A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice
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22. Ibid., 34.
23. For a critique of the Benetton ad campaign, see Henry A. Giroux, “Benetton’s ‘World Without Borders’: Buying Social Change,” in The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility, Carol Becker, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 187–207.
24. The photo for the Gran Fury ad, according to Gran Fury member Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, was shot at a friend’s loft, where friends and people in ACT UP/NYC dressed up, posed in front of the camera and started kissing. The set was shot as still images and also as a video. Vazquez-Pacheco was paired with a woman and recalls, “A cousin of mine was one day crossing the street and this bus went by and she saw my face. She saw my face kissing a girl. She called me and she was like, ‘Robert, were you in a poster? Were you in a Benetton’s [sic] ad?” Which I loved, because everyone thought it was a Benetton’s ad. She was hesitant, like, ‘You were kissing a girl.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, what you do for art.’ ” Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Robert Vasquez-Pacheco,” December 14, 2002, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 002, 59–60.
25. Ibid., 59.
26. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 237.
27. Ibid., 238.
28. Ibid., 241.
29. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Loring McAlpin,” August 18, 2008, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 098, 39–40.
30. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarty,” February 21, 2004, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 044, 20–21.
Chapter 25: Antinuclear Street Art
1. Groundwork flyer, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, REPOhistory Archive, 1911–1999 (Bulk 1989–1999), MSS 113, Series 5: Members Files, Box 13, Folder 11.
2. Ibid.
3. Josh Daniel, “New York City’s Big Secret: The Nuclear Homeport,” EXTRA, May/June, 1988, 6–7.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Artists who participated in Groundwork, to the best of my research, include Rachel Avenia, Stephanie Basch, Terry Berkowitz, Mariella Bisson, Roger Boyce, Keith Christensen, Ed Eisenberg, Harry Eriksen, John Fekner, Shelly Haven, Carin Kuoni, John LoCicero, Robert Morris, Mike Murphy, Paul Nagle, Susan Rapalee, Kristin Reed, Robert Reed, Janet Restino, Gregory Sholette, Jody Wright, Eva Cockcroft, Olivia Beens, Janet Koenig, Mimi Smith, and Tess Tomoney.
7. Groundwork press release, October 27, 1989, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, REPOhistory Archive, 1911–1999 (Bulk 1989–1999), MSS 113, Series 5: Members Files, Box 13, Folder 11.
8. Terence J. Kivlan, “The Fighting Continues on Stapleton Homeport,” Staten Island Advance, April 25, 1990.
9. Thank you to Gregory Sholette, who discussed by phone some of the overarching goals of Groundwork and the community of artists that influenced its practice.
10. E-mail correspondence between Tom Klem and the author, December 6, 2010.
Chapter 26: Living Water: Sustainability Through Collaboration
1. Sue Spaid, Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies (Cincinnati, OH: co-published by Greenmuseum.org, the Contemporary Arts Center, ecoartspace, 2002), 139.
2. Linda Weintraub, In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2003), 360.
3. Richard Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon, Living Water,” conversations.org, December 25, 2009; 25 April 25, 2010, http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=222.
4. Ibid.
5. Mary Padua, “Teaching the River,” in Waterfront World Spotlight 17, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 105.
6. Ibid., 102.
7. Weintraub, In the Making, 360.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 356.
10. Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon.”
11. Terri Cohn, “Betsy Damon: Living Water Garden,” Sculpture 19, no. 2 (March 2000): 55.
12. Whittaker, “An Interview with Betsy Damon.”
13. “Living Water: Combining Art and Science to Rejuvenate Communities and Restore Waterways,” Bush Fellows News, Autumn 2000, 3.
14. Padua, “Teaching the River,” 107.
Chapter 27: Art Defends Art
1. Judith F. Baca, “Artist Statement: May 12, 2005,” Sparcmurals.org, April 25, 2010, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=8.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Save Our State Declaration, reposted on Sparcmurals comment page. 13 June 13, 2005; April 25, 2010, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
6. Ibid.
7. Video footage of the May 14, 2005, demonstration and counterdemonstration can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-GEj58Rb80.
8. Wendy Thermos, “Immigration Protest in Baldwin Park Is Peaceful,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2005.
9. David Pierson and Wendy Lee, “A Monumental War of Words,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2005.
10. “Protest Report from the Social and Public Art Resource Center: Baldwin Park, CA,” May 16, 2005, Sparcmurals.org, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=7.
11. Pierson and Lee, “A Monumental War of Words.”
12. “Protest Report from the Social and Public Art Resource Center.”
13. Baca, “Artist Statement: May 12, 2005.”
14. Ibid.
15. Guest post, “Truth, Reconciliation and Consequences,” Sparcmurals.org comment page, Sparcmurals.org, May 16, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
16. Cesar Lopez, “A Different Mirror,” Sparcmurals.org comment page, May 16, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=2.
