Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle. The Sower, 2015; india ink, acrylic paint, and polyfilm on wood panel; 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery and the Artist.

In the early decades of photography, many Europeans and European Americans employed the nascent technology in conquered lands across the planet to document colonial subjects. These images became historical records, though they were often inscribed with colonial fantasies—subjects were presented as dwelling in prehistory or dressed in attire from cultures that were not their own. This approach to both ethnography and tourism has been widely critiqued, but the resulting documents persist, as do the worldviews built upon them.

Interdisciplinary artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle uses reproductions of these antique photographs as sources for one of three bodies of work in Who Among Us… The Art of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. The Uninvited Series displays over a dozen black-and-white and sepia-tone photographs of African women on a single wall, each of which Hinkle has reclaimed with ink, paint, glitter, gouache, and collage.

Some of the pieces are kaleidoscopic interventions that adorn the figures with ornate headdresses, body armor, or auras. In The Transfiguration (2015), for example, the portrait of a woman is mostly obscured by a sea of pink protozoan blobs and a web of intricate ink drawings that wrap around her chin and protrude from her forehead. Hinkle gives the woman a regal and fantastical headdress and the power it connotes—if only retroactively, imaginatively. In The Huntress (2014), a woman wearing a barely perceptible smile faces the viewer. Spirals of ink radiate from one of her eyes, creating a mask that covers half of her face, stretching upward and outward. The mouth of a roaring tiger cut from a photograph rests between the woman’s bare breasts. The tiger’s defiant roar seems to represent emotions concealed by the subject’s sardonic smile—emotions she may not have been at liberty to display to the photographer.

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Oree Originol. Untitled, 2014; wood, ink, and paper; 7 x 3 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and Galería de la Raza, San Francisco.

The thirteen large-scale woodblock prints that were on display in Carving Through Borders at Galería de la Raza illustrate the varied and sometimes conflicting emotions associated with immigration, from defiance to protest to hope. Carving Through Borders is a product of a long history of political printmaking, but these works render the political especially personal, making their messages even more resonant.

The commanding size of these prints combined with the intimate, stirring texts that accompany the imagery make an emotional impression on the viewer. A piece by DJ Agana at the gallery entrance greeted visitors with a Lady Liberty–like figure in a flowing quetzal feather headdress and bearing an ear of corn in place of a torch. The words “move freely” are emblazoned at the base of the print, a more direct and defiant summation of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. This rendering reminds the viewer that Lazarus’s words have been hollowed out—it is now considered utopian for a nation to embrace the tired, poor, and homeless.

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Dawn Weleski. Conflict Kitchen, 2010-present; Pittsburgh, PA. Image courtesy of the Artists.

A recent poll of Americans asked a variety of foreign-policy questions regarding the ongoing political crisis in Ukraine. Pollsters also asked respondents to pinpoint Ukraine on a high-resolution world map. Only 16% correctly completed this task—but more interestingly, the researchers found that the more incorrect a person’s guess, the more likely he or she was to want the United States to intervene militarily. And many respondents were very, very far off, suggesting that Ukraine was in Greenland, Florida, Alaska, New Zealand, Madagascar, all over Brazil, and, confusingly, several random locations in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

These hawkish voices, guided by ignorance and misinformation, are often the loudest ones, calling for shock and awe when tensions flare around the globe. Dawn Weleski, a recent Stanford University MFA graduate and a 2013–2014 Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellow, aims directly at this destructive connection between ignorance and hostility with her social art project Conflict Kitchen.

Developed with fellow artist Jon Rubin, Conflict Kitchen is a brick-and-mortar restaurant in Pittsburgh that opened in 2010. The restaurant serves food only from countries with which the U.S. is in conflict, militarily or diplomatically. The current menu, focusing on Afghanistan, where the U.S. is waging the longest war in its history, offers slow-cooked lamb, kebabs, potato-leek stuffed turnovers, and a lemon-rosewater basil seed drink. Previous incarnations of the restaurant served food from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Every several months, the restaurant closes down and then reopens with a new menu, name, and facade.

