Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy in Historical Perspective, Part 2

“David Medalla in Conversation with Brandon Taylor,” Artscribe, no. 6 (1977): 23.

The image was originally a poster produced by Swedish artist Christer Themptander in 1970, titled We Will Never Forget Wounded Knee, and was featured in publications including the long-running Akwesasne Notes as well as The Black Panther. See Louise Siddons, “Red Power in the ‘Black Panther’: Radical Imagination and Intersectional Resistance at Wounded Knee,” American Art, Summer 2021, 17.

Siddons, “Red Power in the ‘Black Panther,’” 17.

Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso Books, 2019), 265.

The occupation of Alcatraz, an island offshore from San Francisco and an abandoned federal prison, lasted nineteen-months and was initiated by a group describing themselves as “Indians of All Tribes.” Occupations at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC and at Mount Rushmore would follow, before the seventy-one-day occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, the site of an 1890 mass killing of Indigenous peoples, where the occupiers declared themselves as part of the Independent Oglala Nation, a sovereign entity separate from the United States. See Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (The New Press, 1997); and Estes, Our History Is the Future. In the wake of Wounded Knee, Fredda Shepherd, the main organizer of the AIM Support Group in Derbyshire and chairperson of AIM UK, made contact with AIM founders Dennis Banks and Russell Means, accompanying AIM on visits to Europe and acting as translator in Paris. Frank Shepherd, correspondence with the author, July 7, 2023.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “How Indigenous Peoples Wound Up at the United Nations,” in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

György Ferenc Tóth, From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie: The Alliance for Sovereignty between American Indians and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War (SUNY Press, 2016).

Kate Rennard, “Becoming Indigenous: The Transnational Networks of the American Indian Movement, Irish Republicans, and Welsh Nationalists,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 2 (Fall 2021).

Details remain sketchy on how the exhibition plan came together. There was a Brixton office of AIM that may have played a role; visits by AIM representatives were connected to the Geneva initiative, and Jimmie Durham, who was a key figure through the International Indian Treaty Council, visited London in 1976 (although the exhibition’s connection to Akwesasne Notes suggests that he was not involved). The AIM exhibition would subsequently travel to Sheffield. I am grateful to Maria Thereza Alves and Richard Hill for their comments on these points.

Candice Hopkins, quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Floating Between Past and Future: The Indigenisation of Environmental Politics,” Afterall, no. 43 (Spring–Summer 2017): 34.

Richard Cork, “The Indigenous Americans,” The Times, October 12, 1976.

Susan Hiller, “Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art,” Studio International 193, no. 985 (January–February 1977): 58.

“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY, and some suggestions for our organisation, with proposals for immediate and long-range tasks,” November 26, 1974, Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.

Guy Brett, Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (Heretic Books, 1986), 153.

Cecilia Vicuña, “Organized Dreaming,” trans. Christopher Winks, in Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos/Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2013), unpaginated.

“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.”

Lynn MacRitchie, “The World in a Grain of Sand,” undated handwritten notes shared with the author.

Guy Brett, “Agriculture, Field, Decoration,” in Carnival of Perception: Selected Writings on Art (Institute of International Visual Arts, 2004), 157.

See Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023” →. Economic and agricultural ecosystems provided the basis for one the most inspiring large-scale exhibition models in recent years, ruangrupa’s organization of Documenta 15 (2022), based on the principle of lumbung. And agrarian reform, land justice, and food security are core to the activities of Philippines cultural workers’ organization SAKA (Sama-samang Artista Para sa Kilusang Agraryo).

Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile, ed. Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2018); Marion von Osten, “Another Criterion … or, What Is the Attitude of a Work in the Relations of Production of Its Time?,” Afterall, no. 25 (Spring–Summer 2010); Manuel Borja-Villel, introduction to Really Useful Knowledge, ed. Mafalda Rodríguez et al., exhibition catalog (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2014), 6; Anselm Franke, “On Fichte’s Unlimiting and the Limits of Self-reflexive Institutions,” in Love and Ethnology: The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte) (Sternberg/HKW, 2019), 13; Simon Sheikh, “A Conceptual History of Exhibition-Making,” presentation at the first Former West congress, 2009 →. I am grateful to Lucy Steeds for valuable insight on these points.

