A Carmel response to the Trump administration has D.C. connections.

Even before Donald Trump was elected president, political art was starting to flourish. And so it begins locally with Awakening, a group effort by 14 local and out-of-town artists under the patronage of Green Chalk Contemporary founder and director Gail Enns, opening this Friday with their collective sights on Trump and “the new era in Washington.”

Enns, who used to live and work in D.C., seems specially suited to do a show like this. “There are tons of [political art shows] in L.A. and San Francisco, but in the Central Coast, nothing,” she says.

By contrast, Awakening addresses women’s issues, environmental concerns, prisoners’ rights, depression, prejudice.

Anne Marchand, a D.C. artist of colorfully jubilant paintings, says that after election night it seemed people around her were in a state of disbelief, incapacity and grief. But that’s changing.

“I woke up one day and said ‘That’s it. We have to move forward,’” she says. “That’s when you know you’re in the resistance now.”

That resistance takes many forms.

Kristin Casaletto, from Augusta, Georgia, has a piece in the show called “TOO BIG TO FAIL,” an American flag assembled in red, white and blue pigmented locusts, which she notes were a source of sustenance as well as plague.

Jamie Dagdigian, Art Department chair at Monterey Peninsula College, has submitted a piece titled “RITE-WRITE-RIGHT,” which contains a banner of what seems to be a redacted U.S. Constitution.

Photographer Robin V. Robinson takes black and white photos of clouds of fish and undersea landscapes. They don’t seem overtly political, so in her artist statement she offers this bridge: “The emphasis on fossil fuels by the new administration does not bode well.”

The morning after the election, D.C. artist Sharron Antholt drove her husband to the hospital for cancer treatment. He died three days later.

“All the things I took for granted – gone,” she writes in her artist statement. It accompanies her painting, which looks like a flame being swallowed up by darkness. Or is the flame growing?

“The return of light in my life will be completely up to me,” she continues. “And the return of right in our world will be completely up to us.”

Susan Hyde Greene, of Carmel, has also intimated the persistence of hope. She co-opted a photo of a lone drifting glacier in a stark horizon of the Arctic ocean that she took while on a sea voyage, and stitched the word “hope” onto it.

“It’s poignant, sad and hopeful,” she says. “[It] had a lot of emotion for me.”

The emotion she’s feeling most acutely now – over Trump’s immigration ban, his threatening reactions to protest – is anger.

Anger is not all that is being stirred up.

“After World War II, in Japan, when the U.S. took the place of the emperor, there was a whole era called Confusion Era,” Enns says. “That’s what’s happening. I think we’re confused.”

Art seems a healthy outlet for such emotions. In addition to Trump being an effective protest organizer, it seems he’s also an inspiring art curator.

AWAKENING opens 5-8pm Friday, Feb. 10, on the third floor of Carmel Plaza, Ocean and Mission, Carmel. Free. www.GreenChalkContemporary.com