Description:

In the five years since Occupy Wall Street, the condition of indebtedness and the figure of the debtor have become matters of political concern for activists, academics, and artists. This talk will assess efforts thus far to build a debtors movement, and will then highlight the ways in which the movement for Black Lives has radically altered the aesthetic and political horizons of debt-resistance work.

Yates Mckee is an art critic. His work has appeared in publications including October, Grey Room, Art Journal, e-flux journal, and The Nation. He is the author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso 2016), and has worked with collectives including MTL, Strike Debt, Gulf Labor Coalition, and Direct Action Front for Palestine. He is co-organizer of Decolonize This Place, a movement hub currently set up at Artists Space in Lower Manhattan through December 2016.

This talk is co-presented by the Department of Art History and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as part of the Institute's 2016-2017 Debt Dialogue Series. The Debt Dialogues are made possible in part by the generous support of the Harris Lecture Fund.