Special Lecture: Gregory Sholette “The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art”

We are pleased to host Gregory Sholette (Artist/Activist) for a special online lecture.
Please register via the form below to participate.

Date & Time: Friday, November 14, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM (JST)
Venue: Online (Zoom Webinar)
Lecturer: Gregory Sholette (Artist/Activist)
Moderator: Yoshitaka Mori (Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts)
Language: English / Japanese (with consecutive interpretation)
Fee: Free
Organizer: Graduate School of Global Arts (GA), Tokyo University of the Arts

Reservation Form: Please make advance reservations using the application form below.
https://forms.gle/A2kt9JMgj9c5fq5K8

The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art

Why has contemporary art become so politically charged? What does it mean for aesthetics? What does it mean for politics? This talk traces how artists transformed from detached observers into direct activists, building on my earlier research into the “dark matter” of marginalized creative labor that secretly powers the art world. We’ll journey from 1960s Paris street protests to today’s museum occupations, exploring movements like Black Lives Matter’s creative resistance, environmental activists targeting famous paintings, and artists unionizing against exploitation. Through concepts like “phantom archives” of protest culture and “monumenticide” – the worldwide toppling of colonial statues – we’ll discover how the boundaries between art galleries and street demonstrations have completely dissolved. In our current “unpresent” moment of political upheaval, artists and activists have become virtually indistinguishable, fundamentally reshaping both contemporary art and social movements in ways that would have been unimaginable just decades ago.

Gregory Sholette

Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and professor who co-founded the socially-engaged art collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His books include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Delirium and Resistance, Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass), The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, and forthcoming from MIT Press, The Radical Unpresent, Cultural Resistance in a Fractured World. Sholette is Affiliated Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center and co-director of Social Practice Queens.