Panels

In 1992, commenting on the disavowal of radical artistic practice by institutions in the US, the artist Mike Kelley wrote that “It will be a cold day in Hell when you see a major American museum mount a show of the cultural production of the Black Panthers.” That day seems to have arrived. In the last decade, a number of important transnational exhibitions have reconsidered the relationship between art and politics in the United States during, and beyond the 1960s. These include Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2012) The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013) Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2016) Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017) and the enormously successful Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017). These exhibitions all establish the same periodization, which attempts to measure the afterlives of the 1960s Civil Rights Movements, struggles around gender, sexuality and labor up until the high water mark of neoliberalism in the US during the mid-1980s. This panel offers a reflection on a range of practices that have been addressed in this recent curatorial history: from the work of Melvin Edwards, to militant poster production in the Bay Area, to the relationship between art and the War on Poverty. In addressing these practices, the panel explores ways to rethink the 1960s through the frame of internationalism, the everyday, and also by examining how artistic radicalism interacted with American state formation.