Art that Challenges and Confronts
Art about race, social injustice and inequality, whether challenging, confronting, or bearing witness, feels so important and relevant to the moment we are living right now. This page has resources to help students interested in exploring challenging topics with links to articles and artists who work at this edge.
read New Yorker article on Kerry James Marshall's America
Responding to feelings and events
Many students want to make art about challenging topics that are clearly important to them, and yet often struggle with how to do so meaningfully. Generalizing can lead to stereotypical or clichè solutions, like depicting a gun = violence. Being specific seems to help. As does having a clear understanding of context and history. Ask yourself, what kind of relationship do you have with the issue, what personal values do you feel are being violated? You dont have to be a victim of racism to feel anger, you dont have to be a refugee to feel adrift. We can respond to powerful feelings from wherever we are:
- from direct experience
- as a witness
- confronting privilege
- by challenging the status quo
Resources by topics
articles and links to help you gather information, ideas and material to support your research in your portfolio, for The Comparative Study or The Extended Essay and to fuel and inform your own creative expression.
Race in America
"An artist’s identity and experiences implicitly inform, and in some cases even drive, the work they create."
African American artists past and present ... a few of the many
Carrie Mae Weems
Kerry James Marshall
Horace Pippen
Jacob Lawrence
Romare Bearden
Amy Sherald
Lorna Simpson
Robert Colescott
David Hammons
Fred Wilson
Jean Michel Basquiat
Kehinde Wiley
Kara Walker
Faith Ringgold
Mark Bradford
Alma Thomas
Barkley Hendricks
Mickalene Thomas
Titus Kaphar
This art 21 playlist Portraying the Black American Experience shows 14 videos of artists who expand the conversations we have around bias, race, and representation.
White artists respond to racial discrimination
Ti-Rock Moore explains that "Political or protest art: both are suitable ways to describe my work. My responsibility as a white ally, artist and activist is not simply to acknowledge racism outright, but to target those namely fellow white Americans who turn a blind eye to systemic oppression." And perhaps she speaks for most artists when she says, "I have been an activist for decades, but I know that my art speaks much more loudly than I ever could."
Artist Carson Ellis combed through the database of police killings that resulted in fatalities of unarmed African Americans. She picked 20 of them to illustrate and read everything she could about them. "I cried and cried," says Ellis, who is white. "It brought me face to face with very hard truths about being black in America, and about being white in America. I never doubted the existence of racism, but after this, I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of it."
source: Washington Post article on The most powerful art from #Black Lives Matter
Need a bit more background? Try this brief history of Black art in America
NYT art that challenges and confronts racism
An article that reviews books, music and films that address racism. Each of these is a portal into exploring racism, with specific characters and stories, jumping off points for making visual art. For example...
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson (nonfiction book, 2010)
“This American Life,” “House Rules” (podcast, 2013)
“The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates (article, 2014)
“Formation,” Beyoncé (music video, 2016)
“We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service,” A Tribe Called Quest (album, 2016)
“Revisionist History, “Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment” (podcast, 2017)
I am black alive and looking back at you. (June Jordan)
Elizabeth Alexander writes:
"There are so many visual artists responding to this changing same: Henry Taylor, Michael Rakowitz, Ja’Tovia Gary, Carrie Mae Weems, lauren woods, Alexandra Bell, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, Steffani Jemison, Kerry James Marshall, Titus Kaphar. To pause at one work: Dread Scott’s “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday,” which he made in the wake of the police shooting of Walter Scott, in 2015, echoes the flag reading “A man was lynched yesterday” that the N.A.A.C.P. flew outside its New York headquarters between 1920 and 1938 to mark the lynchings of black people in the United States.
... three short films that address the Trayvon Generation with particular power: Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012); his “Never Catch Me,” with Kendrick Lamar (2014); and Lamar’s “Alright” (2015)."
- excerpt from The Trayvon Generation, Elizabeth Alexander, June 2020, The New Yorker Magazine
Gender bias
National Museum of Women in the Arts - get the facts
Khan Academy brief history of women in art- How have women been represented, underrepresented, and misrepresented in art history?
Gender Identity
Rise Art Contemporay artists questioning gender norms
6 emerging figurative artists who re-define gender identity through depictions of the body, dress and everyday objects, challenging traditionally feminine and masculine ideals to blur boundaries.
There are many other topics not discussed here, other forms of social injustice, racism, religious persecution, sexual abuse, environmental damage, sadly the list goes on. Whatever topic speaks to your heart, maybe you can find a meaningful way to address it, taking your invitation from the same creative challenge at the top of this page.