The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II
New York Times Style Magazine
By Thessaly La Force, Zoë Lescaze, Nancy Hass and M.H. Miller
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.
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, constitutes protest art is a thorny one — and we kept tripping over it. Is it a slogan? A poster? Does it matter if it was 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 pointed out, 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
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The Flint water crisis had mostly stopped making national headlines by the time the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier traveled there on assignment in 2016, but the Michigan town’s water supply was still tainted by deadly bacteria and lead, forcing residents to buy bottled water when it should have been safely available in their homes. Frazier spent five months with a family encompassing three generations of women, chronicling daily life at the heart of a man-made ecological disaster. The project was a natural extension of her already well-established commitment to social justice — Frazier had grown up in Braddock, Pa., a Rust Belt community ravaged by unemployment, toxic pollution, white flight and discrimination, and she first won acclaim for a series of photographs, begun when she was 16, capturing the effects of poverty and environmental racism on her own family. Frazier’s photo essay on Flint first ran in Elle magazine; she then exhibited the images at the gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2018. Some artists might have stopped there, but this was only the beginning of Frazier’s campaign. “I knew it was going to take more than a series of photographs on my part to bring relief to the people in Vehicle City,” she said in a recent TED Talk. Frazier issued fund-raising prints to help residents spread awareness, and she flew flags stating the number of days the town had been without safe water at art institutions nationwide. Finally, Frazier donated the proceeds from her “Flint is Family” exhibition to help bring an atmospheric water generator to the town. Now, residents are welcome to use the machine, which collects 2,000 gallons a day, free of charge. — Z.L.
RH: I don’t think an artist who, in their practice, engages in thinking about politically-charged concepts or histories, has to define every single work as protest art.
I’m very interested in discussing LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint is Family” in the context of the Dorothea Lange you mentioned, Cathy, just in terms of how LaToya’s work pushes back against the disinterested observer who comes and takes a picture, where the condition of a person photographed is left unchanged even though her image is now all over the world for generations, which is what happened with “Migrant Mother.” In “Flint is Family,” LaToya thought about how the series was in the tradition of her own work, in documenting her own community, her family and this kind of postindustrial America. But after she went to Flint, she learned that there was this water purification system that the town really needed and that nobody could afford. And the government was not doing anything about it. So she donated all the proceeds of her show — with a matching grant from the Rauschenberg Foundation — and bought this water purification system for the community. It’s still there. It’s still purifying water. It’s incredible that artists — our creative peers and our community — are coming together for mutual aid. But we are doing services that we have every right to expect our government to do. It’s insane that they don’t have clean water in Flint at this point. It’s insane that people are going hungry in the richest country in the history of the world. And it’s insane that artists — who have no health insurance and who have no job security and are in an even more precarious situation now than they were six months ago — are leading the charge, you know? This is the world that we live in. Shirin, to answer your question, I think it’s a work-by-work difference, not an artist-by-artist difference.
Courtesy of: The New York Times
