Book Talk with Lauren O'Neill-Butler: The War of Art
Writer and editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler is blessing the bookspace with a talk about her new book, [The War of Art](https://www.possiblefuturesbooks.com/item/cQ0CGOT0rSmwgiAKXD5hQ)_, which investigates crucial political additions to art history. Lauren will be in conversation with scholar Alex Fialho.
More about the book:
How artists have changed America through direct action Artists in America have long battled against injustices, believing that art can in fact “do more.”
The War of Art tells this history of artist-led activism and the global political and aesthetic debates of the 1960s to the present. In contrast to the financialized art market and celebrity artists, the book explores the power of collective effort — from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat.
Lauren O’Neill-Butler charts the post-war development of artists’ protest and connects these struggles to a long tradition of feminism and civil rights activism. The book offers portraits of the key individuals and groups of artists who have campaigned for solidarity, housing, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS awareness, and against Indigenous injustice and the exclusion of women in the art world. This includes: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), David Wojnarowicz’s work with ACT UP, Top Value Television (TVTV), Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), fierce pussy, Project Row Houses, and Nan Goldin’s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN).
Based upon in-depth oral histories with the key figures in these movements, and illustrated throughout, The War of Art is an essential corrective to the idea that art history excludes politics.
More about Lauren:
Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York-based writer and editor. Her books include The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (Verso, 2025) and [Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture](https://possiblefuturesbooks.com/item/FAPJ0vmqmQH8AtwRjwVwQ) (Karma, 2021). She has written for Aperture, Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times, among many others, and has also contributed essays to many exhibition catalogues. She received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2020 and the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant in 2023._
She holds graduate degrees in art history and philosophy, and has been a visiting critic at Cooper Union, Stony Brook University, USC, Rutgers, Yale, and the University of Chicago. She is currently a part-time faculty member at Hunter College and the New School and has previously taught courses at the School of Visual Arts and RISD. She’s a member of ACT-UAW Local 790 and PSC-CUNY. She was a cofounder of the nonprofit magazine November and Senior Editor of Artforum magazine from 2008 to 2019.
More about Alex:
Alex Fialho is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. As an art historian and curator, Fialho focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black queer and feminist thought, and AIDS cultural studies. His dissertation “Apertures Onto AIDS: African American Photography and the Art History of the Storage Unit” animates AIDS-related histories through the lens of artists Lola Flash, Darrel Ellis, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Kia LaBeija. Based in Los Angeles after five formative years in New Haven, Fialho is a 2024–2025 Predoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and the 2025–2026 Luce/ACSL Ellen Holtzman Dissertation Fellow in American Art.