The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

Wolverhampton School of Art / Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation / FEINART 

By Gregory Sholette, Artist, Activist, Writer, New York

Abstract

Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicizes activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art.

In the frame of the FEINART lecture series the author Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the unusual dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist). He describes a new wave of activist art taking place not only within community-based protest groups, as it has for decades, but also amongst professionally trained, MFA-bearing art practitioners, many of whom, by choice or by circumstance, refuse to respect the conventional borders separating painting from protest, or art from utility.

Biography

Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and curator Imaginary Archive: a peripatetic collection of documents speculating on a past whose future never arrived. His art and research theorize and document issues of collective cultural labor, activist art, and decolonial historical representation after 1968. Sholette is also co-founder of the collectives, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-1988); REPOhistory (1989-2000); and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010 ongoing), as well as the author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017); Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011); Art As Social Action (with C. Bass: 2018), and the forthcoming book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art from Lund Humphries (2021). Along with his colleague Chloë Bass, Sholette co-directs Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), a new, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded art and social justice initiative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation

The Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation (CADRE) accommodates researchers within the Wolverhampton School of Art. It was established in 2006 to explore and develop the beneficial effect of art and design upon society. The Centre is clustered into three focused areas of research interests: Art, Society and Social Practice; Digital Technology Theory and Practice; Material and Theoretical Practice.