Paint the Protest

Off Paradise is pleased to present Paint the Protest, a group exhibition curated by Nancy Spector honoring artists who center cultural dissent in their practices, featuring works by Andrea Bowers, Raven Chacon, Sharon Hayes, Aaron Huey, Jacqueline Humphries, Francisco Masó, Richard Prince, Dread Scott, Hank Willis Thomas, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Dear Natacha,

I pitched this exhibition to you during a time of deep despair. The social contract I grew up believing in seemed to be shattering around us in myriad ways. Every news report brought accounts of fundamental rights being eroded by a power-hungry political party that feeds on hate, fear, and greed. How else to explain legislation that suppresses the vote or curtails reproductive freedom or makes teaching the history of this country with all its sins and blemishes a crime? How else to explain climate-change denial? Or the epidemic of school shootings? Or the disavowal of truth and the threats to democracy? I kept wondering whether art—which itself has been the target of so-called culture wars—could ever really have an impact on the consciousness of a country or at least critical constituencies that comprise it. I was haunted by the question: was it more important to be in the trenches, literally enacting dissent, than making exhibitions that describe it? I realized, however, that this is not an either/or proposition. Activism can take many forms, evocation and inspiration among them.

Art, in its guise as agit-prop, is a call to action against a specific social or political threat, and there is a rich history of this kind of representation. Such art always accompanies people into the street as they march against injustice in the form of banners and signs, amplifying their grievances and demands. Art can also be complex, even obscurant, in order to infiltrate and destabilize representational systems that maintain the status quo. At the same time, art can bear witness, documenting crimes against humanity and the necessary actions Off Paradise 120 Walker Street New York 10013 paradise@offparadise.com taken to repair those wrongs. But it can also soothe. Art can be a much-needed pause, an invitation for contemplation, a touchstone for pleasure. Even the most ardent activist requires time out to recharge. Paul Chan embraced this truth when he curated a show on bathers and the recuperative power of water as part of an exhibition I once organized called Artistic License.

This exhibition threads a needle between representation and real-world dissent. It features the work of artists who, to borrow a phrase from Richard Prince, “paint the protest.” They portray the very language of opposition, the semiotics of rebellion. Their art reminds us of our constitutional right under the first amendment to “peaceably . . . assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” But it also reveals, especially now, the fragility of that right in the face of a democracy under siege, and its virtual non-existence in other parts of the world. As I write this, in September of 2022, people in Iran are risking arrest or even death to protest the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was taken into custody by the “morality police” for some minor infraction of their dress code for women. And Russian citizens are defying authoritarian law to demonstrate against Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Paint the Protest is, in the end, an expression of hope. It is a reminder that as the public, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “we are a civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies.” The works in this exhibition reflect that shining moment—the opposite of despair—when a sense of moral outrage and compassion for one another conjoin into a collective demand for equity and truth. While the future is unknowable, we must believe that in our small cultural corner of the planet, art can and will be a beacon for change.

With gratitude,

Nancy