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

WSW is pleased to invite you to celebrate how artists have changed America through direct action with 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 (2025, Verso). 

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.

Brenda Miller, a Kingston-based artist who contributed to the book, will discuss the activist group “the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee,” which she formed in 1970 with Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, and Poppy Johnson. The event will also include a reading by O’Neill-Butler from the book, a Q&A, and a book signing.

Postmark Books will be onsite selling copies of the book.

“This timely tome by Lauren O’Neill-Butler charts the history of artistic-activist debate going back to the 1960s, drawing on oral history work related to the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, ACT UP, and other organizations, as well as art by Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, fierce pussy, and Nan Goldin, among others.” Art in America

This event is free and open to the public, but we encourage you to reserve a spot here.

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”