Avant-Garde Museology, ed. Arseny Zhilyaev (e-flux and University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Maria Berríos, “‘Struggle as Culture’: The Museum of Solidarity, 1971–73,” Afterall, no. 44 (Autumn–Winter 2017).

We might also think of related forms such as the slogan, the speech, and the banner.

Lynn MacRitchie, conversation with the author, October 7, 2020.

I am grateful to David and Grace Samboh for conversations on the festival-exhibition continuum. See Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98, ed. David Morris and David Teh (Afterall Books, 2018); and Morris and Grace Samboh, “ǝlɐuuǝᴉq sɐ ǝɯɐs ǝɥʇ ǝq ʇouuɐɔ lɐuᴉq: Might the Exhibition Be a Festival?,” PARSE 13, no. 3 (Autumn 2021) →. On “procession,” see Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney, “Ground Provisions,” Afterall, no. 45 (Spring–Summer 2018).

Raymundo Albano, “Installations: A Case for Hangings,” Philippine Art Supplement 2, no.1 (January–February 1981): 3.

Jun Terra, correspondence with the author, April 8, 2021. Among other activities, the campamentos hosted the Paddington Printshop and Terra’s Red Star Shadow Puppet Theatre workshops, based on the Indonesian shadow puppetry wayang kulit. The particular energy and symbolism of makeshift dwellings in urban contexts was something Guy Brett had elsewhere noted with reference to “Resurrection City, U.S.A.,” a large-scale temporary encampment built in 1968 on the National Mall in Washington, DC by the Poor People’s Campaign. See Brett, “Avant-Garde Art and the Third World,” in Art & Criticism: Proceedings of a Conference Held in London on 23rd and 24th April 1976, ed. Brandon Taylor (Winchester School of Art Press, 1979), 71.

Charles Hustwick, correspondence with the author, June 29, 2023.

Trevor Thomas was curator-director of the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (1940–46) until his persecution and dismissal as a result of anti-homosexuality laws; he also had the distinction of being Britain’s youngest museum curator when he joined Liverpool Museum in 1931 at age twenty-three.

See, for instance, Queer Exhibition Histories, ed. Bas Hendrikx (Valiz, 2023).

Charles Hustwick, correspondence with the author, June 29, 2023.

Naseem Khan, The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (Commission for Racial Equality, 1976).

His point is that the distinction is not racially coded, as Khan’s report seemed to suggest. In a comparable critique of racialized aesthetic criteria, Araeen has argued for Jonathan Miles’s work with the Poster-Film Collective (shown at AFD’s Chile Festival and at “Victory for People’s War” at Whitfield Street) as a forerunner to the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s: “Being a white artist, Miles also demolished the general notion that only blacks were involved in antiracist struggles or should produce such work.” Araeen, “A Very Special British Issue? Modernity, Art History and the Crisis of Art Today,” Third Text 22, no. 2 (March 2008): 136.

Kim was a retired policeman from Hong Kong and a regular presence at Whitfield Street; at the Chile Festival he would “perform rhythmic movements with illuminated Chinese clubs,” a technique he taught to others along with tai chi. Fisher, a doctor in training, was very close to Kim, and would test his homeopathic inventions on other members of the group; he later become the personal homeopathic physician to Queen Elizabeth II. Lynn MacRitchie, correspondence with the author, July 27, 2023.

Rahseed Araeen, correspondence with the author and Wing Chan, April 15, 2023.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, “Performance,” Studio International 193, no. 985 (January–February 1977): 14.

David Medalla, interview by Steven Thorn, 1977, Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.

Geeta Kapur, “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories,” in R. Weiss et al., Making Art Global (Part 1) (Afterall Books, 2011), 203.

Vicuña, “Organized Dreaming.”

Vijay Prashad, Struggle Makes us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism (Haymarket Books, 2022).

“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.” This is itself a paraphrase of Friedrich Engels, also often cited by Prashad in recent years. See, for instance, “History Often Proceeds by Jumps and Zig-Zags,” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Newsletter, no. 33 (August 15, 2019) →.