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BEsteves Mendez knew a lot Woody Guthrie like most people his age – which is to say, he knew This Country Is Your Country – when one of his professors wrote an essay on All You Fascists last semester. It is a popular folk song written at the end of World War II that connects the forces of oppression abroad with those, such as Jim Crow, that flourished at home. “Well, I’ll tell you gangsters, you might be surprised, people in this country are making a plan,” Guthrie sings, yelling, shouting and whistling in his unique Oklahoma song. “You will lose.”
“It was our first time sitting down to listen to a Woody Guthrie song, and we were like, ‘Wow,'” said Mendez, 19, a sophomore at new York University. “‘This could have been written today.’
The relevance of guthrie’s music in america to today’s political culture is the central theme of Woody Guthrie: What a Guitar Can Doa new exhibition at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in Brooklyn. With the help of Mendez and three of his fellow students, the exhibition features a pleasant atmosphere of Guthrie’s house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island – complete with three guitars, two accordions, a keyboard, a curtain, and enough chairs, books and notes to fill the part of the afternoon jam – as well as more than 130 copies from Woodylsath materials.
These images of Guthrie’s cartoons, sketches, written notes and recorded words fill the gallery as a powerful display of Guthrie’s energy. They cover the walls, hang from the ceiling, and are even scattered on the floor. “It’s like you’re walking into his office and he’s writing so much that things are falling on him,” said Mendez. “We wanted to capitalize on his creative potential, which he had, as well as playing.”
The sign encourages visitors to “play instruments, draw, write, and create art”. On a recent evening, one of the donated signs had the following effect: “Long live Woody and what he stands for,” read one note. “You are a machine that kills hate,” read another.
These materials show the breadth and depth of Guthrie’s political activities, with paintings encouraging people to organize and vote, paintings depicting bosses and capitalists, and memorials depicting protests against police brutality and fundraising for organizations and refugees.
This tradition of protest music still lives on in 21st century America – witness Bruce Springsteen Streets of Minneapolis and the Dropkick Murphys’ Citizen ICEboth were released in early 2026 amid violence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities and immigration agencies. The students have also chosen songs from Bad Bunny, A Tribe Called Quest, Jesse Welles and Solange to give an insight into this generation of “refusal to create”.
That continuity in history pleased Nora Guthrie, one of Woody’s daughters, who caught the attention of Bad Bunny. The Super Bowl halftime show during an interview in the show’s living room.
He said: “The best thing about it was that it was a history lesson, but it was fun. “Woody was very playful. Many people confuse the interest of other musicians with Woody’s humor. Woody was Rosa Luxemburg – ‘I don’t want to be part of a revolution where I can’t dance.” (This line is attributed to Emma Goldberg.)
Nora Guthrie had a small car with her father’s music when she was growing up in Brooklyn: the singer had Huntington’s disease and was at the time in the hospital, and she was not interested in “folk music and dusty wounds”. He said: “I didn’t think he was very interesting when he was growing up. Later in life, when he saved boxes of his notes and papers in a basement in Queens after a flood, that he got to know his father outside the sepia-toned history books.”
“These are all theories,” he said of the protests around us. “I didn’t grow up with him that way because of Huntington’s, so finding Dad was really exciting for 42 years. I was able to say, ‘Dad, what do you think about this? and I can find a song that tells me everything I need to know. ” Since setting up the archives, his work has included bringing unseen aspects of his father to the public through collaborations with Billy Bragg and Wilco, Dropkick Murphys and Klezmatics.
Some light is thrown on the show, through no fault of the student trustees or the Guthrie family, by the character of NYU itself. At the university to answer richly to the protests of students and teachers against the war in Gaza shows that it prefers anti-fascism to be confined to old exhibitions and history books. Next month, NYU graduates will listen pre-recorded (and pre-approved) introductory speech.; in 2025, a student speaker criticized the “cruelty” in Palestine in his speech, that the university without taking his diploma as punishment.
This coldness greatly influenced the content of the show, which initially focused on Guthrie’s relationship with New York and featured 19 locations around the city where he wrote. “We lost it,” said Anna Canoni, Nora’s daughter and president of Woody Guthrie Publications, who worked with the students on the exhibit. “I said, ‘How can Woody be a safe place for what you have to say in 2026, what you stand for and what you want to say?’ And their answer was this.”
“We were very much in the forefront of the whole fascism side of things,” Mendez said. “Even on the NYU campus, it’s been real — the repression of any kind of political connection. We were still able to create something that had a political perspective, and I’m glad to see that being celebrated.”
“This is what we do – we go in,” Nora Guthrie said. “This is the antithesis of art. Even if we do a show, it’s fun and romantic. I believe in good angels. I’m sorry NYU doesn’t understand, but that’s their problem.”
