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The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II

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The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II nytimes.com/2020/10/15/t-magazine/most-influential-protest-art.html October 15, 2020 Video CreditCredit...Video by Scott J. Ross Three artists, a curator and a writer came together to discuss the pieces that have not only best reflected the era, but have made an impact. By Thessaly La Force, Zoë Lescaze, Nancy Hass and M.H. Miller Oct. 15, 2020 On a recent afternoon, the artists Dread Scott, Catherine Opie and Shirin Neshat, as well as T contributor Nikil Saval and Whitney Museum of American Art assistant curator Rujeko Hockley, joined me on Zoom for a conversation about protest art. I had asked each to nominate five to seven works of what they considered the most powerful or influential American protest art (that is, by an American artist or by an artist who has lived or exhibited their work in America) made anytime after World War II. We focused specifically on visual art — not songs or books — and the hope was that together, we would assemble a list of the top 25. But the question of what, precisely, constitutesprotest art is a thorny one — and we kept tripping over it. Is it a slogan? A poster? Does it matter if it was 1/65 in a museum, in a newspaper or out on the street? Does impact matter? Did it change what you think or believe? Must it endure? What does that mean? And what is the difference, anyway, between protest art and art that is merely political? It should go without saying that our answers to these questions, as well as the list we produced (which is ordered by the flow of our conversation), are not definitive. A different group on a different day would have come up with a different list, but disagreement and debate were always at the heart of this project. The panelists spoke candidly about the protest art that changed them or their ideas of the world in profound ways. We discussed the silent work that art does — when it makes us brave and when it makes us believe in our collective capacity to create change. There is simply no denying that it is a dark time in the world right now. There are many reasons to feel hopeless and afraid — we are experiencing, as Neshat pointedout, crises in every aspect of our 244-year-old democracy: about feminism, about human rights, about immigration, about poverty, about housing, about our health care system, about combating systemic racism, about the environment, about our very belief in what is good and right. Still, we managed to end the conversation that day on a note of resilience and joy — a lesson for all of us in the long days ahead. — Thessaly La Force This conversation has been edited and condensed. The T List: A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now. 1. Robert E. Lee Statue, Richmond, Va., in its current state 2/65 Image A photograph of Breonna Taylor, projected onto the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., July 2020.Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock A colossal 61-foot equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee has towered above Richmond, Va., since 1890. It was the first Confederate monument erected in the former capital of the Confederacy and, as of this summer, it is among the last two standing. Other memorials to those who defended slavery — including the Confederate president Jefferson Davis and general Williams Carter Wickham — came crashing down at the hands of protesters in June while Richmond’s mayor, Levar Marcus Stoney, invoked emergency powers to remove the rest on July 1. But the 12-ton effigy of Lee, by far the nation’s most physically imposing memorial to the commander and his cause, proved too large for demonstrators to topple and, given its location on state land, lay beyond Stoney’s jurisdiction. Over the past several months, activists have transformed the base of the sculpture instead, covering the marble and granite with the names of victims of police violence, protest chants, calls for compassion, revolutionary symbols and anti-police slogans in dozens of colors. New phrases continually appear, adding to the kaleidoscopic display of communal, collective action. People who once avoided the statue now make pilgrimages to see what has become an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as a newly diverse public gathering space. The statue and its surrounding lawn are now the site of barbecues, music and dance performances, family get-togethers, voter registration tents, photo shoots, board games, basketball hoops and religious services, as well as ongoing demonstrations, encampments and candlelight vigils. The ultimate fate of the monument remains uncertain — Governor 3/65 Ralph Northam, a Democrat, ordered that it be taken down this summer, but a number of Virginians filed lawsuits, resulting in multiple injunctions barring the statue’s removal. A trial is slated for October 19. — Zoë Lescaze Thessaly La Force: I’d like to begin by asking a crucial question, which is: How do we define protest art? Cathy, why did you nominate the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Va., and the action around it? Why is this protest art? Catherine Opie: Well, I think it’s a reclaimed location. What it means is embedded, obviously, in that land. This summer, my wife and I had to drop my son off at Tulane University, so we bought an R.V. because it seemed like the safest way to travel — I’ve also been known to do bodies of work from an R.V. — and it was really, really hard during Covid not to bear witness. Journalists kept showing me images of what was going on in Richmond with the statue of Robert E. Lee. There were projections on it, it became an activist site. The transformation of that space, to me, felt like exactly what protest art is. The day I was there, I had a big camera with me, so multiple families would ask me to take their portrait in front of the statue, which I would do with their cellphones — and just in that way, it became activated. I’m really interested in ideas of activism in relationship to activating these sites. The question now is about the removal of that monument — in my opinion, all monuments from that era need to be removed — but what does that do to the history of the activation there? I find it a very poignant moment of protest art. TLF: Dread, could you speak to that? Dread Scott: Ever since the Civil War, there’s been a real attempt by white supremacists all over the country to reinsert and reinscribe white supremacy as the ideology and the visual culture of America. These monuments aren’t from 1862, they’re from 1905, 1920, 1935 and so on. In New Orleans, for example, there was a giant statue of Robert E. Lee. That statue is now gone because of the activist community. And Take ’Em Down NOLA doesn’t get a lot of the credit. Years before Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, called for the statues to be taken down, activists had been working on this in an earnest way. And these statues are all over. There are Confederate monuments in the North, too. But the way Cathy is talking about people reclaiming those spaces and that being protest art is an interesting place to start, because we need to address what protest art is. We should chew on that as we go through these discussions. 2. Silence = Death design collective, “Silence = Death,” 1987 4/65 Image Act Up’s campaign poster “Silence = Death” (1987).Credit...Gran Fury Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY In the early years of the AIDS epidemic , the government and mainstream media infamously ignored the crisis. By the time President Reagan finally uttered the word “AIDS” in 1985, 12,000 Americans had already died. That same year, six men in New York 5/65 City — Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione and Jorge Socarrás — began meeting to privately share their experiences of AIDS-related loss in the absence of public discourse. Inspired to create something tangible that could spread awareness, they swiftly settled on a poster. It should have little (if any) text, they decided. “Manifestos don’t work,” Finkelstein recently wrote. “Sentences barely do. You need sound bites, catchphrases, crafted in plain language. The poster is exactly that, a sound bite, and vernacular to the core. The poster perfectly suits the American ear. It has a power. If you’ve ever stopped in front of one or turned your head for a second look, that power was at work.” The result of their collaboration, a hot pink triangle (an inverted version of the symbol Nazis used to label gay men) emblazoned on a black background above the slogan “Silence = Death,”made its debut in 1987. The six friends hired wheat- pasters to cover the East Village, West Village, Times Square, Chelsea and the Upper West Side — neighborhoods chosen to reach both queer audiences and the media — overnight, and the city woke up to what became the most enduring icon of H.I.V./AIDS-related activism. Later that year, on April 15,members of the newly formed activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up) stormed the city’s General Post Office carrying copies of the sign, solidifying its ongoing centrality to their cause.
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