We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change.
Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguińiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brownand the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.
Recenzijos
We Make Each Other Beautiful swan dives into the activist projects of US-based and diasporic artists as wide-ranging as Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguińiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown that trace the emergence and cultural trajectories of these artivists' networks of radical affinities and models of care.
(Hyperallergic) An important bridge between the academic and artistic worlds she inhabits, We Make Each Other Beautiful elucidates not only the role that artists play in society with syntactical brio but also how the most rigorous critiques of the law often emerge from artistic practice.
(Hyperallergic)
Introduction
1. Artivism Avant La Lettre
2. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie MaeWeems' Challenge to
Copyright and Property Law
3. "I just didn't feel safe, but I don't feel safe a lot of times in alot of
different places:": Young Joon Kwak's Mutant Salon andthe queer need for
safer and thriving spaces
4. "How did we get here?": Tanya Aguińiga's art about theborder and
disability law
5. "There are so many stories like that, too, of the governmentand private
companies relinquishing their responsibility to thepeople of New Orleans, who
had lost everything":: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Blights Out, and Live Action
Painting(2015
6. "We wanted to open up and surpass those usualunderstandings:": Drawn
Together and fair artists' contracts
Conclusion: An art dedicated to survival: Art, law, hope, and the wayahead
Yxta Maya Murray is David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of eight novels, including Art Is Everything and God Went Like That. Her art criticism and journalism have appeared in Artforum and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
