Art is Activism: Why Social Movements Need Art and Artists
Activist art from the Black Panther Party
Activism takes many forms: organizing community events, speaking at city council, educating people about their rights, providing mutual aid, and more. Yet, when we imagine activists, we often picture protestors marching down streets to shout at police; though we may think of the aforementioned examples after a moment. What we tend to overlook, however, is the writer hunched over a desk, the painter standing at an easel, the musician in a recording booth.
We tend to overlook artists even though these artists can be as much an activist as anyone engaged in a street protest. Through work that gives visions for new worlds, by embodying new cultures in the act of creation, Artists are essential activists in any movement, which is why every meaningful movement in history has leaned on artists for inspiration.
If you want to build a new world, you need artists. Even still, in less-cultured activists circles, artists get a bad rap. They’re derided as elitist, armchair activists. The irony of making such a statement – and in doing so placing one class of activist below another – seems lost on those who lob these lazy attacks.
That being said, the critique of artists as elitists is in some ways justified. Alain Locke, the man credited as the philosophical father of the Harlem Renaissance, said, “Culture must develop an elite, must maintain itself upon the basis of standards that can move forward but never backward.” In other words, art must be elitist for art to advance. We see the same in sports.
Every generation of athletes strives to outperform the previous, not that you’ll hear Olympic athletes accused of elitism. They are the best at what they do, and the world knows it. So perhaps accusations of elitism in art should be seen almost as a compliment. That being said, when it comes to art as activism, the artist must strive for excellence while avoiding the genres of art which remain inaccessible to those they wish to speak.
As for accusation of artists as, at best, armchair activists, such aspersions cannot stand. I’ll admit that not all artists and not all art is created equal. Not everyone sets out to bring into the world work that contributes to our collective liberation. In fact, it is far easier to create art that upholds rather than challenges the existing system. It is easier to create aesthetic art than activist art.
It takes intentional effort and critical thought to dig into the depths of lived experience and collective visioning to extract inspiration for art that envisions a more just world and evinces the paths we can follow to make that world real. That’s what the best forms of art as activism do: Make a new world not only tangible but possible.
Art as Activism Gives Social Movements Substance
Often, social movements leave descriptions of what comes next to uncertain abstraction, and when they do attempt to describe it, the images are cloaked in a dense fog of philosophical language. Movements on the left will talk in the abstract – often using the same tired language George Orwell decried eighty years ago in “Politics and the English Language” – about tearing down the bourgeois status quo that exploits the working class and laying the foundation for a radical transformation to a more human world.
But when pressed to provide examples of what this world looks like and how we create it, they stutter and stumble and speak as though life were a political pamphlet, using language that further obscures their objectives, all while gesticulating in hopes of using body language to animate the emotions they cannot reach with words alone. I don’t say this to hurl insults at others. I speak as a repentant sinner once guilty of these same acts, who now uses art to walk a new path.
For a long time, as a well-read writer and an educated orator, I looked to philosophy as my guide, for works of political philosophy have their place in the world of movement-building, but just because Karl Mark, Vladimir Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, and others wrote intimidating intellectual tomes does not mean they are a necessary precursor to public rebellion.
In fact – given it takes a sharpened mind to pierce their dense, dialectical discussions – where such philosophies seek to reinforce mass movements, they may introduce fractures as they create an unintended divide between those who, through tracts and treatises, can understand the theoretical underpinnings of the uprising and those who can’t, but who nonetheless have an intuitive understanding etched into their bones from sleeping on the street or losing loved ones to a violent system.
Art, on the other hand, can mend those fractures and build bridges. Art can bring people in who never strode the tiled halls of higher education. Art can provide clear and concrete visions for the world we aim to create and the paths we can follow to get there. Art can do this in a way that almost anyone can connect with, understand, and relate to.
By presenting the world as it is and as it could be through sound, through symbols, through sentences; art provides new avenues for understanding where we’re going, what obstacles we’re up against, and how we’re going to overcome them.
Without art to anchor us, our ideas float free without form. Our theories become, at best, jellyfish swimming through the deep, dark sea: They retain stingers to strike those who venture to close, but without a skeleton to support them, they pose little threat to what unfolds in the light of land. Our theories, ideas, and strategies need more substance if we wish to surge above the surface. We need a body hardened for battle. This is what art allows.
Art makes abstract ideas solid and certain. Art provides a shell to support our advances onto land. Art takes us from soft-bodied jellyfish to hard-bodied crabs ready to scuttle across the sand with pincers prepared to snap at our foes as we make our inward approach. Though like crabs, as we make our initial encroach, we must still scurry between tide pools, between spaces of shelter as we accustom ourselves to life on land before we make it our own.
