, political gatekeepers, or messaging constraints. The art remains ours. The message remains clear. The march remains accountable to the people who show up—not to outside interests.

A Queens-Based Aesthetic, A Collective Effort

Resist Flower is rooted in Queens: plural, dense, overlapping, and unapologetically local. It doesn’t aim for slick uniformity. It embraces texture, imperfection, and reuse. Many of the designs intentionally feel handmade, screen-printed, or stamped—because movements are built by hands, not algorithms.

As the next march approaches, Resist Flower is also becoming a shared resource. Supporters are gifting items to friends to invite them in. Volunteers are using it as a visual anchor for art builds. The symbol becomes a way to say: this is happening, and you’re part of it.

Supporting the March Without Burning Out the Movement

One of the hardest challenges in organizing is sustainability. Marches can be powerful—and exhausting. Resist Flower helps distribute the work. Instead of asking a small group to fund everything out-of-pocket, it allows hundreds of people to contribute in small, meaningful ways while receiving something tangible in return.

That exchange matters. It respects people’s limits. It turns support into a shared practice rather than an emergency ask.

What Happens Next

As we move closer to the next march, Resist Flower will continue to evolve—appearing on new materials, at art builds, and in public spaces across the borough. Every purchase helps convert cultural presence into logistical readiness.

Art doesn’t replace organizing. But it can finance it, strengthen it, and make it visible long before the streets fill.

Resist Flower™ is proof of that: a symbol that raises money, builds recognition, and reminds us that resistance doesn’t always arrive shouting. Sometimes it grows—quietly, persistently—until it’s everywhere.

Support the march here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ResistFlower

Resist Flower™: How Art Funds the March—and Strenghtens the Movement

Art Builds Communities

Art does not arrive fully formed. It is built—collectively, physically, in shared space. Before it appears on a street or in a march, it appears in conversation, in planning sessions, in rooms where people cut, paint, argue, revise, and keep going. This process is not secondary to the work. It is the work.

Community is strengthened not only by what art represents, but by how it is made. An art build gathers people who might not otherwise meet. It gives them a common task, a shared visual language, and a reason to stay in the room together long enough for trust to form. The result is more than objects. It is continuity.

In preparation for the next No Kings march, a large-scale art build is underway—one that treats visual presence as essential, not decorative. Signs, symbols, and constructed forms are being developed with the understanding that they will be carried by many hands, seen from many distances, and read in motion. This kind of work demands clarity, durability, and collective authorship. It is designed to be used.

What happens in these builds matters beyond the march itself. People show up not as spectators but as participants. Skills are shared. Decisions are made together. The labor is visible. Art becomes a civic act—something that belongs to everyone involved, rather than something handed down fully resolved.

This is also how places become cultural centers: not through branding, but through sustained activity. Queens does not need permission to claim its place on the art map. It earns it every day through lived practice—through studios, community spaces, libraries, storefronts, and living rooms that function as sites of production. The work being made here is shaped by proximity, diversity, and immediacy. It is responsive because it has to be.

Brooklyn had its moment. Its mythology is now well documented, well marketed, and increasingly detached from daily life. Queens, by contrast, is not performing an identity. It is producing one. The art coming out of this borough is inseparable from the communities that make it—multilingual, intergenerational, and grounded in actual use rather than trend.

Preparing for a major art build is, in this sense, an act of cultural declaration. It says that the visual language of protest, care, and resistance is being authored here. That Queens is not a feeder system or a periphery, but a center—living, breathing, and in motion.

Art strengthens communities because it requires them. And when communities build together at scale, they don’t just make images. They make presence.

Art Builds Communities

Art as Power

Art is a form of power that operates through images rather than decree. It shapes perception, organizes memory, and gives structure to experiences that resist easy narration. Long before it persuades, art reorients: it trains attention, alters scale, and determines what is allowed to remain visible.

My own work begins from this premise. Images are not neutral, and symbols are never incidental. They accumulate meaning through repetition, circulation, and use—through being carried, held, worn, or encountered unexpectedly. Over time, certain forms insist on returning. A flower becomes a sign of refusal rather than ornament. A future date becomes a horizon rather than a prediction. These are not abstractions; they are working tools.

Throughout history, images have done work that laws and speeches cannot. They have carried dissent across borders, encoded refusal under regimes of surveillance, and preserved ways of seeing that institutions sought to erase. Art does not simply reflect power; it negotiates with it, absorbs its pressure, and—at times—outlasts it. Protest art makes this dynamic explicit. It demands clarity without simplification, endurance without stasis.

This writing approaches art as an active force rather than a finished object. It follows the development of visual language across projects—how symbols are pared down, stressed, tested, and redeployed. In works such as Resist Flower™, the image functions less as illustration than as a carrier: something meant to travel, to persist, and to remain legible under strain. In Project 2029, the visual field expands toward the future, using speculation not as fantasy but as a form of pressure on the present.

Art also operates where official systems fail. It holds grief that cannot be processed publicly, gives form to anger that has no sanctioned outlet, and creates coherence amid fragmentation. These are not sentimental claims. They are structural ones. Making and returning to images becomes a way of maintaining continuity when language collapses or is rendered unusable.

