A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  25. Erika Doss, “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at The Black Panther,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 186.

  26. Chisholm was a progressive Democrat who was elected to the New York state legislature in 1964, and in 1968 she became the first black woman elected to Congress. In 1972, she was the first Democratic black candidate for president. She lost in the Democratic primary and survived three attempted assassination attempts during the campaign. Chisholm held her seat in Congress from 1969 to 1983 and advocated on behalf of inner-city residents; promoted bills for social spending for education, health care, minimum wage, and day care; and opposed military funding and the draft.

  27. Fax, Black Artists of the New Generation, 278.

  28. Edward P. Morgan, “Media Culture and the Public Memory of the Black Panther Party,” in Lazerow and Williams In Search of the Black Panther Party, 335.

  29. The Black Panther, May, 18, 1968; republished in Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, 43.

  30. Bourne, “An Artist for the People,” 203.

  Chapter 20: Protesting the Museum Industrial Complex

  1. Malevich’s painting was not chosen arbitrarily. He was a modernist abstract artist who joined the Russian Revolution, and his paintings became part of the visual language of revolutionary art. GAAG, thus, aligned themselves in solidarity with Malevich and suggested that his work had lost its radical meaning hanging on the walls of MoMA as an art object.

  2. The Guerrilla Art Action Group, The Guerrilla Art Action Group: 1969–1976: A Selection (New York, Printed Matter, 2011, orig. pub. in 1978), Number 2.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid., Number 3.

  5. Ibid., Number 3.

  6. “Guerrilla Art Action—Toche and Hendricks talk to Gregory Battcock,” interview, October 18, 1971, in ibid., Number 25.

  7. The Guerrilla Art Action Group, The Guerrilla Art Action Group, Number 49.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid., Number 10.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 154.

  12. Ibid., 126.

  13. Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York Since 1969,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985, Julie Ault, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press/The Drawing Center, 2002), 79.

  14. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 120.

  15. Ibid., 117.

  16. Roman Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left: The Art Workers Coalition and the Emergence of a New Collectivism (A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 58.

  17. Ibid., 74.

  18. Equal gender representation in exhibitions was not included in the first list of demands, but it was later added—a sign of the frustration that many women artists had with the men in AWC who tried to control leadership.

  19. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 113.

  20. Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left, 74.

  21. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 117.

  22. Lucy R. Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984), 30.

  23. Ibid., 30–31.

  24. The AWC influenced others to organize as well. The Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement was drafted in 1971 by artist Seth Sigelaub and lawyer Bob Projansky. Their other influence can be felt in the passing of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. For more recent discussions on artists’ rights and artists’ economic issues, see, Temporary Services, Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, 2009, http://www.artandwork.us/.

  Additionally, the AWC helped influence artists to start spaces. Their meeting space was a rented loft called “MUSEUM” at 729 Broadway. Petruniak argues that this space “set a precedent for the later development of the ‘Alternative Spaces Movement’ throughout the seventies and eighties”—most notably Artists’ Meeting for Cultural Change (1975), Collab (1978), Group Material (1979), ABC No Rio (1980), PAD/D, and REPOhistory (1989). See Petruniak, Art Workers on the Left, 101.

  24. Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1990), 175.

  26. Frazer Dougherty is often listed as Frazier Dougherty or Fraser Dougherty.

  27. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 182.

  28. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street, 149.

  29. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 184.

  30. The AWC had previously tried unsuccessfully to lobby Picasso to remove Guernica from MoMA as a protest against U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

  31. Temporary Services, Jean Toche / Guerilla Art Action Group (self-published zine, part of the Temporary Conversations series, 2008), 25.

  Chapter 21: The Living, Breathing Embodiment of a Culture Transformed

  1. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 1970–75,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 35.

  2. Faith Wilding, By Our Own Hands: The Women Artist’s Movement, Southern California 1970–1976 (Santa Monica: Double X, 1977), 10.

  3. Wilding, By Our Own Hands, 11.

  4. Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs,” 34.

  5. Ibid., 35.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Wilding, By Our Own Hands, 14.

  8. Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in Broude and Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art, 58.

  9. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs,” 41.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Cheri Gaulke, “1+1=3: Art and Collaboration at the WB,” in Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, Meg Linton and Sue Maberry, curators (exhibition catalog, Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 23.

  12. Ibid., 27.

  13. Jenni Sorkin, “Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building” in Linton and Maberry, Doin’ It in Public, 60.

