The novelist, playwright and scholar Yxta Maya Murray has been a law professor for three decades and long Moonled as respected art critic. An important bridge between the academic and artistic worlds it inhabits, We make ourselves beautiful: art, activism and the law (2024) allows Murray to put his legal expertise in the critical sphere to elucidate not only the role that artists play in society with syntactic brilliance, but also how the most rigorous criticisms of the law often emerge from artistic practice.
Murray opened the introduction to Tijuana, Mexico, in August 2021, a sweltering end of the summer marked by desperate migrants caught in the reticle of a hostile xenophobic immigration policy a year after Trump's presidency. Local news stations report that an elderly woman has been fatally seized by cardiac arrest while waiting in her car for hours to cross the American-Mexican border. It is in this backdrop that the artist based in Los Angeles and the artist raised in Tijuana, Tanya Aguñiga, deepens her commitment to change politics. She created Linea Pak – an action during which the artist distributes crucial provisions of survival to migrants such as water packets, granola bars, Saladitos (Salted dehydrated prums) and Port-O-Potties-In addition to writing a petition pleading for elderly and disabled migrants. Aguñiga's efforts are a crucial contextual example for legal researchers. Murray breaks down how the study of the human sciences, including projects such as Linea PakAllows legal researchers to “present prospects excluded from case law”.
Testing the elements of legal theory, history, biography of artists, memories and story, Murray's essays include a richly studied critical collection that places the works and political commitments of queer, trans, non -binary and feminist colored artists in conversation. It also highlights the work of artists who directly dispute the legal frameworks who structure and limit their full capacity and their release. Murray Shepherds has readers through a vast often hostile landscape occupied by several generations of colored artists who have built and refined their practices in the language of justice and direct action.
For all those who have already wondered what it meant to occupy homosexual and marginalized production methods in the first half of the 20th century, there was Gladys Bentley, which in the 1930s made a trail against the so-called anti-perforation laws, Protestant against segregationist policies in New York as direct actions. Or for any color artist who is structurally faced by contemporary cultural institutions, the story of Elizabeth Catlettwhich, in its role as president of the art department of the Black Dillard University in New Orleans, had to intervene against the racist exclusion rooted in the city's park system which prevented its students from attending a Picasso exhibition at the Delgado Art Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). Murray explains that these projects have opened the way to critical genres that we know today as participatory art, social practice, institutional criticism and my new favorite categorization: the crime commission, which involves breaking the laws as an art of performance.
The nucleus of the collection is divided into Profiles of Aguñiga, Carrie Mae Weems, young Joon Kwak and Imani Jacqueline Brown, and their respective justice activities where race and sex intersect with immigration status, housing and mutual aid. Murrary is powerfully telling the scary story about the way We got to know the daguerreotypes of Praise and Delia TaylorThe Blacks Sougons whose photographs were commanded by the Ethnologist of the University of Harvard, Louis Agassiz, and are now at the center of a legal struggle of several years led by their descendant, Tamara Lanier. The images then inspired the installation of weekends “From there, I saw what happened and I cried(1995-1996). The artist signed a contract with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of the University so as not to use the images without authorization, that she ignored After learning their harmful objective: to advance Agassiz's belief in “polygenèse”, a retrograde dogma posing that God created races as distinct species and a racial domination that natural order.
While the Agassi's house In Harvard was appointed not for the ethnologist but for his wife and son, for Murray, this illustrates the continuous profit of slavery and persistent marginalization in the mid -1990s of the Black Faculty (then roughly 5% on a university level) and black students (then about 7.5% of the student body). Murray's narration of this case is doubly powerful because it quotes its own legal scholarship Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Left Left. This makes an exciting exegesis reminding readers today what it meant that weekends break the law on copyright and remain unwells.
We are making ourselves beautiful Turns out to be a particularly interesting step for the unique role of quotation. It is not often that an art critic can rely on his experience as a legal researcher to deepen our understanding of the role of the artist in the transformation of society, as well as to improve the artistic stories that we thought that we knew on Weems or Yoko Ono, Judy Baca or Faith Ringgold.
These connections are better articulated in the conclusion of the book, where Murray writes in a more memorable way when she tells her childhood with her grandmother, María Alléde Adastik, a Mexican woman who could have been a great artist without marriage. But she was nevertheless an artist, a woman who protested under her own terms – in silence and assembly. As with several artists in We are making ourselves beautifulMurray's grandmother created art as a global modality “inextricable from many local forms of problem solving” and, as such, “both a tactic and a lifestyle”.
We make ourselves beautiful: art, activism and the law (2024) by YXTA Maya Murray is published by Cornell University Press and is available online and via independent booksellers.