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Installation view of Wafaa Yasin's 'Aesh (Livelihood),' 2008.

DS: You’ve been writing about the relationship between politics and art for a little while, not just at Art Practical, but in other publications. How did you come to the topic?

Matthew Harrison Tedford: Originally, I studied political philosophy, so I’m indebted to that discourse. Personally, however, I became disillusioned because I felt the conversation was disconnected from reality. So I began to look at art through this lens. It’s not that art is really any more concrete, but there’s something about it that’s helped me to clarify my questions about politics. There are other avenues for this: becoming an activist, becoming a politician, for example. But, for someone interested in the arts, like myself, looking at political art is a way to engage as an activist or a politician might, without having to martyr yourself to a profession you might not be interested in.

DS: Were you an activist? Or an artist?

MHT: I tried to get involved with campus politics, but I found it frustrating. There was this mentality where if you raised a legitimate question, you were attacked for somehow being counter-revolutionary. It seemed very superficial and reactionary. So in that proto-radical, post-adolescent scene, I became withdrawn, but this wasn’t something I was happy about. I was left with a question about how to be involved with politics, given the unappealing experiences I’d had. Which is not to say that all political groups are like this, or that even most political groups are like this! I just didn’t want to be part of a group that wasn’t open to being questioned.

DS: Do you feel like there’s a lack of conversation about the relationship between art and politics?

MHT: No. Certainly not. My personal interest is to clarify this relationship, to make it more concrete. I think sometimes works are seen as political just because they have political content. For instance, just because it’s a painting of George Bush, it’s seen as political. For me, I need the definition to be more meaningful. My goal has been to really define what makes a work of art political, or when does art function as a political phenomenon versus just an artwork?

MIchael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass' on the move, 2012. Photo by Will Brown Hernandez.

DS: What conclusions have you drawn? What makes a work political?

MHT: Answering for myself — as there are a lot of different approaches — I had to say forget art, what’s politics? I was looking at [philosophers] Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, and for them, something is political if it involves a plurality of members of a given society. If it engages a large group, people of different perspectives, and not a homogenous mass. Secondly, if it’s doing so in a way that creates debate or dialogue among these people with regard to the structure or function of their society. For me, something’s not just political if it creates a debate alone — we can debate about whether a table is hard or soft — but really, it becomes political when the debate is about the way in which we live and structure our society.

DS: Would you consider Piss Christ (a photograph of a crucifix in the artist’s urine, a copy of which was recently smashed in a London Museum) a political work?

MHT: This recent attack was interesting. I don’t know if this is too cynical, but you could choose to look at the fact that it was smashed as ‘debate.’ On the other hand, you could say that it was just smashing an artwork. I don’t know, but I have a sweet spot for iconoclasm.

DS: But when it’s just one individual, that doesn’t constitute a plurality, does it?

MHT: No, but the fact that this work and works like it are so often attacked — not just physically, but via funding or visibility — indicates that there is a larger debate happening. So yes, you could say that this is acting as a political work of art. The unfortunate result is whether or not this means a work of art is more political if it has more celebrity? I don’t want that to be the case, but then again, if I have this brilliant work of political art, but it never leaves my studio…

Andreas Serrano's 'Piss Christ,' 1987, after being smashed with a hammer at the Lamber Collection Contemporary Art Museum in France.

DS: How much is artist intention involved?

MHT: Well, even if the work has no political intent, if it raises the kind of debate I’ve mentioned, I would consider it political. To do this accidentally — it’s complicated. So much is contingent on what happens. Really, any artwork has the potential to be political, depending how it enters into the public arena.

DS: Besides creating debate, does a work need to be effective in a particular way?

MHT: No, I don’t think it does. An artist creating a political work probably wants it to be effective, but it doesn’t need to be. Take voting, for example. It’s a political act, but even if you vote for someone who loses, you’re still engaging in politics. So, no, I don’t think the efficacy of something is tied up in whether it’s political.