An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017 | Art & Artists

Aug 18, 2017–Aug 27, 2018

Resistance and Refusal

Black and white photograph of a hand clipping a barbed wire fence.

Resistance and Refusal

American artists in the mid-twentieth century used ideas of resistance and refusal to reject inherited policies, politics, and social norms. For some, like Toyo Miyatake, the very act of making art was a form of disobedience. He documented his internment after smuggling camera parts into the camp in Manzanar, California, where he and other Japanese Americans were held during World War II. For Larry Fink, photographing the beatniks during the 1950s gave visibility to a population that formed its identity in opposition to a conformist cultural mainstream. Other projects, like those by Louis H. Draper and Gordon Parks, recorded the efforts of those fighting against racist politics and policies for the fundamental right to be part of society. Ad Reinhardt, working in the aftermath of World War II, defined his art mainly by what it was not. His black paintings were “non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested.” Although described in aesthetic terms, Reinhardt’s disavowal can also be seen as a stand against the heroic cultural ideology that led to repression and war.