Off the Grid

Wilfried Raussert

Off the Grid. Art Practices and Public Space

ISBN 978-3-86821-835-0, 232 pp., 26 illustrations, paperback, € 29,50 (2021)

(IAS - Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos, Vol. 35)

This book examines public art practices in three eras of social and political upheaval: the 1920s-1930s, 1960s-1970s, and today. Heydays of artistic innovation and provocation, these periods see the rise of grassroots and avant-garde practices that intervene in the crises of their day by reclaiming public space for community building and social transformation. Artists of various cultural, social, and political movements in these times establish the street and other public spaces as laboratories for redefining the nation, culture, and community—in short, for endowing the world with new possibilities. Such revolutionary aesthetics can be found in the public art practices of Jamaican and U.S.-American Garveyism, Mexican muralism, North and South American 1960s theatre and happenings, and the contemporary Zapatista, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter movements.

Preview / Table of Contents (pdf)