The posts here move between reflection and process. Some examine finished work; others remain unresolved, thinking through form, failure, and revision as part of the practice itself. Taken together, they reflect a belief that art is not supplemental to political or social life, but embedded within it—shaping how resistance is imagined, sustained, and remembered.

This is not art as decoration, nor art as explanation. It is art as a method of pressure, persistence, and attention: a way of holding ground when certainty is unavailable, and of insisting that meaning—however provisional—can still be made.

Art as Power

Executive Order – Jan 6 (Speculative)

SUMMARY

January 20, 2029

President Orders Preservation and Public Access to the Historical Record of the January 6 Attack on American Democracy

Today, the President signed an Executive Order directing the preservation, organization, and lawful public accessibility of the historical and judicial record related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

The Order affirms that while presidential pardons resolve criminal liability, they do not erase historical facts, judicial findings, or the public record. The initiative is designed to safeguard democratic memory, ensure transparency, and support civic education—without imposing punishment, stigma, or retaliation against any individual.

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 20, 2029

President Signs Executive Order to Preserve January 6 Historical Record

The President today signed an Executive Order establishing a comprehensive, non-partisan effort to preserve and make accessible the historical and judicial record of the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

The Order directs the Department of Justice and the National Archives to preserve court opinions, trial records, sworn testimony, and other lawfully public documents arising from the prosecutions of January 6-related offenses. These materials will be organized into a centralized archival collection to ensure that the factual record remains available to the American people.

The Executive Order makes clear that presidential pardons—while constitutionally valid—do not alter historical facts or judicial findings. The initiative is expressly non-punitive and does not create any registry, surveillance mechanism, or additional legal consequence for any individual.

“This action is about memory, not punishment,” the President said. “A democracy cannot function if it forgets how it was tested.”

The preserved records may also be used for lawful, nonpartisan civic education, including instruction on constitutional governance, the peaceful transfer of power, and the rule of law.

EXECUTIVE ORDER

Preservation of the Historical Record of the January 6, 2021 Attack on American Democracy

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Purpose and Findings.

(a) On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol was violently attacked during the constitutionally mandated certification of the Electoral College vote.

(b) Federal courts adjudicated hundreds of cases arising from these events, producing sworn testimony, judicial findings of fact, evidentiary records, and reasoned opinions.

(c) The presidential pardon power, while absolute with respect to criminal liability, does not alter historical facts, judicial findings, or the public record.

(d) A democratic society depends upon the accurate preservation of its history, particularly when constitutional processes are threatened.

(e) It is therefore in the national interest to ensure that the factual and judicial record of January 6, 2021 is preserved, organized, and made accessible to the public in a lawful, neutral, and non-punitive manner.

Section 2. Preservation of Records.

(a) The Attorney General, in coordination with the Archivist of the United States, shall take all lawful steps to preserve records related to the January 6, 2021 attack, including but not limited to:

  • Court opinions and orders

  • Indictments, informations, and plea agreements

  • Trial transcripts and admitted exhibits

  • Sentencing memoranda and judicial findings of fact

(b) Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the disclosure of sealed records, protected personal information, or materials otherwise exempt from disclosure under federal law.

Section 3. Public Accessibility of Lawfully Available Records.

(a) To the extent permitted by law, the Archivist of the United States shall organize and make accessible existing public records related to January 6, 2021 through a centralized, non-editorial archival collection.

(b) Such collection shall:

  • Rely exclusively on lawfully public documents

  • Avoid characterizations, labels, or commentary

  • Clearly distinguish between factual records and interpretive materials

(c) No record shall be added, removed, or altered based on the granting or denial of a presidential pardon.

Section 4. Statement Regarding Pardons.

(a) This Order affirms that presidential pardons:

  • Relieve criminal liability

  • Do not constitute findings of innocence

  • Do not expunge judicial findings or historical facts

(b) Nothing in this Order shall be construed to impair the pardon power granted by Article II of the Constitution or to impose additional punishment, stigma, or legal disability on any individual.

Section 5. Civic Education and Democratic Institutions.

(a) The Archivist, in consultation with appropriate educational and civic institutions, may facilitate the use of preserved records for nonpartisan educational purposes, including instruction on:

  • Constitutional governance

  • The peaceful transfer of power

  • The role of courts and the rule of law

(b) All such efforts shall be factual, neutral, and consistent with existing law.

Section 6. Prohibition on Retaliation or Punitive Use.

Nothing in this Order shall be interpreted to:

  • Create a registry of individuals

  • Authorize surveillance or monitoring

  • Impose penalties, disabilities, or adverse consequences

  • Encourage harassment or retaliation

This Order is solely concerned with historical preservation and lawful transparency.

Section 7. General Provisions.

(a) Nothing in this Order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

  • The authority granted by law to any executive department or agency; or

  • The functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This Order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This Order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity.

THE WHITE HOUSE
January 20, 2029

Executive Order – Jan 6 (Speculative)