Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People's Culture

Author: Angela Y. Davis (Author), Amber Husain (Editor), Tschabalala Self (Contributor)
Publisher: Walther König, Köln/Afterall Books
Year: 2021
Pages: 79
ISBN: 978-3960989011

In 1985, scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis asked, ‘How do we collectively acknowledge our popular cultural legacy and communicate it to the masses of people, most of whom have been denied access to the social spaces reserved for arts and culture?’ Looking to the cultural forms born of Afro-American struggles, Davis insists that we attempt to understand, reclaim and glean insight from these in preparing a political offenseive against the racial oppression endemic to capitalism. Working from a site of racial uprising some 35 years later, artist Tschabalala Self responds to Davis’s words with a new series of characteristically vibrant, challenging and provocative works on paper. Her series of three individual subjects emerge collectively as something greater than their parts, suggesting in the ebbs and flows in joy and disdain, a kind of shared social consciousness.