Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art.

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. The book explores the subtle distinction between activist forms of art and protest by artists, and proposes that contemporary activist art and art activism constitute a broader paradigm shift that reflects the crisis of contemporary capitalism.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Sholette (Queens College, CUNY) jumps headfirst into 21st-century art practice, identifying activism in art as impactful, provocative, and a crucial harbinger of change in an increasingly active field of "socially engaged, collective and participatory art." In chapters illuminating his conceptual framework, the author argues for the dissolution of boundaries that traditionally mark the art and activism divide. In intervening chapters, he explores the history of activism in art starting in the 1960s, the significant "activist turn" in the 1970s, and the 1980s as a turning away from free-market capitalism and reduction of government spending that decimated public art funding, facilitating its invisibility in mainstream art history. An activist, a scholar, and an artist himself, Sholette is careful to disclose his involvement with collectives he uses as examples in chapters devoted to topics such as the art of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, among others. The volume includes a smattering of black-and-white illustrations that serve as brief examples of the art discussed. Helpful notes and further reading sections are also included. This thought-provoking book is part of the "New Directions in Contemporary Art" series, which comprises volumes of newly commissioned criticism--all worth reading, as is Sholette's book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Judy Natal, emerita, Columbia College Chicago

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Gregory Sholette is an activist artist, writer and Professor of studio art at Queens College, CUNY. He has participated in, documented and written about activist art for over forty years.