We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law

by Yxta Maya Murray

Overview

We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change.

Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501775581
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2024
Series:	Publicly Engaged Scholars: Identities, Purposes, Practices
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yxta Maya Murray is David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of eight novels, including Art Is Everything and God Went Like That. Her art criticism and journalism have appeared in Artforum and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Artivism Avant La Lettre
2. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie MaeWeems' Challenge to Copyright and Property Law
3. "I just didn't feel safe, but I don't feel safe a lot of times in alot of different places:": Young Joon Kwak's Mutant Salon andthe queer need for safer and thriving spaces
4. "How did we get here?": Tanya Aguiñiga's art about theborder and disability law
5. "There are so many stories like that, too, of the governmentand private companies relinquishing their responsibility to thepeople of New Orleans, who had lost everything":: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Blights Out, and Live Action Painting(2015
6. "We wanted to open up and surpass those usualunderstandings:": Drawn Together and fair artists' contracts
Conclusion: An art dedicated to survival: Art, law, hope, and the wayahead

What People are Saying About This

Lisa Gail Collins

Drawing on her day job as a law professor with crucial commitments to critical race, queer, and feminist legal theory as well as her extensive work as an art critic, Yxta Maya Murray brings her passions into rich, creative conversation in this highly original book. In We Make Each Other Beautiful, Murray opens and models a new area of inquiry, a generative space to consider ways recent art projects by Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown offer vital resources for addressing injustice, including within the formidable legal arena, and imagining a world where all can thrive. I'm greatly looking forward to being in the classroom with this book!

Kevin R. Johnson

We Make Each Other Beautiful is a cutting-edge book at the intersection of art, activism, and the law. Yxta Maya Murray—a gifted storyteller, engaging writer, and influential legal scholar—is the ideal author.

Arlene Dávila

A thorough examination of the politics of art that is specifically focused on the legal and public policy considerations of art activism, We Make Each Other Beautiful is a timely and extremely needed book.

Editorial Reviews

We Make Each Other Beautiful swan dives into the activist projects of US-based and diasporic artists as wide-ranging as Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown that trace the emergence and cultural trajectories of these artivists' networks of radical affinities and models of care.

Hyperallergic