Somewhere buried in ramped-up news cycles about mass shootings from last weekend and beyond, artist, like everyone else, are confronted with an unsettling reality as these bullets hit closer and closer to home. As we stare down the barrel of yet another weekend of killings in El Paso and Ohio, we are trying, like you, to find a balance between feeling overwhelmed and feeling numb. I’ve compiled a list of some of the articles we have featured on the subject in recent years.
1. All of Our Guns, Part 1, from 2015, in which our editor-in-chief, Christina Rees explores the depictions of guns in art.
…and Part 2: All of Our Guns, the All-Texas Edition.
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2. Fernando Andrade’s War on Violence, where critic David S. Rubin makes the case for Andrade’s work as a reflection on human vulnerability and the preciousness of life itself.
3. dis America, an op-ed where I question the impact any art can have on gun violence.
4. An American Procession and Some Divine Ammunition in Dallas: Colette Copeland on two exhibition that confront racism, religion, violence, hegemony, heroism, and gun culture.
5. Seth Mittag: Gun Play: Bill Davenport’s review of Mittag’s show about how early guns show up in the lives of some children.
6. Guns In The Hands of Artists: Paula Newton’s 2015 news story about the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery’s distribution of guns from the streets of New Orleans to 30 artists, inviting them to create works in response to gun violence in America.
7. All The World’s a Snuff Film, with Rees ruminating on desensitization and the slippery slope.
8. American Buffalo: another time, another kind of massacre.
9. A Studio Visit with Shannon Cannings: Contributor Hannah Dean talks toy guns and Columbine with the artist.
10. Three Walls at Sala Dias: ‘Under the Gun’, in which Neil Fauerso explores what he sees as the central pressing question of all art right now, and how to respond to a world that seems to be getting worse.
11. Threat/No Threat: Images Today and the Instant Response: “The power of language and images is more charged than ever, especially in our digital age, and the information we receive through images (and language) is coming at us with unprecedented velocity.” -Paul Middendorf.
12. Buy One Get One Guns, The Yes Men’s satirical “collaboration” between the NRA and Smith & Wesson to give free guns to America’s urban poor.
Search “guns” on Glasstire for even more artists and articles on the subject.
