Ralph Gibson’s American Gothic (2009) explores contradictions within American identity, making it a compelling example of how activist art can question national symbols and beliefs. Image: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
From Bruce Davidson to Kara Walker, explore five artists whose work shows how activist art can challenge history and amplify public voices.
BY KAZEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON
Art has long been a place for dissent. It can record a protest, expose an injustice, challenge an official version of history, or make visible people pushed to the margins. At Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, Turn the Volume Up! brings these possibilities together. The exhibition explores how individual expression can become collective action.
The exhibition draws from Nasher’s collection. It brings together photography, painting, sculpture, prints, installation, and archival material.
Its subject is broad but focused. The exhibition examines how people participate in public life. Voting, petitioning, organizing, documenting, and speaking out all become forms of civic expression.
The exhibition arrives as the United States marks its 250th anniversary. That timing gives its examination of participation and dissent an added historical charge.
Yet Turn the Volume Up! is not a patriotic survey. Nor is it a conventional history of American protest. Instead, it asks a more open question: How do people make themselves heard when the structures around them do not fully represent their experiences?
What Is Activist Art?
Activist art engages with social, political, or civic issues. It can challenge systems of power, document injustice, amplify marginalized voices, or encourage public participation. It does not need to depict a protest. A photograph, sculpture, installation, or historical reinterpretation can all function as activist art.
Activist art can also take many forms, from documentary photography and historical reinterpretation to protest art.
That broader definition is central to Turn the Volume Up! The exhibition looks beyond marches and political demonstrations. It considers the many ways people make their voices heard. An artist might document a movement. Another might question an accepted version of history. A third might give physical form to resistance.
The works do not all make the same argument. However, they share an engagement with public life.
Activist Art Begins With the Act of Speaking
Turn the Volume Up! is organized into five sections: Remarks, Organize, Records, Dissents, and Petitions. These headings provide a framework, but the works often cross their boundaries.
A photograph can be both a record and an act of protest. A sculpture can embody resistance without depicting a political event. An image can preserve history while also questioning its historical construction.
That overlap gives the exhibition much of its strength.
Rather than treating activism as something that happens only in marches, elections, or political institutions, the Nasher expands the meaning of participation. Making an image can become a public act.
Preserving evidence can become an act of resistance. Gathering with others can create political power. Refusing to remain silent can also become a form of participation.
This distinction matters. The exhibition is less interested in protest as spectacle than in the quieter processes through which people create change.
Bruce Davidson and the Human Face of Protest
Bruce Davidson’s Time of Change, made between 1963 and 1965, offers an intimate view of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the black-and-white photograph, a young man stands in the foreground. The word “Vote” is painted across his face. His mouth is open, suggesting that he is speaking or calling out. Behind him are several young men; one carries an American flag over his shoulder.
This photograph does not rely on the grand scale of a historic event. Davidson brings the viewer close to one person and one powerful word. “Vote” becomes more than a slogan. Painted on the young man’s face, it becomes part of his identity at that moment.
Davidson’s proximity to his subjects gives the photograph an immediacy. The movement appears as something lived by young people who were actively demanding political participation.
This is where photography becomes activist art. Davidson is recording an event, but he is also preserving the human presence within it.
His photograph demonstrates how visual activism can document social movements while shaping how audiences understand them. The photograph reminds us that social movements are made by individuals. Their voices give history its human scale.
Spider Martin Makes the Crowd Visible
Spider Martin’s Dr. King Speaks to the Crowd of 25,000 People at the March’s End, from 1965, expands that sense of collective presence.
The black-and-white photograph shows Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. He stands at a podium surrounded by microphones. A large crowd gathers before him, with buildings visible in the distance.
King is the most recognizable figure in the photograph. Martin does not isolate him from the people around him.
That choice is important.
Understanding the Civil Rights Movement extends beyond its most famous leaders. Its power came from thousands of people who marched, organized, registered voters, and demanded their rights.
Martin’s photograph captures that collective force. King may be delivering the speech, but the crowd gives the moment its scale.
Together, Davidson and Martin show two sides of political participation. One photograph emphasizes the individual voice. The other makes the community visible.
Both reveal how individual action can become collective power.
Kara Walker and the Politics of Historical Memory
Kara Walker shifts the exhibition from documenting protest to questioning the images through which history has been preserved. Her Confederate Prisoners Being Conducted from Jonesborough to Atlanta (2005) draws on a nineteenth-century illustration from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.
Walker intervenes in the historical image with stark black silhouettes. The result is an unsettling confrontation between the original representation and her contemporary response.
The work asks viewers to look twice at the idea of the historical record. Images can appear authoritative simply because they are old. Yet every historical image was made by someone, for someone, and within a particular system of power.
