LibGuides: Social Justice Art: Background

Social justice art encompasses a wide range of visual and performing arts designed to raise critical consciousness, build community, and motivate individuals to promote social change. Practitioners believe art can be a catalyst to engage community members to take action around social issues. Artists have recognized and reacted to injustice throughout time and across cultures. This guide highlights a handful of 20th and 21st c. artists and how to find more. Social Justice Art. Wikipedia. Copied 28Oct2022 BQP

Finding artists and projects

Arts & Social Justice Fellows
Inspired by faith in the power of art to open spaces for conversation, community-making, and collective action, the Arts and Social Justice Fellows program pairs six Atlanta artists with Emory faculty to co-teach an exisiting course and design a related project for their students to produce throughout the semester. The goal is to help students translate their learning into creative activism in the name of racial justice. The program is a partnership between the Emory College of Arts & Sciences, Emory Arts, and the Emory University Center for Ethics.

Creative Capital
Creative Capital supports underserved, risk-taking artists in the creation of new work and in building sustainable practices. Search their website for "grantees" to find projects related to social justice.

Justseeds Artsts' Cooperative
See Justseeds blog for current art and resistance projects around the world.
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ounded in 1998, and originally the graphics distribution project of Josh MacPhee (OC 1995), Justseeds became a worker-owned cooperative in 2007. It was built on an already existing network of MacPhee’s past collaborations and friendships. Today, with members from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. The cooperative believes in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end, they produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets — all while offering daily support as allies and friends. They also operate an online store and wholesale distribution center.
Museum Partners for Social Justice
The Henry Luce Foundation's American Art Program started offering this new grant in 2020.
Teaching Artists Guild: Social Justice Resources
[A] crowd-sourced arts education and social justice clearing house celebrating best practices, practitioners and projects from all over the country to serve as beacons, inspirations and support for expanding the work from the margins to the mainstream.