Art Movements, 1940-2020

ART MOVEMENTS, 1940 - 2020. American Left artists after 1940 continued to focus on the economic, political, and social conditions needing reform or upended. To them, both practice and theory were intertwined. Moreover, these artists considered themselves members of a Left community—going to meetings, writing manifestoes, and marching in the streets—even if the overthrow of capitalism was not their stated goal.

During World War II American artists overwhelmingly supported the Allied cause; some enlisted, some worked in war factories, some created posters for the war effort. Even though the 1940s witnessed record numbers of strikes and worker unrest, Leftist artists generally tamped down revolutionary content in their art; some artists abandoned figuration and moved on to abstract styles. The realists who remained formed such groups as “Reality.” Led by Raphael Soyer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Philip Evergood and others, they met in 1953 to deplore the surge of presumably content-less abstraction and called on artists to “reaffirm human values.” During the mid-1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, few artists produced anti-capitalist art. Exceptions were Black artists, such as Jacob Lawrence, who mined the struggle against poverty and racism as a source for his imagery in his Struggle series, 1954-56. Another artist was William Gropper, investigated by the government in 1953 and who subsequently produced his Capriccios Suite of fifty prints that satirized the agents of fear and repression.

With the 1960s came greater prosperity to the middle classes, and many younger artists working singly moved towards an apolitical “Pop” art. A group of artists, led by George Maciunas, created Fluxus, an international anarchistic neo-Dada movement, although some members later moved toward the political Left. Many artists adapted the ironic stance characteristic of pop art iconography but infused their art with political content, such as Edward Kienholz’s installation about lynching, Five Card Stud (1969-72). Artist Hans Haacke’s exhibitions of photos and text commented on the capitalist base of the real estate business as well as the art market itself. Still, until the late 1960s, no visible Left art movements were in place.

By the late 1960s the social unrest following assassinations, lynchings, body-bags of soldiers returning from the Vietnam War, and the eruption of urban riots across the country—all documented by television images on the evening news—motivated many more Left-leaning artists to join the activist, oppositional politics of the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the Women’s Movement.

The anti-war movement of the 1960s incorporated many of the tactics of the older Ban the Bomb groups. As early as 1965 a group formed in New York called Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam. In Los Angeles artists formed a similar Artists Protest Committee and conducted demonstrations in the spring and summer of 1965. In early 1966, working closely with New York artists and critics, the Los Angeles group sent out a call for artists to contribute to the Peace Tower, erected in Los Angeles by Mark Di Suvero and others. In 1967 the New York group organized an ‘Angry Arts’ week. Artists and Writers Protest kept up their agitation and staged various poetry readings and discussions. A protest wall called ‘Collage of Indignation’ comprising artworks on uniformly sized panels, opened at the Loeb Student Center of New York University. A second Collage of Indignation, organized by Ron Wolin of the SWP and Lucy Lippard, contained anti-war posters.

By 1969, a large coalition group had formed, the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), which held mass meetings in lower Manhattan. The most active street performance group within the coalition was the Guerrilla Art Action Group; they carried out a number of anti-war agitational performances within museum interiors.

As the United States continued to engage in other wars across the globe after the Vietnam era, anti-war protests continued. In the mid-1980s, as the United States stepped up its political interference in Central America, the organization Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America was founded by Salvadoran filmmaker Daniel Flores, critic Lucy Lippard, and artist Doug Ashford. It sparked protests across the United States and Canada, with some fifty different events and exhibitions in New York City alone in 1984.

While Art Workers Coalition membership declined, many activist artists continued to form art/political groups, such as Artists Meeting for Cultural Change founded in 1975, to focus on both the exclusion of minorities on the staffs of museums and the lack of representation by minorities in museum collections. One of its actions was to picket the opening of the 1976 exhibition of the collection of John H. Rockefeller III at the Whitney Museum of American Art, because the collection offered no art of dissent, had no Black artists and only one woman artist. The protesters argued for a more wide-ranging and inclusive exhibition for the Bicentennial year.

In tandem with the growing Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1950s to the late 1960s was the emergence of politically engaged Black artists, writers, and activists—referred to as the Black Arts Movement. Writers Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Jr., and Larry Neal advocated new artistic styles to match a new consciousness of power and self-esteem. Neal wrote what might be considered the manifesto of the movement in his article “Any Day Now: Black Art and Black Liberation,” (Ebony, August 1969): “Black Power, in its most fundamental sense, stands for the principle of Self-Definition and Self-Determination. Black Power teaches us that we must have ultimate control over our own lives. It teaches us that we must make a place on this Earth for ourselves, and that we must construct, through struggle, a world that is compatible with our highest visions.”

In New York, Black visual artists Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, Emma Amos, and others associated with the Harlem art scene, formed the group called Spiral in 1965 to give themselves opportunities to exhibit their art. Another group of Harlem artists founded Weusi (Swahili for “people”) and established a gallery collective called Nyumba Ya Sanaa in 1965.

