Crafting Politics: MAD Artists Respond Across History

Art has always played an important role in expressing a society’s hopes and concerns. Many of the artists in MAD’s collection have used their creative practices to engage with the social, political, and cultural issues of their time. This module showcases examples of how artists in the collection have advocated for causes or issued critiques in inventive and creative ways, working across a broad range of craft media. War is at the center of a number of these works: Stephen Dixon’s 21 Countries consists of 21 ceramic plates, each commemorating a foreign country in which the United States has carried out military actions since World War II, while Gonçalo Mabunda’s The Hope Throne is made from armaments, weapons, and ammunition buried in fields during Mozambique’s tragic and devastating civil war (1977-1992). MAD’s collection contains a number of works memorializing the victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001, as well as two brooches by Kathleen Browne that were created to express the artist’s opposition to the subsequent Iraq war and, in her words, “the abuses of both human and civil rights perpetrated by my government.” Other works in this module address domestic issues, whether in the United States or abroad. In Angela Ellsworth’s In Memory of Our Sisters III, the artist honors the “sister wives” of the Mormon faith while commenting on the silencing and trauma of women amidst historic losses in reproductive justice, while Donald Paul Tompkins’s necklace commemorates the life and work of union organizer Jack Zucker, an important figure in the American labor movement. Farther afield, Nadya Tolokonnikova, known for her role as founder of the Russian feminist activist group Pussy Riot, employed the sewing skills she was forced into learning during her imprisonment in Siberia to create a series of artworks criticizing Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Finally, some artists have created works inspired by American presidents, from Marvin Lipofsky’s solemn memorial to the Kennedy assassination, to Wendy Maruyama’s cheerful Homage to Jimmy Carter, to Jan Hopkins’s Head Over Heals, expressing the widespread excitement and fervor over the nomination and inauguration of Barack Obama.