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We discussed the silent work that art does - when it makes us brave and when it makes us believe in our collective capacity to create change. The panelists spoke candidly about the protest art that changed them or their ideas of the world in profound ways. A different group on a different day would have come up with a different list, but disagreement and debate were always at the heart of this project. It should go without saying that our answers to these questions, as well as the list we produced (which is ordered by the flow of our conversation), are not definitive. Is it a slogan? A poster? Does it matter if it was in a museum, in a newspaper or out on the street? Does impact matter? Did it change what you think or believe? Must it endure? What does that mean? And what is the difference, anyway, between protest art and art that is merely political? But the question of what, precisely, constitutes protest art is a thorny one - and we kept tripping over it. We focused specifically on visual art - not songs or books - and the hope was that together, we would assemble a list of the top 25. I had asked each to nominate five to seven works of what they considered the most powerful or influential American protest art (that is, by an American artist or by an artist who has lived or exhibited their work in America) made anytime after World War II. On a recent afternoon, the artists Dread Scott, Catherine Opie and Shirin Neshat, as well as T contributor Nikil Saval and Whitney Museum of American Art assistant curator Rujeko Hockley, joined me on Zoom for a conversation about protest art.
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By Thessaly La Force, Zoƫ Lescaze, Nancy Hass and M.H.