The Iraqi artist Vian Sora has seen the absolute worst that politics has to offer – she spent most of her first 30 years living under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, then endured the destruction of her country following the US invasion in 2003. Years later, she surfaced in the United States as a refugee. Her art, which mixes bright, neon colors with motifs from the ancient history of her homeland, is a testament to the history that has scarred her and her resilience as a survivor.
Settled now in Louisville, Kentucky, along with the family that she worked tirelessly to bring over from Iraq, she is a part of an art community grappling with what their vocation will mean now that Donald Trump has been elected president. The stakes for Sora are not just creative; her family itself may be threatened by Trump’s presidency. “I am acutely frightened by the prospects of refugees and immigrants becoming persona non grata,” she said, “as my sister has an asylum case that remains in jeopardy.”
Sora was one of many artists and exhibitors who I spoke with following the re-election of Donald Trump, and she was not the only one who felt personally threatened by a second Trump term. Cassils, an artist whose work frequently involves large-scale performance pieces that involve mass groups of trans individuals, said a curator friend recently canceled an upcoming exhibition and quit her job – instead of continuing her career as usual, she was making an impromptu move from her home in Arizona to California in order to protect her transgender child from hate legislation targeting their rights and body. These are threats that Cassils themselves feels subject to. “There’s the anticipation of not knowing, and that’s a really scary place to be.”
In spite of very real threats, Sora and Cassils both highlighted the power of art to guide them through frightening times. Sora tsaid: “Artists are vessels for truth, which can be neither restrained nor abated. This is an instinct we creatives share, and the more it is repressed, the more we will produce against ignorance and suppression.”
Cassils also shared their belief that the impulse to create art can’t be eradicated by autocratic regimes. “Creative freedom at a moment when you’re being told to shut up is absolutely imperative,” they said, “art is something they can’t legislate out of you.” They believed that art is vital at a time like this – simply because it provides a place for communities to come together in solidarity, and to be in their bodies in healthy ways. “I will continue to build artworks that provide visual and metaphoric strategies for resistance. I’m trying to create somatic body practices, meditation techniques, things that can help people stay in their bodies, finding a sense of power within while collectively building power.”
For the artist Zoë Buckman, whose work has engaged feminist themes through striking, in-your-face practices such as plastinating her own placenta and embroidering rap lyrics onto vintage lingerie, the impacts of this election on artistic communities came down in a very different way. “The past year in the arts has seen unprecedented hostility with folks canceling, boycotting and straight-up bullying their fellow colleagues and artists. This has been incredibly painful to witness and personally experience. We are supposed to be standing shoulder to shoulder, debating in the areas we disagree – not further isolating each other. I hope this election will be a wake-up call to the tribalism and ostracism taking over many art communities and spaces, but I do not have much faith that it will be.”
Community was also on the mind of the freelance art historian and curator Noa Wynn, who frequently works with younger feminist and queer artists. Immediately after the election she was eager to come together with her artistic community as she struggled to process the election – she found herself turning again and again to social media, with Instagram providing an impromptu gathering site for collective grieving. “I think I really found solace and comfort, looking on social media at what artists were thinking and producing,” she said.
She added that she expected artists in her network to need time to come to terms with the election before they were prepared to respond it. “Immediately afterwards I saw people saying things like, ‘What did this artist say? What did that artist say?’ but I feel like we have to give artists space to process. Artists are people too, and right now they’re processing.”
Wynn’s comments point to the fact that in the social media age we have come to expect immediate statements from community leaders, be it in the arts or in politics, but artists traditionally work on different timelines. The immediacy of social media is often at odds with how they contemplate and respond to historic events, if they do so at all.
Such sentiments were in keeping with comments by Marilyn Minter, whose work often engages with feminist themes and who collaborated with For Freedoms on their 50 State Initiative in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections during the last Trump presidency. She turned to the tumult of the 1960s, sharing a quote that resonated with her from What Kind of Man Am I?, the Met’s recent Philip Guston show: “Reflecting on the shifts that he felt compelled to make in his practice in 1968, he recalled: ‘The war [in Vietnam], what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man I am, sitting home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.’”
As Minter indicates, sometimes artists are just as confused as anyone with how to meaningfully engage with massive political upheavals. She added that setbacks, even ones that feel cataclysmic, are all a part of the process of change – “I was 20 years old in 1968. Cities were burning, leaders were getting assassinated. Progress is two steps forward, one step back.”
In contrast to Minter’s remarks, the artist Amy Sherald said she did not want the election to impact her art at all. While her portraits of Black individuals have included paintings of Michelle Obama as the first lady, as well as of Breonna Taylor after her death at the hand of police officers, she does not see politics as affecting her artistic inspiration. “I make what I make, and I feel like my work does good,” she told me. “but I don’t see how I would change. It wouldn’t be authentic. As artists we have to create from an authentic place, and everybody can’t start creating protest art. But if it’s something that naturally aligns with what you do, then I feel like you should follow that. I don’t want to make work from a reactionary place.”
Wynn said that for her, engagement right now looks like more of the same – her work curating shows and showcasing artists was already deeply political, and she now sees it as even more vital. “This election gives me motivation to continue doing what I’ve been doing so far,” she said. “Championing and amplifying female queer artists. People are trying to push these voices to the margins, but we’re here to stay.”
Wynn’s project as a curator is in part a process of reshaping narratives about the world that have traditionally excluded queer and female voices. Although Sherald did not see her practice as consciously collaborating in that task, she did say that art was an integral part of the process of creating a better future. She expected that art museums and galleries would be places that the politically dispossessed turned to during a second Trump administration, whether for solace or for inspiration. “Art can create transformation and justice, and it allow us to imagine a future,” she said. “Important conversations can happen around art that can’t happen in different space, so it can be healing. It can offer peace and restoration.”
Sora came down in a similar place, offering her belief that artists would be leading the way toward imagining something better than a Trump presidency’s vision for America. “Art, by its nature, is humane and illuminates the darkest paths. The artistic world will respond with vigorous concepts to confront any reversal in humanity’s forward march.”
For Cassils, art will ultimately work on a much more individual scale. They believed that the art world can be a way for individuals to come together support one another in retaining a basic sense of humanity, reflecting that it was not the first time that the trans and queer communities faced an existential threat. They asserted that art would be a way of countering that threat, one person at a time. “We work with what we have. How is it that we have held extreme difficulty and not lost ourselves? I think it’s so important that we have that ability to calm ourselves, so that we can be calm and see clear-eyed together such that we can go back out. How is it that we hold on to ourselves, and our wellbeing in this tsunami that is bound to be difficult?”