What is shown matters. So does what has been omitted.
Walker’s intervention makes that tension visible. Her silhouettes disrupt the original image rather than allowing it to remain a seemingly neutral document. The past becomes something that must be examined. It can also be questioned and contested.
This concern with representation connects Walker to Carrie Mae Weems and the Guerrilla Girls. Their practices differ, but each has challenged systems that determine who is represented and who receives visibility. Artcentron has also examined how African American artists have used their work to confront race, politics, gender, and social injustice.
In this context, activist art is not only about protesting an injustice. It can also challenge the cultural structures that determine whose stories become part of public memory.
Sam Durant Turns Refusal Into an Object
Sam Durant’s …For People Who Refuse to Knuckle Down (2004) approaches resistance from a different direction. Made with steel, wood, and chain-link fencing, the sculpture has a stark physical presence. The fencing suggests barriers, restriction, and control.
Its title introduces an opposing idea: refusal.
The work does not depict a specific protest. There are no marching crowds or political slogans. Instead, Durant gives resistance a physical form. The tension between enclosure and refusal makes the sculpture particularly effective within the exhibition.
A fence is designed to control movement. Yet a barrier can also create the desire to challenge it. Durant leaves that tension unresolved. He does not tell viewers exactly what they should resist.
The work is more interested in the condition of resistance itself. That approach prevents Turn the Volume Up! from becoming a simple collection of political statements. Some works document movements. Others confront historical narratives. Still others create an atmosphere of opposition.
Not every work tells viewers what to think.
Ralph Gibson and the Contradictions of American Identity
Ralph Gibson’s American Gothic (2009) brings the discussion toward national identity. The photograph combines several familiar American symbols. A soldier carries a gun. A man prays. Flags appear within the composition.
Yet Gibson does not arrange these elements into a straightforward statement about patriotism. Instead, the image feels deliberately ambiguous. Faith, military power, nationalism, and vulnerability occupy the same visual space. The title evokes the familiar idea of “American Gothic,” but the photograph complicates rather than confirms that identity.
This ambiguity is valuable in an exhibition about civic expression. Not every political artwork needs to tell viewers what to believe. Sometimes an artwork’s role is to place competing ideas beside one another. The result can be uncomfortable. It can also encourage viewers to examine their own assumptions.
How Activist Art Turns Individual Expression Into Collective Action
The title Turn the Volume Up! captures the exhibition’s central metaphor. The phrase suggests amplification. It means making a voice louder, making an issue harder to ignore, and creating enough collective force to enter public life. Many of the works in the show demonstrate that process in different ways.
Davidson photographs a young person demanding the right to vote. Martin records a crowd gathered around a movement leader. Walker challenges the authority of historical imagery. Durant gives physical form to refusal. Gibson places conflicting ideas about America into a single frame.
None of these works presents activism as a simple formula. Instead, they show how public participation can begin with an individual act.
Public action can begin with a single voice. Someone speaks, another photographs, a crowd marches, a petition gathers signatures, and an artist makes an artwork. Each gesture may seem small on its own, but together these acts can become a movement, a historical record, or a demand for change.
Each gesture can appear small on its own. Together, such gestures can become a movement, a historical record, or a demand for change.
This is one of the exhibition’s most compelling ideas. Activist art does not always need to provide an answer. It can create a space where questions become impossible to ignore.
Why Activist Art Still Matters Today
One of the exhibition’s most persuasive qualities is that it does not treat activism as a finished chapter of American history. The Civil Rights Movement provides an important historical foundation. Yet the exhibition extends beyond it into questions of representation, institutional power, memory, and belonging.
The Nasher’s use of its own collection reinforces this sense of an ongoing conversation. Works are scheduled to rotate during the exhibition’s run. This allows new relationships between objects to emerge.
That decision is fitting. There is no final version of a history shaped by dissent. New voices continually alter what a society remembers. They also change how it understands itself.
Turn the Volume Up! ultimately suggests that activist art is not defined by a particular style or medium. It can be a photograph, a sculpture, an altered historical image, or a carefully constructed composition.
What connects these works is their engagement with public life.
The exhibition does not claim that art alone can change society. Its proposition is more measured. Art can make a voice visible. It can preserve evidence and question an accepted story. More importantly, it can give form to refusal.
Additionally, it can remind viewers that public life is shaped by more than institutions. It is shaped by people who decide to participate in it. At the Nasher, the act of “turning up the volume” is therefore not simply about speaking louder. It is about deciding that something deserves to be heard. And it is about recognizing that an individual voice can become more powerful when it joins others.
Turn the Volume Up! continues through July 11, 2027, at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art