These Artists Want You to Vote for Mamdani
They're mural painters, sculptors, hat-makers, and gallery workers — and they’d like to keep living in New York City.
When Zohran Mamdani ran for high school vice president, he reportedly campaigned on a platform that included daily fresh-squeezed orange juice for everyone. This innocuous tidbit from Mamdani's early political history was seized by rapacious conservative tabloids, which sought to discredit the New York City mayoral candidate as a Marxist of the most romantic persuasion. But to the Lower East Side artist Massimo LoBuglio, who advocates for Universal Basic Income (UBI) and better access to organic food, it was a small yet powerful testament to Mamdani's core beliefs.
“Zohran seems most concerned about affordability for all,” LoBuglio, who has painted murals about food equality in Soho and Bushwick, told Hyperallergic. “I see UBI as a nascent social movement, and movements mature when disparate nodes start working together, aligning messages and tactics.”
Mamdani may have lost his high school race, but the way things are looking, he may just win this one. The 34-year-old state assemblymember maintained a 10-point lead in the latest polls, with disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo trailing behind him and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa just hanging on. With a historic more than 735,000 early ballots cast, primarily by voters under the age of 55, canvassers took to the streets in the last week for a last-minute push ahead of the election on Tuesday, November 4.
Among these volunteers were artists and cultural workers like William Chan, who started campaigning for Mamdani 10 months ago, driven by disappointment with the Democratic Party following Trump's 2024 win and by the promise of “something that can be leveraged against our two-party system.” Though Mamdani is the Democratic nominee, he is also a Democratic Socialist endorsed by the progressive Working Families Party, two groups Chan also belongs to.
“His campaign was polling around 1% then, but I believed his voice was needed,” Chan said of his early volunteer days. “He was the rare Democrat voice that embodied my aspirations. Mamdani is a Democrat with an equitable worldview and an affordability agenda.”
Recent research has shown that what artists need to flourish is the same safety net that benefits broader communities. Creatives Rebuild New York, which launched a guaranteed income program for artists in 2022, found that recipients used the unconditional cash payments to catch up on bills, pay off debts, buy food, and care for their families — not unlike most New Yorkers when they get a little extra cash. The financial flexibility freed artists to pursue creative work.
“NYC is special in that we have a density of arts and cultural spaces like no other city in the country,” Natalia Nakazawa, a Queens-based artist and educator, told Hyperallergic. “We cannot do this, however, without a continuation to invest in a cultural plan for NYC — or with censorship, and the invasion of our sanctuary city by the likes of ICE.”
Nakazawa canvassed for Mamdani in Jackson Heights and turned to Soft Power Vote, a civic engagement organization started by local cultural workers, to guide her research on voting and ballot measures. She saw the issues that matter most to her — the protection of diversity and vulnerable groups, affordable food and housing — reflected in Mamdani's platform.
The candidate's signature proposals include universal childcare, free and fast buses, and city-owned supermarkets to address the rising cost of groceries, which increased by 56% over the last decade.
“As a visual artist, I want to live in the city I love and actually afford it instead of constantly feeling like I'm being priced out,” said Samhita Kamisetty, a member of the Greenpoint-based Flower Shop Collective.
“I feel very seen, not only as a South Asian person, but also in the way he speaks so clearly and loudly about the things we deal with every day — the buses, the trains, the fact that groceries are impossible to afford,” Kamisetty continued. “He's not vague about it.”
It is not just artists but also arts workers, who do everything from exhibition design to art handling to typing up catalogue essays, struggling to make ends meet in a city where housing costs continue to outpace wages. Rebecca Polanzke, a sales assistant at a blue-chip gallery who said she earns an annual salary of around $60,000 to $65,000, told Hyperallergic she cares most about Zohran's rent freeze policy.
“Lots of my fellow cultural workers don’t want to be priced out of areas while being expected to trek to the Upper East Side, Tribeca, or Chelsea five days a week,” said Polanzke, who lives in a rent-stabilized unit in Bushwick. “Because my block is surrounded by NYCHA [NYC Housing Authority] buildings, making sure their department receives proper funding is a priority to preserve the wellness of my community.”
Many Mamdani voters say what inspires them most about the candidate is his authenticity, the fact that he comes off like another resident of their own city. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, filmmaker Kenneth Sousie said he sees in Mamdani the promise of a return to New York's creative heyday, “and not just an area for wealthy transplants working in tech to moonlight as DJs and cosplay bohemian.”
“I'm tired of mayoral candidates who do not care about New York, who do not understand what it is to be a New Yorker on the street level, and it's time we had a mayor who is one of us,” he said.
Artist and feminist Mira Schor, known for her fiercely feminist, political art, told Hyperallergic that she cast an early vote for Mamdani.
“I'm going with the generational trend, with the young because it is their time, and with the globalist trend — New York is a very diverse city, and he represents that in a new way in terms of the mayoral race,” Schor said. “I wish him luck and I wish us luck as I voted for him despite my fear-filled conviction that New York is the next Portland and Chicago, the next object of Trump's rage.”
Trump has already threatened to punish the city by withholding federal funding if Mamdani is elected, a move the candidate said he would pursue legal action against.
Aside from his stated commitment to lowering the cost of living, what Mamdani appears to represent to so many is much more intangible. It could be best described as a flicker of hope, a respite from the despair of creeping authoritarianism nationwide.
Kristine Michelsen-Correa, who launched an unofficial campaign merch project called "it's giving prizes" with Mexican designer Chris Cruz after Mamdani's primary victory, believes the candidate is already making New York “more joyful to live in.” (A cut of the proceeds from sales of hats emblazoned with “Zohran" in an electric typeface benefit a mutual aid organization for asylum seekers.) This weekend, Michelsen-Correa said she distributed 1,500 signs across neighborhoods during the citywide marathon, bringing with her a towering cardboard cutout of Mamdani that bobbed up and down during a DJ set in Greenpoint.
“Zohran (the real person) came to address the crowd at the midway point,” Michelsen-Correa recalled. “He didn't notice at first that there was a life-size cutout behind him the whole time in the crowd. When he turned around and started walking and looked at it, he burst out laughing.”
“You could tell his initial shock and then loud laugh was one that he really meant,” she added. “This is the joy I'm talking about.”
