Art and Architecture: American Artists against War | Joyce Kozloff, David McCarthy, Martha Rosler | An Art Book Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

In conjunction with the publication of American Artists against War, 1935–2010, author David McCarthy is joined by artists Joyce Kozloff and Martha Rosler for a discussion about artists’ activism and antiwar art in the age of the American Century. McCarthy provides a historical overview of the continuities and changes in antiwar art from the 1930s until today, while Kozloff and Rosler contextualize this broader history with their experiences as artists and activists since the 1960s.

Beginning with responses to fascism in the 1930s and ending with protests against the Iraq wars, David McCarthy shows how American artists—including Philip Evergood, David Smith, H. C. Westermann, Ed Kienholz, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, Chris Burden, Robert Arneson, Martha Rosler, and Coco Fusco—have borne witness, registered dissent, and asserted the enduring ability of imagination to uncover truths about individuals and nations. During what has been called the American Century, the United States engaged in frequent combat overseas while developing technologies of unprecedented lethality.

Many artists, working collectively or individually, produced antiwar art to protest the use or threat of military violence in the service of an expansionist state. Charting a seventy-five-year history of antiwar art and activism, American Artists against War, 1935–2010 lucidly tracks the continuities, preoccupations, and strategies of several generations.

Copies of American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (University of California Press, 2015)  are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

David McCarthy is Professor of Art History at Rhodes College. An expert on 20th-century American art, he is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980, Pop Art, and H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America, as well as essays in American Art,  Art Bulletin, and Art Journal. A graduate of Gettysburg College and the University of Delaware, his research has been supported by Luce Foundation and Smithsonian fellowships. The project on artists’ opposition to war is the product of a dozen year’s labor in archives and libraries across the United States.

Joyce Kozloff is an American artist whose politically engaged work has been based on cartography since the early 1990s. Kozloff was a founding member of the Heresies collective, one of the original members of the Pattern and Decoration movement, and an early artist in the 1970s feminist art movements. She has been active in the women's and peace movements throughout her life. She is represented by DC Moore Gallery.

Martha Rosler, M.F.A. is an influential video, photography, installation and performance artist who has been part of the feminist art movement since the early 1970s in California. She has taught at the Städelschule, a fine arts academy in Frankfurt, and at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Martha Rosler’s work has been shown all over the globe, and she is an eminent writer on art and culture who lectures both in the US and internationally. She is represented by Mitchell, Innes & Nash.

In its eighth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

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