Off the Grid - Art Practices and Public Space

This book examines public art practices in three eras of social and political upheaval: the 1920s-1930s, 1960s-1970s, and today. Heydays of artistic innovation and provocation, these periods see the rise of grassroots and avant-garde practices that intervene in the crises of their day by reclaiming public space for community building and social transformation. Artists of various cultural, social, and political movements in these times establish the street and other public spaces as laboratories for redefining the nation, culture, and community-in short, for endowing the world with new possibilities. Such revolutionary aesthetics can be found in the public art practices of Jamaican and U.S.-American Garveyism, Mexican muralism, North and South American 1960s theatre and happenings, and the contemporary Zapatista, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter movements.






Contents




Introduction

Public Space, Art Practice, and the Social ................................... 1




Chapter I

Parading and Performing in the Streets:

Cultural and Artistic Practices in Garveyism

and the Harlem Renaissance ........................................................ 29




Chapter II

Mexican Avant-Gardes and InterAmerican Flows:

Redefining the Relation between Art Practice

and Public Space in the 1920s and 1930s .................................... 63




Chapter III

The Body as Public Sphere:

Taking Theatre, Performance, and Music to the Streets

in the Turbulent 1960s and 1970s ................................................ 103




Chapter IV

Off the Grid:

Art Practices and Public Space in the Contemporary Period ...... 159




Epilogue ....................................................................................... 211