Art and Social Movements

Art and Social Movements offers a comparative, cross-border analysis of the role of visual artists in three social movements from the late 1960s through the early 1990s: the 1968 student movement and subsequent activist art collectives in Mexico City, a Zapotec indigenous struggle in Oaxaca, and the Chicano movement in California. It explores the ways in which artists helped shape the identities and visions of a generation of Mexican and Chicano activists by creating new visual discourses. Based on Edward McCaughan's extensive research in archives and museums and interviews, the book is also rooted in his own participation in some of the movements he explores. McCaughan argues that the social power of activist artists emanates from their ability to provoke people to see, think, and act in new ways. Artists, he claims, helped to create visual languages and spaces through which activists can imagine and perform new collective identities and new forms of meaningful citizenship. In examining the role of activist artists, McCaughan contributes to an understanding of social movements by integrating insights from scholarship on the cultural politics of representation with structural analysis of specific historical contexts.