Rethinking society requires imagination. Below are ten American movements from different eras of the country’s history and the defining works of art they produced.
9. LGBTQ Rights
Two men in waist-high water kiss, their bodies cut from a single map of the world, at the center of a 1984 collage by David Wojnarowicz. The work’s title — “Fuck You Faggot Fucker” — came from a scrap of paper with a crude cartoon the artist found (the original is pasted below the couple). Elsewhere in the collage are black-and-white photographs showing Wojnarowicz and a friend, nude, inside an abandoned building in downtown New York; another depicts a former lover posing as St. Sebastian on one of the derelict piers in Lower Manhattan where gay men once cruised. At a time when sex was becoming a source of terror for people helpless to save their dying lovers and friends, Wojnarowicz created a fearless vision of intimacy. He’d rail against bigotry in many other artworks and essays until his death at 37 from AIDS-related illness in 1992. In this work, however, he deftly renders homophobia ridiculous — a flimsy bit of trash in an otherwise vivid and expansive world. A factory building, complete with billowing chimneys and flying an American flag, is here improbably situated on a floating barge, specifically a paddle-wheel riverboat. An essay by art historian Margo Machida in the catalog notes that paddle-wheel-driven steamships appear in port scenes of 19th-century Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong by Chinese trade painters. Twain vocally criticized Western involvement in China, and his work was broadly circulated in the country, so Wong may well have known about Twain’s anti-imperialist positions, Machida writes.