CategoriesStyles and Movements
Social Action
Contemporary art that intervenes in social and political life through organising, protest, education and community projects.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Social Action are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Some artists measure their work less by what it looks like than by what it does. Social action art, often called social practice, takes on migration, housing, labour, health and climate, and it usually happens in the world rather than on a wall: as organising, teaching, protest or long-term community projects.
Its roots include Joseph Beuys's idea of “social sculpture” and feminist projects such as Suzanne Lacy's Three Weeks in May (1977), which mapped reported rapes across Los Angeles and staged events around them. In the late 1980s the collective Gran Fury made posters and billboards for the AIDS activist group ACT UP. Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses (begun 1993) turned shotgun houses in Houston into studios and homes for young mothers; Theaster Gates restores buildings on Chicago's South Side as cultural spaces; Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International (2011) ran as a community centre in Queens. Often only documentation remains.
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