![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2006_7_1_15_v3_FINAL_o2.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>Harper\u2019s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)<\/em>, 2005.<\/span>). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC. Museum purchase with funds provided by Monica M. and Richard D. Segal, the Neely Family, and Barbra and Andrew Rothschild, 2006.7.1.9. \u00a9 Kara Walker. Pho t o by Peter Paul Geoffrion.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
What did that mean to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe KRS-One song is about sharing histories and stories through hip-hop with a wider audience\u2014people who may not otherwise have access to that information. Mamdani laid out a platform that included voices that hadn\u2019t been centered before, and it resonated with the work I was doing for \u201cBy Dawn\u2019s Early Light.\u201d I thought, this is the spirit of this moment, the importance of bringing people to the table and making that table bigger, whether through music or art.<\/p>\n \n\tI thought, that\u2019s the title for this show, because, effectively, what happened in that mayoral election was that the volume was turned up. Two million people turned out to vote and said, \u201chere\u2019s my voice.\u201d<\/p>\n So how did that translate into an art exhibition?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe exhibition is about how artists, activists, and everyday people organize for change. As I gathered more works along those lines, five sections emerged: \u201cRemarks,\u201d \u201cOrganized,\u201d \u201cRecords,\u201d and \u201cPetitions,\u201d along with a fifth section that I\u2019m still confirming in the exhibition materials.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cRemarks\u201d looks at artists commenting on historical and sociocultural events and responding to them. \u201cOrganized\u201d looks at how artists organize for change, making works that are not only artworks but can also be used\u2014taken off the wall and shared as flyers, for example, or used to raise funds for causes.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cRecords\u201d explores how artists document events, literally through photography, painting, or other forms of record-making. It also considers how artists speak back to existing records and highlight issues that were not resolved\u2014effectively disagreeing with what has entered the historical consciousness.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPetitions\u201d looks at how artists present contemporary issues and ask people to advocate for change around them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe section titles are intentional. At the heart of the show is the idea that these are terms used both at the federal level\u2014in Congress, the Senate, or the House of Representatives\u2014and in community contexts, such as a local city hall meeting or a neighborhood organizing group. You hear people say, \u201cI\u2019d like my remarks recorded for the congressional record,\u201d but you also hear people in a community say, \u201cWe need to organize.\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019re trying to remind visitors that politics is personal.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s important to me that visitors understand that they matter, that what they care about matters, and that using their voice to advocate for issues they care about matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhen you think about the context of time, space, and geological history in which we exist, it\u2019s already a miracle that we exist at all. A meteor could have hit millions of years ago, and we wouldn\u2019t be here. In a sense, I need people to see and believe that they themselves are this miracle, and that they need to use this one wild and precious life to fight for the things they care about.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNothing is too small. It could mean helping your neighbors or recognizing that an older population does not have access to resources and asking how you can support them.<\/p>\n \n\tPeople have power. Just because it looks in the news as though only a handful of people have power, that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s true. The show includes reflective questions throughout that ask visitors to think about the exhibition from the perspective of \u201cI am part of this.\u201d<\/p>\n How is that idea reflected in the exhibition\u2019s design?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe exhibition has a very intentional design treatment. Joel Johnson, our head of graphic design, and I worked closely to create visuals that position visitors to see themselves as part of the show.<\/p>\n \n\tThere are silhouettes of demonstrators holding placards, and the placards are perfectly blank. The idea is that visitors are walking in and joining this line of people carrying signs. As they read the reflective questions throughout the show, their own personal placard becomes visible to them: What are the things they care about as they look at the works and think about the exhibition? The first questions visitors encounter are: \u201cHow are you showing up for your communities every day?\u201d and \u201cWhat actions are you and your neighbors taking to shape your local government policy so it can support your shared welfare?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe questions appear on the walls, in the interpretive text at the end of each section. The exhibition text says that the show meditates on the state of the world as we face challenges to the fabric of our social-welfare systems. It also asks us to reflect on our responsibility to make a difference as active participants in shaping a nation.<\/p>\n The art explores pivotal chapters in American history, like the Civil Rights movement, from intentionally unfamiliar perspectives. What\u2019s a work that surprised you?