American Action, Then and Now

Tess Pollok interviews Lauren O’Neill-Butler about her new essay collection, “The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America.”

By Tess PollokDecember 8, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• History

COLLECTING STORIES OF ART and activism from the 1960s to the present, Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (2025) is a chronicle of American artists and their resilience in the face of oppression. Some of the activist groups collected in this book have entirely different approaches to organizing, but they are all connected by a fierce desire to combat inequality and injustice in the United States by fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, housing, AIDS advocacy, women’s rights, and more. O’Neill-Butler utilizes archival research and hundreds of hours of oral histories to create nuanced portraits of key people and groups, and she delves into the questions motivating and compelling their efforts: How do slogans travel across media channels? When does protest transform into action? And how can that action move beyond the symbolic realm? With careful attention to how campaigns have evolved across different periods and groups, O’Neill-Butler sheds light on the importance of collective artistry in leading the fight for change.

I sat down with O’Neill-Butler over Zoom to discuss the research and interview process behind the essay collection, how the contemporary media landscape affects activism today, and the inspiring legacy of artist-led protest in the US.

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TESS POLLOK: What was the impetus behind putting together an essay collection on artists and activism?

LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER: This book was a long time in the making. My experience with activism goes back to when I was in high school. I got involved through punk rock subcultures in the 1990s, and my interest has only continued from there. Part of my reason for writing the book now is to reconnect with that earlier, fearless version of myself.

In earnest, I would say I began the book around 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration and not long after I started teaching a course on the legacies of artist-activists at Hunter College. At that time, there was a lot of reportage on artist-led protests going on at different museums. At the Whitney Museum, there was a protest against Warren B. Kanders, and at MoMA, there was Decolonize This Place. This was wonderful work, but it felt like only part of the story was being told when it was reported on. Journalists were always trying to connect it to an earlier historical moment, but I would talk with the activists themselves, and many of them were not aware of the historical context of what they were doing. They were aware of certain groups, like moratoriums in the 1970s and the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), but there wasn’t a lot of information about their work out there. When I was teaching the class at Hunter, it felt like people involved in these movements were dying left and right, so I felt an urgency around protecting these stories that weren’t being told and wanting to make a more complete history for people who are interested in things like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which you can read about in snippets in other people’s books, but there’s no full story. That’s the short story of how this all started.

Were there any through lines to effective organizing that you saw across all the groups you covered?

One of my favorite tactics is using journalism and media strategically. There’s an ACT UP slogan I like—they say, “We don’t speak to the media, we speak through the media.” The BECC always maintained a list of sympathetic journalists to tip off, and they adapted that strategy from the Civil Rights Movement. Philanthropy is another interesting and, I think, unexpected tactic. I talk a lot about philanthropy in the chapter on Edgar Heap of Birds. Edgar Heap of Birds is an example of an artist who’s lived for decades on his ancestral land, just outside of Oklahoma City. It’s important for him and his work to be within the community, and he often hosts youth workshops. He started an Indigenous residency program and gallery at the University of Kansas, where he went to school. He did it again at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where he got his master’s degree. To me, that’s a new tactic—if artists get to a stage in their life where they can give back, they can do things like endow galleries. I think Edgar Heap of Birds can see the writing on the wall and knows that there’s work to be done to ensure visibility and accessibility for future generations of artists, in his case Indigenous artists.

What was unique to each group in terms of how they approached organizing?

When I was dealing with the organizational structure of the book, I thought at first of organizing it by tactic—doing a chapter on philanthropy, on wheatpasting, on agitprop, and so on—but it didn’t allow the breadth of research for each case study that I wanted to present. I was trying to look at how activism operated in each instance: Did it work? If it’s good, is there a time when it stops working well? In some cases, the work didn’t get done, or they stopped working because capitalism shifted—that happened to Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!) because capitalism had created a market for lesbians. I wanted each group to have their own chapter to be able to preserve the differences between them and not combine everybody into one pot when they’re all so dramatically different. Even when they’re united by a particular time or place, like New York City in the 1970s, they’re still very different in terms of the tactics they use and how they go after their targets.

With Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), it’s very interesting to me that Nan Goldin does so much of this work later in her life. Most of my examples in the book are artists who are doing this as very young people with nothing to lose. Many of them don’t even have gallery representation, so they don’t care if they mess up these relationships with curators at big museums. They just want to use activism to make a change. But with Nan Goldin, doing this much later in life, she leverages her star power to do something. It takes a lot of guts to put your own career on the line like that. She says to museums that she’ll withdraw her work and protest certain galleries if they don’t take the Sacklers’ names down. That’s another tactic that is very unique to her and to PAIN. Every person I talked to in PAIN, they said you had to have Nan on the front line.

