Arts of Resistance: Seeing and Shaping the Struggle

Historic struggles for more equitable cities have always used visual and representational means alongside direct action and policy reform. Posters, buttons, pamphlets, and other printed ephemera are part of a visual culture produced by, for, and with urban social movements. Using everything from bold graphics to timelines and maps, artists create another language to articulate power and oppression as well as visions of resistance. As artist-archivists Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee (2010: 13) have written in their curatorial project Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now: “In order for groups of people to consciously change the world, part of their struggle must be envisioning and experimenting with what this new and changed world will look like.”