On the South Side of Chicago a group of Black artists and writers formed the Organization of Black American Culture in 1967, with a writers and a drama workshop. The visual artists—Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald Williams—painted the Wall of Respect mural on Chicago’s South Side. In 1968 the visual artists, joined by Jae Jarrell and Barbara Jones-Hogu renamed themselves the Commune of Bad Relevant Artists; a further name change brought them to AfriCobra; they, too, mounted exhibitions. The most openly “revolutionary,” anti-racist political group was the Black Panther Party, whose Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, did powerful satirical graphics of police confrontations for the Black Panther Party’s newspaper The Black Panther.

Some groups began as reactions to establishment events. Black artists --Benny Andrews, Russ Thompson, Cliff Joseph, and Reginald Gammon—hastily organized the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which responded to and protested the Metropolitan Museum’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind. They accused the Museum of rejecting the participation of Black curators or Harlem residents in the exhibition’s organization, of including only photographs, and for the Museum’s blatant insensitivity to the real economic issues facing Blacks in America. In solidarity, the AWC mounted a protest by invading a trustees’ dinner party at the Met. The BECC organizers later set up storefront museums to bring art to the people, much as the Black Panthers had set up kitchens to feed neighborhood Black children.

In California the Chicano mural movement blossomed from about 1975 to 1985 and the artists stressed the same civil rights and social justice issues as had Black artists. Most famous was the group of young artists, Congresso de Artistas Chicanos en Aztlán, who collectively painted murals on the walls of the Estrada Courts Housing Project in East Los Angeles. Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino described the world that Chicano artists faced: “The Americanization of Mexicans in this country can be seen as a history of both resistance and affirmation in their struggle to survive not as an alien resident under-class, but rather as a multiplicity of citizen classes contributing to the American social whole.” One of the Estrada artists was Giugo Nicandro, who called himself “Gronk,” a multi-media artist who founded Asco (Spanish word meaning “nausea”). Asco became an artists’ collective active in the 1970s and 1980s and which later included Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa, Jr. and Willie Herrón. Public murals were also created throughout Los Angeles by other Latinx artists, such as Judy Baca, Frank Romero, Yreina Cervántez and the collective East Los Streetscapers. Gronk was also a founding member of the artist-run alternative space called Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a collective that featured both alternative and emerging art.

Women had played a major role in the antiwar actions of the 1960s and were vocal early members of the AWC. By the 1970s these women began to redirect their art and activist energies to an analysis of their own situation as women. The first feminist New York City group within the WCA was Women Artists in Revolution, soon to be replaced by the AdHoc Women Artists Committee, founded by Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, Poppy Johnson, and Brenda Miller. They launched protests and engaged in performances in 1970 at the Whitney Sculpture Annual because of its underrepresentation of women sculptors. In 1971, Black women artists led by Faith Ringgold founded their own “Where We At,” which addressed gender issues of Black women; Ringgold’s daughters Michele and Barbara worked for the organization.

On the West Coast Judy Chicago offered a new class at Fresno State College (now California State University) in 1970 focused on women artists and structured as non-heirarchical, “consciousness-raising” sessions. When Chicago moved to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1971, she was joined by New York artist Miriam Schapiro; together they organized the Feminist Art Program and began a collaborative, site-specific project in Los Angeles they called Womanhouse. A hub of activity for women artists, Los Angeles became home to the Woman’s Building (1973-1991), run by a collective that nurtured women artists and sought to change the gender expectations of their audiences. Chicago, on her own, in the mid-1970s organized a team of women artists and supporters and in five years produced “The Dinner Party.”

When Schapiro returned to New York in 1975, she became the pivotal figure of the “Pattern and Decoration” movement. These artists, which included Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Robert Zakanitch, and others, was not specifically Leftist, but was political in advocating the democratic populist mission of breaking down the modernist hierarchical antipodes of elite “high art” painting vs. popular craft.

Critic Lucy Lippard understood the counter-cultural ramifications of women’s art as a conduit for politically revolutionary ideas. Lippard’s reviews and essays were republished in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, 1976. As the 1970s gave way to the next decade, many artists, critics, and art historians moved away from their initial mission to celebrate women’s identities and toward a critique of the structures of power relations that led to discriminations. With Heresies, a collective and publication platform organized in 1977 by Lippard, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Elizabeth Hess, Joyce Kozloff, Mary Miss, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Snyder, May Stevens, Michelle Stuart, and others, a new discourse was launched taking as its premise that gender was mutable and affected by social conditions, race, sexual orientation, ethnic legacies. Issues of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, first published in January 1977, focused on a wide range of subjects, including racism and women of color, violence against women, Latin American indigenous women, women in prisons, lesbian art, and architecture.