  14. An incomplete list of some of the radical artists’ groups and radical alternative spaces that were established during the same period as the Woman’s Building, or after, include: Artists’ Meeting for Cultural Change (1975), Collab (1978), Group Material (1979), ABC No Rio (1980), PAD/D (1981), Guerrilla Girls (1985), Critical Art Ensemble (1987), REPOhistory (1989), Temporary Services (1998), 16 Beaver Group (1999), the Dirt Palace (2000), the Beehive Collective (2000), Mess Hall (2003), Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (2007), and InCUBATE (2007).

  15. Gaulke, “1+1=3,” 29.

  Chapter 22: Public Rituals, Media Performances, and Citywide Interventions

  1. Cheri Gaulke, “Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Woman’s Building,” in The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978–1998, Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland, eds. (Gardiner, NY: Critical Press, 1998), 14.

  2. Suzanne Lacy, Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics: 1974–2007 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 96.

  3. Suzanne Lacy, “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 269.

  4. Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 65.

  5. Groups and organizations that help co-organize Three Weeks in May included the Studio Watts Workshop, the City Attorney’s Office, the Commission on Public Works, t
he Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women, Women Against Violence Against Women, the East Los Angeles Hotline, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Ocean Park Community Center Women’s Shelter. See Irish, Spaces Suzanne Lacy, 64.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Laura Meyer, “Constructing a New Paradigm: European American Women Artists in California 1950–2000,” in Art, Women, California 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 107.

  8. Richard Newton, “She Who Would Fly: An Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” in Burnham and Durland, eds., The Citizen Artist, 11.

  9. Irish, Suzanne Lacy, 71.

  10. Lacy, Leaving Art, 122.

  11. Lacy, “Affinities,” 267.

  Chapter 23: No Apologies: Asco, Performance Art, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement

  1. “Oral History Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr., 1999, Apr. 1–16,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  2. Ibid.

  3. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Social UnWest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.,” Wide Angle, 20, no 3 (July 1998): 54–78.

  4. See Mario T. García and Sal Castro: Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

  5. Nora Bebavidez, “Harry Gamboa, Jr: L.A. Urban Exile,” interview, August, 23, 2010, http://www.harrygamboajr.com.

  6. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderburg, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 203.

  7. An Asco work that responded directly to the events of the National Chicano Moratorium March and the death of Salazar was their 1977 mural Black and White Mural, painted by Herrón and Gronk. The mural was painted at the Estrada Courts Housing Projects in East L.A., and Herrón and Gronk painted it to look like a series of black-and-white film reels or television screen shots. Images of the riot and Salazar’s death were interwoven with snapshots of Asco performances, abstract images, graffiti tags, and other images. See Max Benavidez, Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007), 22–33.

  8. Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish, Viva La Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2008), 187.

  9. Chavoya, “Social UnWest,” 54–78.

  10. Sandra de la Loza argues that other factors also influenced Chicana/o murals at the time in Los Angeles: “Although dominant discourse on Chicana/o art of the 1970s tends to focus on overt examples of Chicana/o iconography and political imagery, there is no denying the aesthetic and ideological impact of psychedelia and the countercultural impulse of the time . . . Third World liberation movements, student strikes, antiwar demonstrations, and experimentation with music, drugs, sexuality, and lifestyles all contributed to a visual language that became popular in the larger culture and surfaced in Chicana/o murals.” See Sandra de la Loza, “La Raza Cosmica: An Investigation into the Space of Chicana/o Muralism,” in L.A. Xicano, Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, eds. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 57.

  11. Steven Durland and Linda Burnham, “Interview with Gronk,” High Performance 35, vol. 9, no. 3 (1986): 57.

  12. George Vargas, Contemporary Chicano Art: Color and Culture for a New America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 206.

  13. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 205.

  14. Asco’s name came about after the group had already been collaborating for three years. In September 1974 Gronk, Herrón, and Valdez staged an art show at Self Help Graphics titled Asco: An Exhibition of Our Worst Work. Shortly thereafter, Asco became the official name of the collective.

  15. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 197.

  16. Description of the work inspired by Noriega’s analysis, which reads, “Herrón’s tortured mural faces—perhaps a veiled reference to the tripartite ‘mestizo head’ symbolizing the racial mixture of Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the Americas—become so bored with their place within the racial mythology of Chicano nationalism that they walk off the wall and into the streets,” Ibid., 10.

