Public Platforms with Marina Peng & Shannon Levin (PSA:) and Cleo Barnett

How do public spaces reflect public consciousness? Join Shannon Levin and Marina Peng of PSA:, a public art project that features text installations by St. Louis-based artists, writers, and poets, and Cleo Barnett of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. These creatives share with us how and why they use their platforms to reclaim public space in order to uplift the voices of others, and how public art has the ability to shift our perspectives and make room for real change.


Cleo Barnett is a curator, creative director, post disciplinary artist and emergent strategist working in the arts & civic engagement. Barnett is currently the Executive Director of Amplifier, a non-profit design lab that builds media experiments to amplify social movements. Since 2009, Barnett has directed and produced more than 300 public space interventions across five continents. Collaborating with artists, government agencies, non-profit and community based organizations, foundations, educators and global brands, her work shifts culture through public art and mass media experiments that amplify the voices of environmental & social justice movements.


Shannon Levin is co-founder of PSA: and an illustrator, designer, and educator living, working, and playing in St. Louis, MO. She earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she currently teaches an undergraduate illustration course. Driven by color and expression, her work extends to clients in the arts, music, and community-focused spaces.


Marina Peng is co-founder of PSA: and a visual artist based in St. Louis, MO. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. In her practice, she examines her position as a second-generation American in the Midwest. Her work visualizes experiences of isolation, sacrifice, and hyper self-analysis.

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As a major component of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis's exhibition Stories of Resistance, Radio Resistance assembles the voices of intersecting local and global agents of change. Artists featured in the exhibition are paired with figures from the past, present, and future of St. Louis, coming together to transmit messages of dissent. Eleven episodes will be released over the course of the exhibition, amplifying shared struggles, collective dreams, and models of individual and group action. Using a historically rebellious medium, Radio Resistance broadcasts social narratives of defiance and hope.

Selections of Radio Resistance will be broadcast on St. Louis on the Air, the noontime talk program hosted by Sarah Fenske on St. Louis Public Radio. Full episodes will be released biweekly in a listening station at CAM, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. A publication celebrating Stories of Resistance, featuring episode highlights, will be released later this year.