Repression breeds resistance, Sixties radicals once insisted – and sometimes, as newspaper headlines remind us, repression simply silences citizens from China to Chile and the Czech Republic.

Then, too, repression makes for mighty fine protest art all around the world. In London recently, an anonymous artist painted an immense street mural that showed a man on a ladder printing the words “One Nation Under CCTV,” while another man in uniform films him. (CCTV stands for Closed Circuit Television, now a fixture in many cities from London to New York and Chicago.)

Now, a new exhibition opening Thursday in San Francisco, called “Bearing Witness: Surveillance in the Drone Age” (May 21 - June 7), features eight artists from the group 1030 – which uses art to make people more aware of the depth and breadth of spying, listening, recording and gathering data – along with installations by at least 15 others.

One of #1030's participating artists, Antonio Cortez, knows Big Brother is watching, that watching can create a chilling effect, and that Big Brother also creates the big chill with tanks and automatic weapons. In Cortez's experience, it doesn’t take long to go from watching to weapons; from police cameras in the streets to police armed to the teeth.

In 1992, Cortez was a 23-year-old student at Simon Bolivar University in his native Venezuela when urban insurgents tried and failed to topple the government. President Carlos Andres Perez declared a state of emergency and cancelled civil rights and civil liberties. Hundreds of Venezuelans were detained. Dozens were shot and killed. One of Cortez’s friends was murdered; others disappeared.

“It was a wake-up moment for me,” Cortez says. “I decided it was time for me to get out of Venezuela before I got killed. As a gay man, I’d also been subject to homophonic slurs; once a knife was pressed to my throat. Not my kind of country.”

Cortez went into exile and recreated himself in the United States. At Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts he studied photography. At Harvard he received an M.A. in Administration and Management. Not long afterward, the Twin Towers crashed and burned, the war on terrorism heated up, the Patriot Act became the law of the land and the Bush administration ramped up the mass surveillance of American citizens.

When Obama came to power, surveillance intensified; Cortez experienced one wake-up moment after another. The most recent was Edward Snowden’s release of classified information from the NSA. In 2008, as a U.S. resident with a green card, Cortez moved to California and joined the 1030 Art Group, many of whom made multimedia art at Berkeley City College.

“Artists bear a responsibility to society,” Cortez says. “We have to respond to the big issues and causes of our time.”

Hanna Regev, co-curator of "Bearing Witness," specializes in exhibits with big dramatic themes meant to ask questions, provoke discussion and generate debate. Born and raised in Poland and a veteran of the Israeli army, Regev has degrees in history — focusing on Nazi Germany — and in museum studies. These days no themes touch her moral compass more than the linked themes of privacy, freedom of expression and security.

“The exhibit we’re doing at Fort Mason offers an opportunity for viewers to see how artists are responding to this new phenomenon where there’s nowhere to hide,” Regev says. “The government and corporations are gathering information fast and furious about what, where and why we buy, how we feel and think, and what we do. We’re all under constant surveillance.”

Jane Norling’s work, “Me, My Phone, My Baby, And,” depicts a thirty-something mother taking a selfie while her child gazes at a drone overhead. For $199, Norling bought a real drone; it hangs down from the ceiling in front of the painting. Her medium is acrylic on Tyvek. The dimensions are 90" x 48" x 16." In the background, behind mother and child, there’s a big bank of data like the kind generated on individuals.

Born in 1947 in Washington, DC, Norling attended Bennington where she made art and listened to professors who told students that art was art and politics was politics and that never the two should meet. That notion sounded odd to Norling, but it dominated classroom conversations. Then, the Sixties picked up speed. Norling read the Port Huron Statement, which expressed the growing political awareness of a generation, and joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

“In 1968 the world came knocking on my door,” she said. “I moved to San Francisco to join the revolution, worked with Peoples Press, a radical publishing house, got the men in charge to admit women, and worked on anti-war posters and political murals.”

After Norling went to Cuba in the winter of 1972-73, the FBI arrived at her Haight Street apartment to question her. “In those days, I assumed that all of us were under surveillance,” she said. “So not long ago, when Antonio Cortez suggested to the 1030 group that we make art that was overtly political I was all for it. I’d been doing abstract landscapes and I wanted to get back to more figurative work that addresses social issues directly.”

Norling persuaded her niece, Amelia Nardinello, to pose for the painting with her child. The likeness to the artist is uncanny, but Amelia is also meant to represent a generation that Norling sees as hip, self-absorbed, and unaware of the threats to their own personal liberty. The piece is as much a critique of that generation as it is of mass surveillance.

“I told my niece to wake up,” Norling says. “She told me, ‘I guess I should be more aware of what’s happening around me.’” Norling won’t be at the opening of the exhibit. After more than 40 years, she’ll return to Cuba to meet with artists in Havana; no doubt the FBI will add new data to her file.

“The constant spying in this country is outrageous,” Norling says. “They’re continually raking in data. It’s practically part of the atmosphere itself.”

Matt McKinley, who co-curated the exhibit with Regev, will also co-moderate a panel about surveillance at Fort Mason during the International Arts Festival, of which "Bearing Witness" is a part.

“I wasn’t in the streets for Occupy, but I supported the message,” McKinley says. “I’m not a technophobe or paranoid, but I do believe that we’re watched by eyes that we’ll never see. There has to be a better balance between security and liberty than what we have now.”

The poet Ezra Pound once said that artists were the “antennae of the human race.” Marshall McLuhan called art “an early alarm system.” In the age of mass surveillance, artists are also eyes and ears that tell us what we often don’t see and don’t hear. Their art tells us what we need to know if we’re to survive Big Brother.

Jonah Raskin is the author of "American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s 'Howl' and the Making of the Beat Generation."

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