These areas of refuge are essential for our success. We need places where we can rest, recover, and regroup before we continue our sidelong assault on an outworn empire of animals. These safe spaces are created by communities, and they are spaces replete with art, for there is much that art can and must do. Beyond providing substance to abstraction, art and artists offer us examples of how we adapt to and embody the new world we aim to shape.
Artist Activists Provide a New Way of Being
In the plaque describing his piece in the Our Blue Planet exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum this past Spring, Australian Aboriginal artist Syd Bruce Short Joe said, “My art is a bridge from my people’s way to the outside world.” This bridge building is a critical component of what art offers.
It bridges the gap between existing cultures with opposing views and allows them to understand each other. But almost more importantly, art bridges the gap between the cultures that exist and the cultures we want to create. This can’t be achieved any other way.
People are so deeply embedded in their ways of doing and being that imagining, let alone enacting, an alternative is all but impossible for most. Art provides a path for that imagining. Art is the only compass that can guide us to the future we want to build, we need to build.
Art points the way because the artist has long sought to find it. The artist has walked many paths to see where they lead, and now returns to present the best path to their audience. In this vein, James Baldwin wrote,
“The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society – the politicians, legislators, educators, scientists, et cetera – by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being.”
In revealing to us these mysteries, the artist also seeks to offer ways to change ourselves and provide pathways to harness the ever-changing nature of the world in the direction best fit to our health and happiness.
I believe, as do many, it is in a world freed from the confines of capitalism that we can find ourselves in a place best fit for our health and happiness. Art provides a path to that world. Not just through the subject of a work of art, but through what art is.
While the best art serves a multiplicity of purposes – to embody Beauty, to evoke emotion, to reveal the audience to themselves – the magic of art for the anti-capitalist artist is that art lacks function; it has no use. Amid the act of creation, the artist exists only to create that which, in the most literal sense, is useless. You cannot do anything with art beyond consume it, digest it, and be moved by it. I cannot think of anything more antithetical to the productivity-consumed culture of capitalism.
Therefore, not only can art provide an inspired vision for the land we wish to one day reach, the artist-at-work becomes a beacon burning atop a lighthouse tower, illuminating the way for servant leaders steering shiploads of weary passengers through dark and treacherous waters to this new land. When an artist exists in the unadulterated act of creation, they embody the way of the new world, a world in which people are empowered to embrace their birth right: To be.
For these reasons and more, artists have been central to mass movements for generations. They created works that inspired bystanders to act, that fortified frontline fighters to keep going, that caused enemies of progress to question their opposition. The art activists created amid movements were so influential that they’ve retained their power for decades.
Examples of Art as Activism
The beauty, emotion, and power of movement art even led Tate Modern and the Brooklyn Museum to curate independent exhibits showcasing these works.
Referring to the exhibit at the Tate Modern, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, wrote, “This exhibition … reaffirms the integral role of art in the fight for social change and the quest for freedom of expression.”
And Kellie Jones, the co-editor of the essay collection and art book describing the exhibit Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties at the Brooklyn Museum, said, “Artists here and elsewhere not only create objects that reflect or comment on these times; they are these times. These works are a part of the landscape of forward motion, they process; they are the ‘Now!’”
These are not the only exhibits, museums, or galleries to showcase art that shaped society. But often, you won’t find most activist art in gallery halls. That’s not where many are meant to be. Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, said, “By taking it out of the museum and putting it on the street with the people, the revolutionary artist educates the people as they go through their daily routine.”
This is why the Black Panther Party’s art focus became one of murals, newspaper comics, and posters. Kellie Jones even described the posters “as the quintessential activist art form. Vibrant and with endless possibilities of image, the poster was inexpensive to make, own, and distribute.”
I could go on and on about the different manifestation of activist artistry, and others have. In Art and Politics Now, through her lens as an academic, activist, and art critic, Susan Noyes Platt describes dozens of examples of how art aided and advanced an array of social movements across the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s. Her descriptions reach far beyond the Afrocentric examples I shared above.
And in the well-loved book, Zapantera Negra, editors Marc James Leger and David Tomas describe how the art of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers informed and enhanced their respective movements, impacted each other, and helped build solidarity between these disparate movements striving for similar goals.
With all this in mind, if you are an artist, don’t allow anyone to tell you that you aren’t taking action, that you aren’t contributing to the movement. The work you create and the life you lead that are so inextricably intertwined are the embodiment of the movement. Art is activism.
Art is essential to the new world we’re building. As German artist Bertolt Brecht said, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” So, go make art. Go shape the world.
