A FEW YEARS BACK, a friend caught me off guard when he asked, “Why aren’t the artists of today responding in force to the political crisis of the moment?” He mentioned some of the visual artists who were radicalized by the Vietnam War—Mark di Suvero, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ad Reinhardt, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre, and so on, and said that nothing approaching that level of engagement has taken place in the decades that have followed. My answer to him was simple. I told him that artists were responding, and more important, he was looking in the wrong places.
My colleague was drawing names from the art world (primarily the New York art world of galleries and museums), while I was looking elsewhere. I suggested that he look to the artists, designers, photographers, and creative agitators who took part in the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the Chicano/Chicana movement, and the red power movement. That he look to the artists in the antinuclear movements, the AIDS movements, the antiwar movements, the environmental movements, the antiglobalization movements, the prison-justice movements, and the feminist movements that did not end in the 1970s. If he wanted to go further back, he could look at the artists in the 1930s’ federal art projects and labor unions, those in the suffrage movements, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and so on.
However, his point was clear. Many people look to the world of museums and galleries when they think of visual art, including political art. My argument was that these places are not the primary site for activist art. Politically engaged art can and does exist in museums and galleries, but activist art is altogether different and is firmly located in movements and in the streets and communities that produce these movements.1 My deeper point was that there is another art history that is overlooked—a history of activist art.
This study addresses this parallel history. Some examples draw upon movement culture—the art, objects, ephemera, photographs, and visual culture that emerges directly out of movements by the participants themselves. This work is done by individuals who may or may not self-identify as an “artist” or a producer of media. These individuals more likely consider themselves activists first—people who organize and at times employ visual tactics to help their causes succeed.
In contrast, other examples in this study focus upon individuals who identify first and foremost as an “artist”—individuals who were often trained in art academies and art schools. These individuals (or art collectives) chose to locate their art within a movement—rather than a gallery or a museum—because they were inspired by the cause and decided to join the movement in solidarity as an artist.
Both paths taken—movement culture and the work created by “artists” aligned with social-justice movements—are equally significant. And both paths fundamentally change the role of art in society. Likewise, when the definition of an artist becomes more flexible (for example: an artist is anyone who creates visual culture), it breaks down the elitism in the visual arts and challenges the notion that only a select few people with special talents can participate in the visual-art field. In short, it makes art accessible to all.
Curiously, or perhaps not, the term “visual artist” is often the biggest impediment to artists themselves in the modern era. “Visual artist” comes with its own set of cultural biases, internalized dilemmas, fixed paths, and stereotypes—isolated, aloof, fringe, eccentric, and so forth—labels that define the artist from the outside. These labels and misnomers are detrimental: they present artists as fundamentally different, when in fact most artists are much like everyone else—working-class people with working-class concerns.
Additionally even the term “art” is suspect when one looks at material items from the past four centuries. Different cultures see the world from different perspectives, and the central thesis of this book—artists working in movements—is less applicable in describing traditional Native art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mary Lou Fox Radulovich, the late director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, stated that “Indian people have no word for art. Art is part of life, like hunting, fishing, growing food, marrying, and having children. This is an art in the broadest sense . . . an object of daily usefulness, to be admired, respected, appreciated, and used, the expression thereby nurturing the needs of body and soul, thereby giving meaning to everything.”2
Contemporary artistic practice also blurs our understanding of art. Arguably, some of the most profound examples of activist art, especially during the past four decades, is work that negates traditional ideas about art—projects where the art is difficult to define. This type of work shares commonality with the tactics of social-justice movements—art as a form of civil disobedience and art that intervenes in public space and the mass media, becoming a form of tactical media itself.
Yet if anything connects the multitude of examples that are presented in this study, it is the recycling of tactics that are redeployed with minor variations—a practice that is wholly welcomed. Tactics that succeed do so for a reason, and if activist artists can draw inspiration from the past and adapt them to the present, then all the power to them.
Significantly, this study is not an all-encompassing survey of activist art throughout U.S. history. If so, I would have included essays on Thomas Nast, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Black Mask, Bread and Puppet, and others, along with key struggles like the ones led by the Young Lords and the United Farm Workers, to name just a couple. Rather, my decision-making process was to move through U.S. history chronologically and to focus upon a select number of examples that inform us about various visual art disciplines and tactics used in activist campaigns. Some that worked. Others that fell short. At times, I was particularly drawn to the examples that were complicated, where the decisions made by artists were controversial and confounding. My logic: analyzing histories that are deeply complicated helps us learn. A history of only success stories does not.
Collectively, my hope is that this study serves as a call to action for more artists to become activists, and conversely for more activists to employ art, for the benefits are vast. When social movements embrace artists, they harness the power of those who excel at expressing new ideas and reaching people in ways that words and other forms of media cannot. They harness the power of visual culture. And when artists join movements, their work—and by extension their lives—takes on a far greater meaning. They become agitators in the best sense of the word and their art becomes less about the individual and more about the common vision and aspirations of many. Their art becomes part of a culture of resistance.