17. Judith F. Baca, public lecture, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, March 29, 2007.
18. Judith F. Baca, “Documenting Our Presence: History, Cultura, y Arte,” Sparcmurals.org, June 12, 2005, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=5.
19. “Statement of the Committee to Defend Danzas Indigenas,” Sparcmurals.org, n.d., http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=124&limit=1&limitstart=4.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Judith F. Baca, letter to supporters following the second demonstration, Sparcmurals.org, http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=169&limit=1&limitstart=1.
24. Judith F. Baca, letter to supporters before June 25, 2005, counterdemonstration, Sparcmurals.org, n.d., http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=169&limit=1&limitstart=3.
Chapter 28: Bringing the War Home
1. “Operation First Casualty,” YouTube, June 5, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdXY3Y4q_Ds.
2. Nicolas Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” interview, Temporary Services (self-published zine), part of the Temporary Conversations Series, 2010), 17.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. Ibid., 20.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. OFC was not without precedent. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had performed “Operation Raw” in the 1970s—a sixty-mile road march, where veterans marched through small towns in the Northeast with fake weapons as if they were patrolling villages in Vietnam. Soldiers wore white face makeup to draw attention to the racism found within the military and the process of dehumanizing the Vietnamese.
7. Martin Smith, “Structured Cruelty: Learning to Be a Lean, Mean, Killing Machine,” in Warrior Writers: Re-Making Sense: A Collection of Artwork by Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Lovella C
alica, ed. (Iraq Veterans Against the War, 2008) 32–33.
8. “Operation First Casualty.”
9. Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” 21.
10. Ibid. 21–22.
11. Ibid., 22.
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Robin Caudell, “War, What Is It Good For? Combat Paper,” Press Republican.com, May 9, 2009, http://www.pressrepublican.com/0705_people/local_story_129223929.html.
14. Nan Levinson, “The Power in Their Pain: Iraq War Veterans Create Art to Protest,” Boston Globe, April 22, 2008, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/04/22/the_power_in_their_pain/?page=1.
15. Combat Paper Project, http://www.combatpaper.org/about.html.
16. Jan Barry, “Culture Warriors,” Earth Air Water, December 15, 2008, http://earthairwater.blogspot.com/2008/12/culture-warriors.html.
17. Elise Hennigan, “Art as Catharsis—The Combat Paper Project,” Juxtapoz, November 11, 2009, http://www.juxtapoz.com/Features/art-as-catharsisthe-combat-paper-project.
18. Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, “Shredding War’s Dark Memories: Iraq War Veterans Release Their Angst by Turning Their Uniforms Into Paper,” Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2009.
19. Julia Rappaport, “War in Pieces: Combat Paper Project Sees Veterans Use Uniforms to Heal,” Vineyard Gazette Online, July 25, 2008, http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?17547.
20. Ibid.
21. Russ Bynum, “Veterans Shred Uniforms to Heal Themselves Through Art,” Stars and Stripes online edition, August 6, 2009 http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64052.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Lampert, “Aaron Hughes,” 17.
Chapter 29: Impersonating Utopia and Dystopia
1. The Yes Men Fix the World, Dir. Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr, 2009, Film.
2. The Yes Men developed out of an earlier project, RTMark, which was an Internet-based infrastructure developed to fund and help facilitate activist art projects. The premise was that artists and activists would list projects that they wanted to create and visitors to the site could select which ones they wanted to fund. In essence, it was a tool kit for creative disruption and anticorporate activism that reached a zenith during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. The Yes Men would go on to impersonate the WTO, falsely representing them at conferences, and going as far as to announce their dissolution at a meeting in Sydney, Australia. During the hijinks, the Yes Men announced the formation of a new Trade Regulation Organization that would abide by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, instead of a system based upon maximizing corporations’ profitm argins. See http://www.rtmark.com.
3. Dave Gilson, “Trust Us, We’re Experts,” Mother Jones, March/April 2005, 82–83.
4. Ibid.
5. The Yes Men, http://theyesmen.org/faq.
6. “Dow ‘Help’ Announcement Is Elaborate Hoax,” DowEthics.com, December 3, 2004, http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/bbc.htm.
7. The Yes Men, http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal.
8. Ibid.
9. David Darts and Kevin Tavin, “Global Capitalism and Strategic Visual Pedagogy,” in Critical Pedagogies of Consumption: Living and Learning in the Shadow of the “Shopocalypse,” Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 238.
10. Gilson, “Trust Us, We’re Experts, 82–83.
11. Anne C. Mulkern and Alex Kaplun, “Fake Reporters Part of Climate Pranksters’ ‘Theater,’ ” NYTimes.com, October 20, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/10/20/20greenwire-fake-reporters-part-of-climate-pranksters-thea-39576.html.
12. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), 281.
