The 2020 Archive Project came to be through the work of students in Art and Activism, a course taught by Professor Ila N. Sheren in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis in the Spring of 2021.
As a scholar of contemporary art in that department, I engage with the recent past. Yet as we began the semester, 2020 still loomed large in our day-to-day experiences and we wondered if we were even ready to start compiling an archive of a history we were still living, of a year that hardly felt demarcated by the calendar year. We felt the ways in which the pandemic had radically altered our lives from the personal to the circumstances of our course meetings, which took place via Zoom.
By the spring of 2021, many of us were used to this sort of course meeting. Sitting around a large table or in a classroom felt itself historical. We began to see the ways in which the new constraints put on our learning might be advantageous; by this I mean we took full advantage of Zoom’s chat feature. This allowed for a main discussion to transpire on screen while students could throw ideas, related works, other texts, and favorite (and despised) examples of activist art that pertained to a particular topic. The chat became a lively center of discourse and a way that we were able to feel the sense of community that occurs in the classroom into the digital sphere.
We were also able to have a virtual tour of Stories of Resistance (March 12–August 15, 2021) at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Director of Leaning and Engagement Michelle Dezember presented some of the artworks at the show to our class, providing us with the stories that bolstered these images’ activist interventions. Her presentation included Glenn Kaino’s Salute (Lineage), 2019 (header image) as an example of existence as resistance. Kaino features a gold-plated raised fist, representing Tommie Smith’s gesture of protest at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Smith’s fist glows gold, repeating against multiple mirrors as it disappears into the background. The work suggests the ongoing labor of existence and resistance and implicates the viewer’s own reflection in that process through the mirror.
Like Salute (Lineage), the archive allows us to see our interventions as adding to the discourse on a particular activist practice. The archive project began as a way for final papers to be something more collaborative and public facing than a traditional paper. This archive can turn the study of art and activism’s intersections into a collaborative and communal practice, shared beyond the walls–real or virtual–of the academic sphere.
Engaging with projects close to home for students living and studying in St. Louis, like the signage outside of local churches, allowed for a historicization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some students also worked with topics from their hometowns, one working on Black Lives Matter communities of street art and mutual aid in Chicago that arose from protesting in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and another focusing on street art in Minneapolis. While most of the essays forces on U.S. Activism, one focuses on feminicide in Ciudad Juarez and another on protests in Hong Kong.
Not every essay is location specific. Some students dealt directly with the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as it intersected with racism and impacted mothers. Another essay explores the way in which climate change is impacting the globe. Though these essays are about contemporary practices, they also draw on historical imagery: confederate and colonial monuments and the image of the Statue of Liberty. One essay details the use of memes as imagery in the unionization protests that took place in Amazon’s warehouses. Exploring local and global avenues, and their intersections, created a wealth of resources from which to engage with activist practices through art historical analysis.
Some students chose to express themselves via video, and the archive includes two such projects. One dealing with indigenous eco-activists working to stop the Line 3 Pipeline and the other tracing the alt right’s own image culture, which culminated in the 2020 U.S. elections. These video projects make the archive a multimedia document, engaging audiences beyond the traditional written format as they venture into a visual practice to catalogue visual art and culture.
The 2020 archive project’s goal is not to present every example of art and activism that occurred in a tumultuous and uncertain year. Instead, it works to offer a glimpse into activist practices through art that engaged undergraduate scholars working on this topic in a sociopolitical moment of great anxiety. Rather than attempting an extensive list of these practices, students each chose one on which to focus their energy, attention, and care. Acting as archivists of these recent events, students engaged with images and texts to present a version of their chosen activist projects.
Even within this public format, the 2020 Archive Project is still very much alive, unfinished, and open for engagement. By presenting this “living archive” of our recent past, we gesture toward the futurity that is intertwined with the difficult task of archiving our own present. Many of the issues raised in these essays continue to impact people living in 2021. How might this archive become a resource for future students? A fertile ground in which activist artists and the art historians who study them can respond to(?)the practices taken up by their predecessors? Our engagement with the archive is only the beginning; we invite you to join us.