Farley Aguilar’s cartoonish Bat Boy (2018) is hanging in the first room of “We are the people. Who are you?” at Edel Assanti, an unsettling group show featuring 11 artists that examines mass-media and the rise of populism. As the painting’s title suggests, it depicts Bat Boy, a fiendish mutant with huge eyes and sharp teeth popularized in the early 1990s by the American tabloid Weekly World News. Here, this devilish man with pointed ears is depicted reading the Weekly World News on his porch. He casts a blood-red shadow; the headline reads, “KILL BAT BOY.” Morphing subject and reader, Aguilar points to the danger of becoming the very media one consumes. Bringing together artists from different political climates such as Ukraine, Nicaragua, and Turkey across drawing, sound, video, sculpture, and installation, “We are the people” embraces scope rather than focus. The curatorial breadth allows for illuminating juxtapositions to emerge between pairs or clusters of artworks. On the wall near Bat Boy is Jamal Cyrus’s triptych Kennedy King Kennedy (2015): laser-cut reproductions of front pages from the Chicago Daily Defender announcing the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. This juxtaposition is echoed in the present political …