Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77

Introduction: Precarious Solidarities
– Wing Chan, Charles Esche and David Morris

Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy in Historical Perspective
– David Morris

Art in a Solidarity Continuum: Winnowing Loose Transnational Threads
– Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

Before Art and Politics: Regarding the Precarious Documents of Artists for Democracy
– Wing Chan

A Museum for the People: On the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende
– María José Lemaitre Mujica and Caroll Yasky

Following Chile Vencerá
– Hannah Healey

Everything is suspended in thin air
– Cường Minh Bá Phạm and George Clark

‘We are going to win’: On Artists for Democracy and the 1970s Conjuncture
– Vijay Prashad

Artists for Democracy 1974–77: Archives

• Organized Dreaming
  – Cecilia Vicuña, 2013
• Agriculture, Field, Decoration
  – Guy Brett, 1976
• Commentary: You Hide Me
  – Nii Kwate Owoo, c.1970
• Paul Burwell and David Toop at Artists’ For Democracy
  – Annabel Nicolson, 1975
• Performance art – it breathes and grows
  – Virgil Calaguian, 1977
• Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art
  – Susan Hiller, 1977
• David Medalla in Conversation with Brandon Taylor, 1977
• Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto (extract)
  – Rasheed Araeen, 1975–76

Voices from AFD
– Rasheed Araeen, Conrad Atkinson, Anne Bean, Guy Brett, Virgil Calaguian, Hugh Cave, Stephen Cripps, John Dugger, Rose English, Charles Hustwick, Tina Keane, Roberta Kravitz, Lynn MacRitchie, Kathleen McCreery, David Medalla, Jonathan Miles, Ife Nii Owoo, Nii Kwate Owoo, Nick Payne, Stephen Pusey, Saleem Arif Quadri, Steve Sprung, Sylvia Stevens, Jun Terra, Anna Thew, Giles Thomas, Cecilia Vicuña

Acknowledgements

Authors’ Biographies

Image and Text Credits

Index

Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77

Artists for Democracy formed in London in 1974 to give ‘material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide’. Precarious Solidarities addresses the far-reaching actions of this group of cultural workers – whose personal/artistic trajectories span Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas – and the entanglement of artistic practice with transnational solidarities shaped by migration and political mobilisation. Through a range of new commissions, contributions from AFD members, and extensive archival documentation, Precarious Solidarities highlights the group’s multiple agencies and conditions of possibility – artistic, social, political, historical and geographic – and the potentials of these histories today. Contributors include: Rasheed Araeen, Guy Brett, Virgil Calaguian, Wing Chan, Cường Minh Bá Phạm and George Clark, Charles Esche, Hannah Healey, Susan Hiller, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, María José Lemaitre Mujica and Caroll Yasky, David Medalla and Brandon Taylor, David Morris, Annabel Nicolson, Nii Kwate Owoo, Vijay Prashad and Cecilia Vicuña.

Kylie Gilchrist, ‘Precarious Futures? Reading and Recovering the Archives of Artists for Democracy (1974–77) and Artists Call (1984–85)’, Art History, Volume 47, Issue 3, June 2024, pp.624–31. It is available to read here.