November 6, 7pm
205 Hudson Gallery
205 Hudson Street (at Canal St.)
7:00-8:30 PM
Join us for a chat with writer & editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler about her new book, The War of Art: A History of Artists' Protest in America, which investigates crucial political additions to art history. Lauren will be in conversation with artist Carrie Moyer, who is featured in the book.
More about the book:
The War of Art tells a history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort — from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat.
Lauren O’Neill-Butler charts the post-war development of artists’ protest and connects these struggles to a long tradition of feminism and civil rights activism. The book offers portraits of the key individuals and groups of artists who have campaigned for solidarity, housing, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS awareness, and against Indigenous injustice and the exclusion of women in the art world. This includes: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), David Wojnarowicz’s work with ACT UP, Top Value Television (TVTV), Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), fierce pussy, Project Row Houses, and Nan Goldin’s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN).
Based upon in-depth oral histories with the key figures in these movements, and illustrated throughout, The War of Art is an essential corrective to the idea that art history excludes politics.
More about Lauren:
Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a writer, editor, and adjunct faculty member at Hunter College. Her books include The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (Verso, 2025) and Let's Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (Karma, 2021). She has written for Aperture, Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times, among many others, and has also contributed essays to many exhibition catalogues. She received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2020 and the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant in 2023.
More about Carrie:
Carrie Moyer is an artist and Professor at Hunter College whose vibrant paintings and works on paper critically interrogate the formal and conceptual conventions of painting while embracing an approach to abstraction rooted in optical pleasure. Moyer’s playful compositions, layered surfaces, and fluid forms, which freely oscillate between abstraction and representation, speak not only to her commitment to feminist political theory, but also to her deep investment in art history. As she explains, “What is political about my painting is its basis in my own experience. The work engages the history of 20th-century painting from the margins, a position defined by humor, exuberance, and disruption.”