The Arts and Politics Collective consists of a small group of artists and scholars who ask: What is, or ought to be, the relationship between aesthetics and politics? To explore this question, we are creating a cycle of performance works that challenges normative ways of viewing the arts.

The three experimental plays explore music, dance, and the visual art. Each piece engages a canonical work of art: Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (1825), Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” (1891), and Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937). Each illuminates our own time. The works demonstrate how racial and cultural differences affect the arts. Our aim, in the words of Toni Morrison, is to make the work “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful.”

To learn more: artsandpoliticsplays.com