Shana Nys DambrotThe challenge for political art is how to be both urgently current and thoughtfully timeless, how to communicate compelling ideas with clarity and force but to create objects and images of nuance and mystery. The risk is that neither the art nor the cause will shine. But in Visual Language: The Art of Protest — organized at and with Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects, with the support of Gallery Director Sara Kaplan, by independent curators Coates & Scarry — you’ll find dozens of artists who prove that it can indeed be done.
Penny Byrne: #StandWithUkraine, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects (Photo by Janelle Low)
Enacting dissent from the flank of shifting cultural perspectives, the show hangs on the theory that while art may not, or not always, have the power to directly affect outcomes or policies, that its superpower is to change hearts and minds — creating a cultural environment where direct action can progress. The assembled array of approaches to resistance employ eclectic and sometimes unexpected strategies of humor, beauty, irony, sensuality, materiality, documentation, performance, poetry, design, and contextualized abstraction. “Often art is about escape,” says Fairey, “but sometimes it needs to be about confrontation.”
Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, original poster, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects (Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers)
The show fittingly opens with a blazing juxtaposition of Barbara Kruger’s iconic Your Body is a Battleground poster (first designed for the 1989 pro-choice rally in Washington D.C.), installed facing Ешь Богатых (Eat the Rich) and We Need a New Earth by Pussy Riot / Nadya Tolokonnikova. Kruger’s trademark pre-Supreme black, white, red, newsprint and based san serif defined the era for typophiles, feminists, and political activists along with further elevating street art-infused visual language. It’s both fascinating and horrifying to see it in its original printed form, and to realize its message is even more timely now, decades and generations later. Tolokonnikova, whose recent performance piece Putin’s Ashes earned her a fresh arrest warrant in Russia, staged a 2019 performance that combined environmentalism with anti-capitalism, engaging imperialist aesthetics in finely made red and gold velvet slogan banners and literary ecofeminism in its wintry forest location.
Robbie Conal: Supreme, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
“Barbara Kruger, Robbie Conal, and Emory Douglas were all major influences for me,” says Fairey, “because of the ways they powerfully combined text and image in their art addressing social and political issues.” In the next gallery, Fairey’s own work is flanked by seminal pieces by both Conal and Douglas — the former a portrait of RBG, the latter a piece from the Faireys’ personal collection. Veteran photographer and tireless chronicler of art world and public actions, Cheryl Dunn is well represented by a series of photographs and a recent video work documenting large-scale civic unrest in the past few years.
Guerrilla Girls: Meet The Creeps, 2022, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Nearby, Guerrilla Girls present their latest poster in response to the recent supreme court abortion ruling, Meet The Creeps Who Stripped Away Our Abortion Rights.” In a sense, the Guerrilla Girls adhere most closely to a conventional understanding of what protest art looks like, but at the same time, their approach to fearless, performative, witty and unflinching intergenerational activism against the patriarchal control of modern art has been anything but conventional. Like Kruger, the Girls are beloved figures it’s always a joyful jolt to see, but a shame their good work remains direly necessary.
Andrea Bowers in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
However the unexpected charm of the show is the large number of artists whose work, by contrast, presents physically as unlike traditional notions of protest or activist art as possible. Andrea Bowers brings a beguiling, quiet sweetness to a pointed ecofeminist message with neon and mixed media painting using leafy vine motifs and disarming calligraphy to state, “History Will Remember People Who Destroy Bulldozers as Heroes, Quote by Judi Bari.”
Leila Pazooki: Democracy, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Similarly, Leila Pazooki uses pretty pastel neon to write Orientalism and Democracy in Arabic calligraphy; and a list of trans-ethnographicized art figures (the Chinese Gerhard Richter, the Indian Damien Hirst, Middle Eastern Louise Bourgeois, etc) to push back against the Eurocentric and largely male default of considered greatness. Hana Shahnavaz appropriates the visual tradition and technique of Pesian miniature painting, excelling at its execution but in scale and detail, subverting its homogeneous strictures against individualist flourishes of style, and of a woman with mastery.
Hana Shahnavaz: Wild and Free, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Penny Byrne de- and re-constructs kitschy vintage porcelain figurines to bring awareness to the chilling violence and injustice of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, juxtaposing their cloyingly adorable, pastoral, regal, confectionary presence with advanced weapons and the emblazoned blue and yellow. Maya Hayuk too reflects on the insanity of that war, in elegant and explosive geometrical abstractions based on the flag’s now-iconic color scheme.
Renee Cox: Housewife, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Photographer Renee Cox, painter Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali, and mixed media collage artist Lina Puerta each take portraiture as their starting point — from Cox’s assertions on behalf of black female beauty and the social dimensions these constructs contain; to Ali’s cheeky and pensive color-riot seated portraits of subtly non-binary identity, brave in the Ghanaian cultural context of non-acceptance of the self-determining woman; and Puerta’s tactile, empathetic, poetic portraits of laborers rendered with lovingly rescued found materials. The full exhibition presents these and many other powerful voices in a fractal, inspiring discourse on what can be done to advocate for change and spark a more engaged citizenry across a range of the issues that matter most.
On view at Subliminal Projects, 1331 W Sunset Blvd., Echo Park, through Saturday, March 25; for more information, visit: subliminalprojects.com.
Awanle Hawa Ali, I Can Be Both, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Lina Puerta: Untitled (Red Man), in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Leila Pazooki: Moments Of Glory, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Cheryl Dunn: Washington Square Park, 2017, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova): Ешь Богатых (Eat the Rich), 2019, in Visual Language: The Art of Protest at Subliminal Projects
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