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m thinking of several works on display. We have a wonderful loan of Robert Colescott\u2019s painting The Wreckage of the Medusa<\/em>, which shows the global context of what the exhibition is discussing. The show is not only about the United States; it also asks us to think as global citizens. The things we are experiencing are not happening out of the blue. They have historical resonance.<\/p>\n \n\tColescott\u2019s work speaks back to Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault\u2019s The Raft of the Medusa<\/em>. When G\u00e9ricault made his painting, the shipwreck was in the news throughout France. The ship had capsized, lives were lost, and people built a raft to survive. Reports even described cannibalism among those stranded. G\u00e9ricault\u2019s operatic painting shows people reaching toward the sky because a rescue ship is visible on the horizon. Colescott looks at the moment after the ship has fallen apart, when the ship has capsized and people are in the water.<\/p>\n \n\tColescott includes himself among the passengers. The people he represents are not only identifiable passengers\u2014such as the captain wearing a hat or someone holding a life raft. He also includes racialized stereotypes and caricatures. The captain is on the left side of the painting, looking at these figures with his eyes completely covered. I think, \u201cWhat an incisive commentary on the history of racism, especially in the United States, and on arguments such as, \u2018I don\u2019t see race.\u2019\u201d Covering your eyes suggests that if you don\u2019t see race or consider it a factor in discrimination, what happens is what Colescott is painting: the perpetuation of stereotypes and problematic representations that continue to harm people.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the \u201cOrganized\u201d section, we have a work by Carlos Vega, a portrait of Malala Yousafzai. It is the first time we have shown the work, which is a recent acquisition. Yousafzai is presented with references to the Virgin Mary: Her hijab is a similar blue, and the rays of light around her resemble a Renaissance votive image. Vega has included small stars around Yousafzai. Inside the stars are portraits of other women and femme organizers who have worked for access to education or for the advancement of women and femmes in society.<\/p>\n The show takes its name from a political victory, but it is also set against a contemporary moment marked by violence, censorship, defunding, and attacks on freedom of expression. How did the national state of art and politics shape your curation?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tFor me, art is almost always inherently political because a human being is behind it. That person is shaped\u2014whether they intend to be or not\u2014by the structures of the nations and states in which they live. A lot of my dissertation research looked at artists\u2019 experiences of exile: what it means to leave one\u2019s homeland, adopt a new homeland, and struggle through that process. Politically, these artists had been written into or out of structures through policies, legislation, or other acts. Friction entered into their ability to move through the world. They are not outside their lived historical or political experience, whether or not they are actively participating in politics.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen we look at artwork, it is critical not to forget that there is a person behind it, with lived experience that may or may not emerge visibly in the work. When you see many works together, threads begin to appear. Threads from a particular period that may not have seemed loud at the time can resonate later, and moments that were loud when they first occurred can continue to resonate because history moves in cycles.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m thinking of a Carol Summers work from a Vietnam War portfolio created by artists and writers protesting the war. The work is titled Kill for Peace<\/em>. It shows a woman and children with a large red X over them and circles that resemble bullet holes. For me, it is a comment on how warfare dehumanizes people. Warfare almost requires us to forget that human lives are behind the violence and are being affected and lost as a result. Summers made the work in 1967, but it feels even more resonant now.\u00a0<\/p>\n Reading history has a way of flattening the emotions of the moment, making political action seem inevitable in hindsight. Sometimes it\u2019s hard to grasp the courage it took for people to make those choices. I\u2019m thinking of the demonstrators who shut down the opening of this year\u2019s Venice Biennale in solidarity with Ukraine and Palestine<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \n\tThere is a direct correlation with the Guerrilla Girls\u2019 Most Wanted<\/em> portfolio, which is on display. The Guerrilla Girls are now canonical within art history, and people often accept their work as though it has always been recognized as important.<\/p>\n \n\tBut in the context in which those works were made\u2014during the 1980s, if I\u2019m remembering correctly\u2014it was radical to present statistics as art. The Guerrilla Girls compiled information from the news and showed how many women had one-person exhibitions at New York museums. The Guggenheim had zero, the Met had zero, the Museum of Modern Art had one, and the Whitney had zero.<\/p>\n \n\tThey presented the information in black and white. There was no figurative representation or thematic subject. It wasn\u2019t a romantic historical painting or a genre painting. It was statistics.<\/p>\n From the outside, infrastructure may seem fixed, but it\u2019s malleable.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tInfrastructure is people.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m thinking of the works in the exhibition by Leonard Freed. He documented cases in Atlanta involving the murders of Black children. He returned to the story repeatedly over several years, between roughly 1975 and 1980. One image shows the family of the 21st child who was killed leaving a service. Freed continued to follow these stories and return to these places. He was there when the police arrived and when bodies were found.