My mission here at WFIU is to cover local arts and culture in Southern Indiana. The thing is, when you’re worried about the health of democracy in your country, local arts coverage can feel like too little too late. I believe you can’t have a healthy democracy without lively and thoughtful arts and culture. But still, sometimes you want to face things a little more head-on. 

So I decided to invite my friend Faye Gleisser for an interview. She’s a professor in the art history department here at Indiana University. I realize, on the face of it, that that might feel even more removed from the state of contemporary democracy. When I think “art history,” I picture students listening to a lecture about the slant of light in paintings of religious epiphanies. Good stuff, but different from protesting injustice in the streets.

Faye Gleisser is not that kind of art historian. (She actually feels complicated about calling herself an art historian at all.) Her book is called Risk Work: Making Art and Guerilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987. It came out in 2023, and it’s about how, in the 1960s, artists started using new tactics in response to changes in…policing. It’s about policing and art. 

We talk about the relationships between those two things, and about an article she wrote about artists at risk in Indiana. And I ask her whether art can resist fascism. She get into her art historian chair and gave me some really helpful insights.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer, Dom Heyob, put this episode together. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.