Three books about making art as resistance

Creative people have been using art as a tool of resistance for as long as we've resisted. Here's three excellent books about particular art collectives and communities using visual art, writing, and performance to fight back.

It was Vulgar and It was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic, Jack Lowery

In the 1980s, AIDS was destroying queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color. And no one outside these communities seemed to care. A small group of angry and grieving queer people formed the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). And as part of that group, an art collective called Gran Fury formed to use art as a weapon. They created posters like Silence = Death, encouraging people to speak out to survive. They dropped fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange pinpointing corporate and pharma greed as a killer. They left bloody handprints across New York as an indictment of the city's leadership and inaction. And they made public art outside the FDA, demanding better research, medications, and redefinition of who was vulnerable. The book is a fascinating portrait of the movement, its members, and the effects that reverberate into our current political and medical fuckery. It's vulgar, beautiful, and inspiring.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, Sara Marcus

In the early 1990s, feminist punk groups formed in the Pacific NW and elsewhere, forming a loose collective of musicians making art to decry misogyny, rape, sexualization, and the ways we ground girls into dust. But alongside this music, groups of young girls formed across the country to share stories, make zines, and create their own art, all to demand a better world. This book describes the rise of groups like Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney, along with tracking the rise and fall of a movement led by young girls. It's an excellent introduction to Riot Grrrl; I recommend following up with The Riot Grrrl Collection, a comprehensive reproduction of art and zines made during this time.

Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid, Shayda Kafai

Disability activism is a way to recognize the power of the disabled community, and to call out ableist culture. Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, created radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming bodyminds of color can do. They call into question the centering of white stories in disability rights movements. I recommend following up with Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

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