Out Not Up: Hot Commie Organizing in the Arts
with Josh MacPhee & Andreas Petrossiants
organized by Art Workers’ Inquiry
Join the Art Workers' Inquiry for an event investigating alternative models of revolutionary organizing and movement building among art workers.
After a series of political inquiries about how the art world relates to Palestine, policing, and the pandemic, it's clear that we need new ways of finding comrades, supporting militant actions, and sharpening our antagonism to capitalism. How do we create a network of revolutionary art workers who are interested in building alliances across the city without cementing ourselves into an institution? How do we build out, not up?
The event will feature the writer Andreas Petrossiants presenting on "expansion vs. scale" in movement building, the artist Josh McPhee discussing the history of artists in the anti-apartheid struggle, and finally, an inquiry on some practical questions for communist organizing in the arts.
Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space. He plays football for Stop Cop City United.
Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade.
The Art Workers’ Inquiry is an organizing group seeking to build power across New York’s vast arts industry. We define art workers as anyone whose labor contributes to the artistic production process, from dancers to artists to art handlers to bartenders at performance venues. We build connections and strengthen bonds of solidarity between art workers with the ultimate goal of building a new, worker-run model of artistic labor.