Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

The Nasher’s New Survey Treats Protest as an American Tradition

Curated by Xuxa Rodríguez and featuring works drawn mainly from the museum's own collection, "Turn the volume up!" charts a century of artists responding to injustice.

With midterms right around the corner, there’s no better time to check out “Turn the volume up!” at the Nasher Museum of Art. Curated by the museum’s Xuxa Rodríguez, the new show is a survey of protest art drawn mainly from the permanent collection, spanning from the 1930s through today. Highlighting blue-chip practitioners like Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, the Guerrilla Girls and Chuck Close alongside less flashy names like Marielle Plaisir, Robert Colescott and Sam Durant, the exhibit is organized in six sections—Remarks, Organize, Records, Dissents and Petition—and explores how communities mobilize and advocate for justice.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Just as speeches in Congress are put on record, so can average citizens go to City Hall or public meetings and say, “I’d like my remarks recorded.” Similarly, artists in the show have compiled their own remarks commenting on historical and current injustices, like Colescott’s The Wreckage of the Medusa, his 1978 prologue to Théodore Géricault’s immortal 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa, depicting survivors of a shipwreck that made headlines at the time. Colescott’s response is to change the context of the disaster to comment on his own country and Jim Crow era injustices that persist today.

“He’s here right after the ship is sunk. He’s centralizing it in the United States and talking about the history of racism and discrimination,” Rodríguez says of Colescott’s acrylic canvas, one of the few loaners for the show. In it, the ship’s captain hides his face in shame as a stereotypical black man swims like a shark toward a buxom blonde.........

© Observer