PAIN is one of the only groups in the book I had any familiarity with before reading. I remember when they protested the Guggenheim by throwing hundreds of used OxyContin prescriptions into the rotunda.

The AWC did that too, in 1971, to protest for Hans Haacke, who had his show at the Guggenheim canceled after his work conflicted with the real estate holdings of someone on the board of directors there. There was another group called Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) that used a similar tactic of throwing paper in the Guggenheim’s rotunda to protest their Abu Dhabi location, the construction of which was just a series of horrific human rights violations against the workers, and that was fantastic. It’s interesting that there’s an aesthetic lineage here because I don’t think GULF was looking at what AWC did at all; it just came naturally to them to do that. With the book, I just wanted to put these groups into conversation with one another so that people could have that context.

I think, too, that museums and institutions in New York City are going to be the last ones to change. There has been some change at large institutions across the country, but victories tend to be in smaller institutions and more regional places.

Do you consider your book to be optimistic?

I wanted to actually document the history of these groups and give people a blow-by-blow of what really happened in such and such instance, so it’s not always the most cheerful book. It’s based on reality and facts and history and a lot of detailed research. If you’re a young artist and you really want to know what happened with a certain campaign, or what happened to this person or that person after the fact, what worked and what didn’t, this is a great book. Sadly, maybe they made a change and maybe they didn’t, but I think many of the groups mentioned in my book were extremely successful in achieving their goals. In my eyes, Project Row Houses is a huge success. They’ve created 54 low-income housing units in Houston’s historic Third Ward so that generations of Black artists and other people from that community can continue to live there. However, it’s extremely complicated, because Project Row Houses had to grapple with how they were at the forefront of gentrification in that area: this art project made rich developers want to build there. The organization ended up preoccupied with buying up housing so that it could be preserved and rehabilitated. Sometimes these outcomes are not just a positive or negative thing. Sometimes they’re both.

How did you approach researching for the book?

All of the chapters are informed by oral history interviews with people involved in these activist collectives who gifted me their time. But this book is very different from my first book—which has over 80 interviews and was largely written in other people’s voices—because, in addition to interviews, it’s also largely based on archival research. It turned out that a lot of the artists I contacted were actively involved in making their own archives already, which I also see as an activist practice. Someone like Benny Andrews, one of the co-founders of the BECC, knew from the beginning that he had to do the work of building his own archive because no one else would. He was just a master archivist and it’s so fascinating to observe his process. Archiving is actually a family practice that his father taught him how to do and so he knew how to preserve his notebooks, his calendars, and all of the exhibition announcements related to the BECC’s work. Camille Billops, who was also in the BECC, collected all of this printed material around the time related to artists, exhibitions, and things that were going on in the world, and left behind a wealth of information to dig through. [Laughs.] I’m a Scorpio, so I love detective work. I would say that maybe half of the book is that kind of research-based material.

How has artist-led activism changed since the 1960s?

It’s hard to compare accomplishments and methodologies across time. For example, PAIN has social media and that makes everything different for them compared to older activist groups. Activism certainly isn’t as grassroots as it was in the 1960s and ’70s, but I think that’s because there are less spaces available to physically meet. It used to be more affordable in New York City for artists to have a studio, and with that came a place to organize. That’s not really the case anymore. Maybe they’re meeting on Zoom or through encrypted chats but it’s very, very different. It doesn’t have the same kind of push. I think another dangerous part of it is that there’s this performance of collectivism on social media that doesn’t get a lot of real work done.

Do you find social media more helpful or more detrimental to organizing? Anecdotally, I think my generation can be desensitized by the constant assault of infographics.

I’ve been hearing the same thing from my students. When I showed them wheatpasting art made by fierce pussy (a New York collective of queer women artists), they were surprised by how quiet it was. Social media is much more in your face and graphic. Another reason I wanted to write the book was to show people what activism was like before social media. Before there was social media, there were billboards and walls we would paste on and that was considered the platform to get people’s attention. The whole point of fierce pussy was lesbian visibility; people could walk by their posters in the street and feel seen. I guess that’s what happens on social media now, but it seems very different from that physical encounter. Carrie Moyer of DAM! mentioned to me that what they did just isn’t possible anymore. What are the possibilities for artists who are trying to organize now? Many of the crises these groups struggled to address are still raging around the world. I’m not trying to recount history to memorialize it. I’m trying to offer a road map of the past so that we can say, “What happens next?”

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Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York–based writer and editor. 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 various exhibition catalogs. She received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2020 and the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant in 2023.