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFreed\u2019s photographs allow me, in 2026, to encounter moments I could not physically have witnessed. I can see the demonstrators, the police at the site, and the investigation room with the portraits, almost as if I were walking through it myself. That is critical to building empathy. Sometimes events are so far away that you have no way to grasp their severity and gravity. You can\u2019t unsee these images.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been learning more about the Nasher\u2019s history. The works in this show include loans, but there is also a deep permanent collection of activist and socially engaged work. Was the Nasher founded with that orientation?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThere is a predecessor, the Duke University Museum of Art, which had been around since the late 1960s. The Nasher Museum of Art, as we know it today, was founded in 2005.<\/p>\n \n\tThe earlier museum was an encyclopedic university museum that collected a little bit of everything from every period to serve as a learning lab. One gap became apparent quickly: contemporary art was not sufficiently present in that conversation. So from the outset, the Nasher\u2019s goal was to collect contemporary art\u2014and to collect it early and often. The collection quickly developed into a strong collection of contemporary African diasporic art. The museum also acquired works by artists who, at the time, were emerging and who would later become major names.<\/p>\n Is the Nasher\u2019s history what attracted you to the institution?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tDeeply. I had watched the Nasher from the time I was a graduate student in the early 2010s. I saw it coming onto the national stage and taking risks with its exhibitions. I thought, \u201cThis is a university art museum doing things.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAt the time, my now-director and predecessor, Trevor Schoonmaker, was the curator of contemporary art. He organized one of the editions of the Prospect triennial. I thought it was remarkable that a museum located within a university\u2014and within a university in the South\u2014was working across the region and internationally, centering artists from the South and artists from diasporic communities who were not always centered in larger contexts.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s not that larger museums weren\u2019t doing this work, but I think it is now expected. Museums understand that building a great collection means attending to the many voices that make up a community and the stories a collection tells. They need to be attentive to the voices in the collection and try to tell a plural history or experience of life as we know it. The Nasher was already doing that from day one.<\/p>\n What feeling do you want visitors to leave \u201cTurn the Volume Up\u201d with?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI hope they take something from the title and the historical moment that inspired it. It is a midterm-election year and the 250th anniversary of the United States. Could you imagine if everyone voted? What if every person went to the polls and put their voice into the process? How radically different could the world look if every voice were taken into account?<\/p>\n \n\tI also want to say something more broadly about the work of museums\u2014curating exhibitions and caring for permanent collections. It is a practice of radical hope. It is predicated on the conviction that there is a future beyond the time in which we exist, that we are working toward and imagining that future, and that people in that future will look back, remember, and learn from what we leave behind.<\/p>\n \n\tPeople participating in their local democracies, or even going to a museum and learning from the past, are already part of that longer story. We are all imagining that there will be a tomorrow. We don\u2019t know what it will look like, but we hope it will be here.<\/p>\n A<\/strong>nd yet you\u2019re also working on a show about the end of the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYes. That is a 2029 exhibition about climate catastrophe. It asks: If we are the last generation to see the last sunsets and the last seasons, how do we hold on to what remains without falling into despair? How do we imagine what life might be like if we make it through climate catastrophe? How do we rebuild afterward?<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m hopeful for the future. I know it\u2019s coming, and I hope everyone embraces the idea that there is a future, even when it sometimes feels as though there isn\u2019t one. It is there every day we wake up and work toward the things we care about. We are working from the conviction that there is a tomorrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/politics-is-personal-powerful-show-protest-art-nasher-museum-1234796737\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2018_24_16_v2_FINAL_o2.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cJust because an artist is not thinking directly about politics while making a work does not mean they are outside the political context,\u201d said Xuxa Rodr\u00edguez, curator of \u201cTurn the Volume Up!,\u201d the newest exhibition at Duke University\u2019s Nasher Museum of Art. The timely\u2014or timeless\u2014exhibition surveys art\u2019s place in both the great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2126006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2126006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2126006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2126006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2126006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/26388_OB_02_o2.jpg?w=400\")
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<\/span>Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC. Gift of Isabella del Frate Rayburn, 2025.27.1. \u00a9 Carlos Vega. Photo by Brian Quinby.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/11579_OB_04_o2.jpg?w=400\")
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