The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest In America by Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Book Event
July 26th 4-6PM

Join us for a reading and interactive talk to celebrate the release of Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest In America.

To begin, Lauren and Brenda Miller, a Kingston-based artist who contributed to the book, will discuss the activist group “the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee,” that Brenda formed in 1970 with Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, and Poppy Johnson. The afternoon will also include a reading from the book and a Q&A. Copies of Lauren’s book will be available for purchase on site.

This event is free and open to the public, but you can reserve your spot here.

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.

About the Speakers

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 (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.

Brenda Miller (b. 1941, Bronx, NY) is known for her innovative sisal wall sculptures, typewriting, and Alphabet rubber-stamped ink and pencil works. She has exhibited work at prominent institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. As a feminist and active participant in the 1970s women’s movement, Miller co-founded the Ad-Hoc Women Artists Committee with notable figures like Faith Ringgold and Lucy Lippard. Her early work merges gender politics with post-minimalism, using repurposed materials like sisal and rubber stamps to imbue abstraction with meaning.

Brenda Miller, Dianderous, 1972-2024, Sisal and wire, 80 x 80”