Global Artivisms

Presently, there is a an increasingly hardening of frameworks to describe, understand, and relate to social, political, and cultural changes. This environment often inhibits people and communities from developing nuanced vocabularies to act upon an increasingly complex realities, including rising economic inequality, growing migration, and climate change.

Since at least the late nineteenth century, one path to generating new frames and vocabularies has been what we now call “artivism.” The term is a neologism from the 1990s, when artists increasingly employed artistic practices to make public or “activist” interventions in institutions, debates, and other contexts where existing strategies had become ineffective or stale.

In this course, we will examine the emergence, limits, and potential of “artivism” as a praxis. Through case studies from the United States and other parts of the world, the course will explore a range of questions, including: What is artivism? Is it simply art that is activist, or is it a different conception of art and activism? Why did this praxis emerge and extend in most of the world? What are some of artivism’s effects? How has the expansion of the Internet change artivism and artivists?