The Art of Activism: Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible, Paperback

The Art of Activism is an all-purpose guide to artistic activism, combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change. With contemporary case studies and historical examples, chapters on cultural and cognitive theory, sections on what can be learned from unlikely sources like popular culture and marketing techniques, along with investigations into ethics and evaluation, explorations of the creative process and the importance of utopian thinking, and an attached workbook with over fifty exercises to practice, the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism take readers step-by-step through the process of becoming, or becoming even better, artistic activists.

About author(s):Stephen Duncombe is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School in the department of Media, Culture and Communications and is a lifelong political activist. He is the author and editor of six books including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York, Cultural Resistance Reader, White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, and (Open) Utopia. Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He and his family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area four days later. His father was a former Franciscan friar, and his mother, an ex-Dominican nun. He dropped out of high school in 1993, but went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute in and the University of California, Davis. He teaches at SUNY Purchase. He is a member of the New York based artist group Free Art and Technology Lab. He has won several awards including from Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Rhizome/The New Museum, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the California Arts Council Duncombe and Lambert are co-founders of The Center for Artistic Activism.