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       Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937)       

Brief Description: Guernica is a powerful anti-war mural painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts the tragedies of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, showing dismembered soldiers, grieving women, and agonized animals. The monochrome cubist style and raw emotional force convey a powerful message against the violence and inhumanity of war.

Performance Artist: Shaun Leonardo, "The Freedom to Move"

Brief Description: Here, Leonardo draws on his background as an ex-athlete and the son of Latin immigrants to portray a character. He underscores this by showing how the projection of racial stereotypes undermines and misrepresents the portrayal of black and brown bodies. He challenges the audience's notions of violence and hypermasculinity through great-intensity actions like "Bull in the Ring." Although the most recent ones have participants go through movement exercises so as to have a better grasp of their own identities and modes of expression, the most striking message seems to be that you can rise higher and live in your own body despite all of society's restrictions.




Chapter 3 Quote 1: "We learn from past successes and past failures, from people of the past whose struggles we identify with, and from those whose actions we oppose" (Duncombe & Lambert, 2021).
Response: It demonstrates that the formation of movements takes a cumulative and self-correcting process involving the positive and negative experiences of those who took part before.

Chapter 3 Quote 2: "We never start at zero, and it's a mistake to think we create something from nothing. We are always drawing from repositories of words, images, and meanings that already exist" (Duncombe & Lambert, 2021).
Response: Our works are not shaped independently without using and responding to the cultural and artistic vocabulary and setting that is around us.

Chapter 4 Quote 1: "Culture is necessary for our very survival. Without it, we wouldn't know who or what we are, nor how to function beyond rudimentary biological life" (Duncombe & Lambert, 2021).
Response: Culture provides the core foundations of identity, belonging, and understanding for individuals and societies. It is a vital framework for how we make sense of ourselves and the world.

Chapter 4 Quote 2: "Art is powerful. It's a way we can express our understanding of the world as it is and articulate our visions for how it could be. In this way, all art is political, whether the artist intends it to be or not" (Duncombe & Lambert, 2021).



Response: Art serves as a vessel for both representing current realities as well as imagining and advocating for alternative futures. Given this role, even seemingly apolitical art can be read as taking an implicit political stance.