introduction

This virtual exhibition aims to highlight the extraordinary range of conceptual, formal, and social connections between Dada art of the 1920s and contemporary protest art from from the Hood Museum’s Permanent Collection. Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Marius de Zayas´ works are presented in dialogue with works of contemporary protest art: Sexy Semite by Emily Jacir and selected works from the Guerilla Girls and Occupy movement portfolio. These artists all address critique on the society and art world surrounding them, their works illuminate a sense of shared community in their artistic practice. By setting the pieces in conversation to each other the virtual exhibition aims to provide scholarly meditations on the interconnectedness of the movements artists and works of art.

These arrangements provide a sense of protest art history as they provide a view on the beginning of Dada in 1916, then jumping over 100 years and looking at the current development. By extracting some of the visual language that is used, such as collage format, and text as a medium and newspaper references found in the Dada works, we can begin to get a sense of Dadaist’s vibrant and important thread connecting artists from the twentieth into the twenty-first centuries.