The need to speak out on the issues of working-class minorities, especially Spanish-speaking artists and recent immigrants, motivated collectives of artists and their friends, such as Group Material, Fashion Moda, COLab, and ABC No Rio. In 1979 Lucy Lippard “initiated an archive of socially engaged art, and it became an activist artists group almost immediately, although the archive outlived the group.” Described by Hyperallergic writer Tiernan Morgan: “An explicitly leftist organization, PAD/D rejected the pursuit of gallery representation and sought new economic strategies for artists. The group adopted a holistic approach towards art activism. They attended demonstrations; organized meetings, talks, and performances; commissioned artists and exhibitions. They insisted that all art is political on the basis that it reflects the cultural perspective of its creator, regardless of whether a work is explicitly political or not.” PAD/D, as a group, was more “alternative” than “confrontational,” in that it did not confront capitalism as the source of economic inequities. By about 1988 PAD/D members had gradually drifted away, but nevertheless the collective could lay claim to an impressive roster of exhibitions and the publications UpFront and Red Letter Days.

In the 1980s the AIDS crisis swept across the world ,and to combat government indifference, Act Up was founded in New York in March 1987; and chapters quickly spread to all the major cities in the United States, as well as to Berlin, London, and Paris. Within the organization artists created the collective Grand Fury, which produced street posters to advocate education about AIDS.

Meanwhile, a group of New York feminist artists and writers created the Guerrilla Girls in 1985. Keeping their identities anonymous, these women voiced their outrage about art world discrimination against women and people of color in three areas of activity: plastering city walls and buying space in magazines for their posters, picketing exhibitions at museums that they considered sexist and racist, and donning gorilla masks to give lecture/performances, primarily at art schools. In 2020, many of the original women were replaced by subsequent activists, but the message stayed the same.

The 1990s saw the collapse of “high modernism.” The 1993 Biannual of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was the clarion call for new attitudes about art, artists, and artmaking. Few individual paintings on canvas were shown; instead, performance and installations dominated, as well as photography, the video arts, and complex, multivalent mixed media art. The new diversity of artists included a multiplicity of identities including, gender, race, ethnic and geographic origins, and philosophy.

With the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9 September 2001 provided a turning point for both international relations and domestic policies. The US government became a surveillance government, especially targeting people from the Middle East. The widening gap between the very wealthy and the poor visibly increased. New environmental issues (nuclear pollution and climate change), health issues (housing and food insecurity) and social justice issues (police brutality and voter suppression) became subjects for individual artistic and performative expression.

On 17 September 2011, a group of mostly young people gathered at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the center of the financial empire, where they camped for several months. Although there was no discernable political ideology associated with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, the leaders stressed the statistics that 1 % of the richest adults owned the vast majority of the world’s wealth. Such “Occupy” groups rose in other major cities. A collective of artists inspired by OWS founded “Occupy Museums,” and created a mixed media installation called Debtfair, a version of which they showed at the 2017 Whitney Museum Biennial. The content focused on the debts of artists in contrast to art collectors. The premise, printed in the online catalogue for the Whitney exhibition, stated: “Debt markets produce lucrative profits for wealthy individuals who make up the majority of museum board members and the collector class.” Later activist artists targeted museums whose board members headed corporations that produced weapons of war or opiates.

While some individuals and collectives focused on political and social justice issues, such as the necessity for climate-change action, the elimination of gun-violence, and humane immigration legislation, others addressed repressions that targeted the identity concerns of LGBTQ (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer) people and BICOP (Blacks-Indiginous-People of Color), and women. Black artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Steve Locke, Dread Scott, and Kara Walker have drawn on the history of American slavery, Jim Crow racism, and/or the struggles to end discrimination to make statements about burden of the past. All such issues are considered as appropriate content for Left-leaning artists, usually working singly but at times working in collectives.

“Activism” has become a frequent word to describe artists of social conscience, although few belong to Leftist groups that organize meetings, marches, and issue manifestoes. Seasoned activist artists, such as Beverly Naidus, Pablo Helguera, and Gregory Sholette have written guidebooks for artists working collaboratively and collectively. Many artists still wield the conceptual tools of institutional critique, appropriation, and irony, but they find inspiration in community organizing, the “Me, Too” movement, “Black Lives Matter,” and the protests of Latinix, Asian Americans, and Indigenous Peoples. The presidential election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 sparked renewed protest marches, particularly by women who deplored his sexist and racist attitudes. One group, “We Make America,” provided colorful placards, often with witty messages, for many demonstrations in the 2017-2020 period.

The movement for a left political art remained fractured in the United States. Individual leftist artists gained momentum from museums that specialize in the art of specific groups, such as women, Black artists, Asian American artists, Latinx artists, or Indigenous artists. When Black artists and their allies in the 1970s began calling for greater representation in the more traditional established museums, many directors listened and set in motion two campaigns: to hire a more diversified staff and to acquire art and artifacts for their collections that would represent a variety of groups. Progress was slow until the social protest eruptions of the summer of 2020, when museums redoubled their efforts. The content for many exhibitions focused on race-based oppression (including prison incarceration and police brutality), sexism, homophobia, gun violence, anti-immigration governmental policies, environmental issues, and wealth inequalities. Still, the majority members of boards of established museums remained members of the elite who answered to their own corporate boards. The urban streets and storefront gallery spaces continued to be most satisfactory venue for the display of Left movement art.

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