HOW DO ARTIST NAVIGATE THE INTERSECTION OF IDENTITY AND OFTEN CHALLENGE IT IN TH

HOW DO ARTIST NAVIGATE THE INTERSECTION OF IDENTITY AND OFTEN CHALLENGE IT IN THEIR WORK?

Even before the term identity-politics came into use, there were those who engaged in a political thought process based in identity. These individuals critiqued not only mainstream culture and society, but the ways in which they believed the left had overlooked the significance of race, gender and sexuality in favor of perspectives it deemed more foundational, such as class, economic structure and later philosophical questions of meaning in form.  Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison and Simone de Beauvoir were but a few writers who directly criticized the left, pointing out perspectives overlooked in the discourse of social equality and fair distribution of resources. Those who took up the cause of critique from the standpoint of identity had a major task. They were charged with informing the world of leftist thought– both in the academy and in the arts–of the urgency to address race, gender and sexuality. Moreover, they had to exhibit the ways in which these critical perspectives could illuminate omissions within the accepted discourses of social and political justice and their cultural manifestations