Artist Romare Bearden’s Reckoning With the South
A new biography contextualizes the art of Romare Bearden within the politics of Reconstruction and civil rights.
11 Article(s) by: Billie Anania
Billie Anania is an editor, organizer, and journalist in Brooklyn whose work focuses on political economy in the cultural industries and the history of art in global liberation movements.
Museum Workers Are Unionizing — and Their Bosses Are Fighting Back
Labor has seen a jolt of new energy recently. Across the United States, museum workers are part of that upsurge.
Artists Can Build Power as Workers
Art workers are organizing in response to miserable pay and working conditions. The history of artist unions in the United States can help them chart a path forward.
The Dada Movement’s Political Turn
Born in Zurich in 1916, Dada is famed for its antiwar, anti-bourgeois, and anti-art antics. But in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the movement took a sharp political turn, merging anti-fascist propaganda with leftist organizing.
The Radical Printmaking of Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz was a radical printmaker with deep political commitments. From the last days of the German Empire until the end of the Third Reich, she gave visual expression to workers’ rebellion and loss, never losing hope in the socialist world to come.
Langston Hughes Was a Lifelong Socialist
In the 1930s and ’40s, Langston Hughes wrote poetic tributes to the working class and socialist leaders worldwide. Some critics allege he abandoned his principles later in life, but they ignore the role of McCarthyist oppression — and Hughes’s creative resistance to it.
The American Muckrakers Who Spoke Truth to Power
The bulk of mainstream journalism in the US has long stood as a mouthpiece for ruling-class interests. Yet from Ida B. Wells to Ida Tarbell, a powerful tradition of “muckraking” has gone against the grain to hold the powerful accountable.
The Ashcan School Painted the American Working Class
In the years before the Great Depression, the “Ashcan” school of painters rejected the cultural norms of the art market. It opted instead for an American realism that took its inspiration from the lives of dock workers, street vendors, and immigrant families in the country’s modernizing cities.
Lewis Hine, Photographer of the American Working Class
Few American photographers have captured the misery, dignity, and occasional bursts of solidarity within US working-class life as compellingly as Lewis Hine did in the early twentieth century.
Alice Neel, Painter of the People
The 20th-century American portrait painter Alice Neel was often misunderstood by art critics throughout her career. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Neel retrospective, “People Come First,” recontextualizes her career as a painter of the human condition whose socialist politics were central to her work.
Art Museums in the US Are Facing a Reckoning
Across the United States, museum workers, activists, and artists are forcing a conversation about the labor abuses, racism, and wealthy patrons’ “art-washing” schemes at museums.