  17. Ibid., 196.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Vargas, Contemporary Chicano Art, 203.

  20. Ibid., 206.

  21. Photographic stills and media manipulation were the driving concept behind Asco’s project No Movies. Gamboa would photograph Asco members dressed up as film stars, playing pretend roles in pretend movies. Gronk describes No Movies as “making a movie without the use of celluloid. It’s projecting that real without the reel.” The stills would then be mailed off as representations of real movies. Conceptually, No Movies critiqued the lack of access that Chicanos had to the film and media industry. See Harry Gamboa Jr., in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., (Chon A. Noriega, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12.

  22. Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 194–195.

  23. Valdez was not invited to take part in the spray-paint action, for the three men in Asco felt it was too dangerous and anticipated having to run from the police or getting arrested. Instead, she was photographed the following morning by Gamboa Jr. standing on a walkway above the tags. Valdez’s diminished role in this action left Asco open for criticism for reinforcing patriarchal attitudes.

  24. Harry Gamboa Jr., “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or, Asco Was a Four-Member Word) (1991),” in Urban Exile, 79.

  25. Chon A. Noriega, “Asco: Your Art Disgusts Me,” Afterall 19, no. 19, (Autumn/Winter, 2008): 109.

  26. Gamboa Jr. “In the City of Angels,” 82.

  27. “Oral History Interview with Willie Herrón, 2000 Feb. 5–March 17,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  28. Ibid.

  29. By the late ’70s/ early ’80s, the four original members of Asco began to collaborate less with one another. They transitioned into individually based projects and other forms of expression, including music and running alternative art spaces. During this time, Asco took on more members, expanding to more than twenty artists. Past projects even became absorbed into museum shows, including LACMA, the same institution that they had so poignantly critiqued. That said, Asco members have not softened their critique of institutions. Gamboa Jr. stated in a 2004 interview, “Museums are basically display cases for the wealthy and for a particular audience. The museums here in L.A. are particularly anti-Chicano and so are their audiences. And I’m not about to waste another breath on them. The way that capitalism causes cultural amnesia it will be amazing if anyone remembers that our ancestors were from Mexico to begin with!” See Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Harry Gamboa Jr.: Ephemerality in an Urban Desert: an Interview,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 52–62.

  30. Benavidez, Gronk, 40.

  Chapter 24: Art Is Not Enough

  1. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 104, 137.

  2. Ibid., 60.

  3. Ibid., 236.

  4. ACT UP was not the first group, and certainly not the only group, to address the AIDS crisis, but the organization gained the most media attention for their confrontational tactics.

  5. Gould, Moving Politics, 188.

  6. Major insurance companies would not cover people with AIDS or people at risk for AIDS. Medicaid would, but would not cover the costs of experimental drugs. See Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 28.

  7. Gould, Moving Politics, 190.

  8. Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Michael Nesline,” March 24, 2003, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 014, 14.

  9. Ibid., 15.

  10. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 20.

>   11. Gran Fury (Tom Kalin, Michael Nesline, and John Lindell), “A Presentation,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, William Bradley and Charles Esche, eds. (London: Tate Publishing in Association with Afterall, 2007), 280.

  12. Gran Fury’s members included Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco. McAlpin and McCarty also notes that Anthony Viti, Todd Haynes, and Ana Held were involved in the collective for a short duration. See Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Loring McAlpin,” August 18, 2008, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 098, 30; Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarty, February 21, 2004, ACT UP Oral History Project, interview number 044, 17.

  13. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 72.

  14. Gould, Moving Politics, 96.

  15. Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, 73.

  16. Karrie Jacobs and Steven Heller, Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era (Layton: Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992), 14.

  17. The AIDS crisis was severely underreported by the New York Times during the early stages of the epidemic. Seven articles were run over a nineteen-month period, compared to fifty-four articles on the Tylenol scare in 1982.

  18. Schulman, “Interview with Michael Nesline,” 32.

  19. Ibid., 30.

  20. Jacobs and Heller, Angry Graphics, 12.

  21. A 1989 image, I Am Out, Therefore I Am by Adam Rolston (part of the GANG collective, not Gran Fury), illustrates this point, as it is nearly identical to Barbara Kruger’s 1987 image I Shop, Therefore I Am. The only difference is the slogan. Even the style of font is copied. Marlene McCarty recalled meeting Barbara Kruger in person and saying to her, “You know, we owed you a lot.” Kruger’s response was, “I know, but I’m glad you did it.” Kruger understood that the graphics produced by ACT UP operated in a different realm. They were not designed for art fame or to make a profit, they were designed to serve the needs of a movement where issues of artistic originality became irrelevant. See Sarah Schulman, “Interview with Marlene McCarthy,” February 21, 2004, “Act Up Oral History Project, interview number 044, 33–34.