Art and Democracy

In the fall of 1971, a group of women began renovating 533 Mariposa Street in Hollywood. This old mansion would become the Womanhouse, a collaborative project directed by artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, along with many others. When working with female artists, Chicago and Schapiro noted that oftentimes instead of making art women would…

If an artist says she accepts full responsibility for any actions the audience does to her during a performance piece, does that mean the audience could get away with murdering her? This was a debate that came up in the audience during Marina Abramović’s performance of Rhythm 0. The piece was a six-hour performance during…

CW: Discussion of rape and sexual assault   Three Weeks in May was a performance and installation work characterized as a “happening” created by Suzanne Lacy to rile up opposition against rape culture and educate the public about the pervasiveness of rape. Lacy set up two large maps of Los Angeles and stamped the word…

Yayoi Kusama staged the performance piece, Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street, in front of the New York Stock Exchange in October of 1968. Kusama hired four dancers to dance nude in front of the building while the artist painted dots across their bodies. The work was a protest against the Vietnam War and the capitalist…

The weather in London is notoriously dreary year round. The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson decided to use this shared belief as a central aspect of his work, The Weather Project, 2003, by installing heat lamps to construct a massive sun in the Tate Modern Museum’s Turbine Hall, recreating the sun and sky. Eliasson distributed surveys…

Street vendors, peddlers, and panhandlers are often socially stigmatized and cast aside from the rest of society. Their presence is often characterized as a nuisance or as evidence of a perceived danger or indication that you are entering “the wrong side of town”. David Hammons’ work Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983 examines this notion in conjunction…

As a society, we have become apathetic towards disaster. This is not to say that we do not feel the effects of devastating events that occur, rather, we react and move on until the next one inevitably hits. Dow Chemical, 2004 by the Yes Men is an interrogative artwork that explores this issue alongside a…

Open up any major editorial magazine and you will see skinny mostly white men and women. The men usually dominate any frame they are apart of and you don’t get any sense of who these people truly are. Open Martine Gutierrez’s “Indigenous Woman”magazine and you are faced with photographs of Gutierrez herself. The Latinx transgender…

When you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art there are iconic pieces that you expect to see. One is the Temple of Dendur which consumes a large gallery. In front of it is a pool of water that people normally toss coins into. It’s a site for Instagram worthy photos. On October 3rd however, it…

A ping pong table sets two people opposite each other at a table. There are a set of rules that the two people follow, which are fairly simple and easy to follow. The game of ping pong is widely known. You probably don’t need to even look up the rules. What happens when you change…