13. Brooke Shelby Biggs, “Yes-Men Taunt Halliburton,” CorpWatch.org, May 10, 2006, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13568.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. One of the most notorious offenders is Exxon Mobil. See Greenpeace’s research project Exxon Secrets—“highlighting the more than a decade-long campaign by Exxon-funded front groups—and the scientists they work with—to deny the urgency of the scientific consensus on global warming and delay action to fix the problem,” Greenpeace.org, http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets/faq.
17. The Yes Men, “Yes Man Sprung, Police Misconduct; Direct-Action Campaign Launch,” press release, September 23, 2009.
18. Ibid. Copenhagen was the site for the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, where political leaders failed to establish an agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. Activists demanded that nations reduce greenhouses gases to 350 parts per million—the maximum level of CO2 that the atmosphere can safely bear. In 2009, greenhouse gases were at 387.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
Index
Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations.
Ablutions, 235, 236
abolitionist movement, 22–38, 40–41, 43, 311n1, 313n4
Abraham Lincoln Brigades, 163
Abrams, Irving S., 82, 89–90
A.C.A. Galleries, 174
ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
“activist art” and “political art” distinguished (Lippard), 305n1
activist filmmaking, 135, 138–45
ACT UP, 253–58, 260, 261–62, 267, 340n4, 341n24
Adams, Ansel, 330n8
Adams, John, 16, 21
Adams, John Quincy, 27, 28
Adams, Samuel, 15, 16, 21
adbusting, 299
Adelman, William, 79, 80–81
advertising, 155, 163, 259–61, 259, 260, 299, 341n24
affinity groups, 254, 262
Afghanistan, 290, 292
African American art and artists, 132–33, 170, 199–210, 214, 216, 310n4
African American Civil War Memorial, 312n1
African American legislators, 334–35n26
African American press, 128, 322n6. See also Black Panther Community News Service; The Crisis
African American pageants, 121, 322n2
African Americans, 332n16
AIDS and, 254–55
lynching crisis, 121–34
photographs of, 43, 65, 132, 136, 189, 191, 192, 196
Riis on, 65–66
suffragist treatment, 112, 321n5
“talented tenth”/”best and brightest,” 124, 131, 132, 133
See also Black Panther Party; civil rights movement
African American soldiers, 39, 40–41, 43–47, 312n1, 312n3, 313n4
Against War and Fascism (exhibition), 172
agitprop, 137, 205. See also propaganda; public interventions
AIDS crisis, 252–62, 340n4, 340n6, 340n17
Albright, Peggy, 54, 314n28
Alexander, William, 143
Algonquian people, 2, 306n19
Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 21
Alm, Helen, 231
alternative spaces, 225, 229, 231, 336n24, 337n14. See also women’s spaces
Altgeld, John Peter, 74
Amalgamated Lithographers of America, 218, 222
Ambulance Corps, 163
American Artists’ Congress, 167–71, 168, 174–75, 174
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 178, 261, 337n5
American Design Index. See Index of American Design
American Federation of Labor (AFL), 165
An American Group (cooperative), 329n13
American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), 260, 261
American Indian arts. See Native American arts
American Indian health. See Native American resistance
American Indian political organization. See Native American political organization
American Indian resistance. See Native American resistance
American Indians. See Native Americans
American Revolution, 11–21
American Slavery As It Is (Weld), 29
Americ
an Society of Painters and Gravers, 162
American Woman Suffrage Association, 111
America Today (exhibition), 171–72
America Today (film), 141
Amistad mutiny, 27–28
anarchists and anarchism
Haymarket affair involvement, 72, 73–74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84
in Iroquois politics, 8
in IWW, 89
Andre, Carl, xi, 216
Andrew, John A., 40, 41, 43
Animal Dance (Northern Cheyenne). See Massaum ceremony (Northern Cheyenne)
Anthony, Susan B., 111
anticommunism, 144, 153–54, 331n29
anticorporate protests, hoaxes, etc., 213, 296–99, 303, 344n2
anti-immigrant movement, 279–85
antinuclear movement, 263–68
The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (Townsend and Townsend), 29
antislavery movement. See abolitionist movement
antiwar art, 220–23, 286, 287–95
antiwar movement, 288
Vietnam War, 214, 216, 217–18, 220–23, 244
World War I, 99, 100, 105
See also Iraq Veterans Against the War; Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 280
Apsaroke people. See Crow Indians
Aptheker, Herbert, 310n2
Arceo, Rene, 78
arches and gates, 278, 279–85
Ariadne: A Social Art Network, 231
armed forces, art for, 154–55
Armwood, George, 136
Army Medical Examiner (Minor), 106
arrests, 159, 264, 302–3
of AIDS activists, 254, 256
Black Panther Party response to, 200
of civil rights activists, 191–92, 191, 195
of suffragists, 116, 117, 117, 120
See also imprisonment and jailing
“art” (word), xii
art, feminist. See feminist art
art, government-funded. See government-funded art
art, African American. See African American art and artists
art, Chicana/o. See Chicana/o art and artists
art, feminist. See feminist art