A Critical Qualitative Study of Community-Driven Artmaking and its Praxis in Cultural Resistance

Public art has been historically complicit in perpetuating discursive and cultural violence on those who do not have access to normative privilege (e.g., citizenship, whiteness, patriarchy). Informed by multiple theoretical thinking such as the counter-public sphere and differential belonging, this dissertation takes a minoritarian stance on the making of site- and culture-specific art by and for the marginalized. It explores the critical potentiality of community-driven artmaking in communicating resistance and other modes of cultural antagonism to counter the assumed illegitimacy of minoritarian lives. Although communication scholars have undertaken primarily rhetorical analyses of artworks in marginalized spaces to delineate the communicative significance of art-as-resistance, they have focused less on the “who” of artmaking: the artists and their participants. Thus, by interviewing 23 community-driven artists and visiting three U.S. cities filled with histories of economic and sociopolitical oppression, this study examines the interview discourses of the artists and (their) artworks to offer three key findings: (1) artmaking as a praxiological commitment to onto-epistemic, anti-colonial, and pedagogical interventions in Western knowledge, (2) artmaking as a heuristic: re-thinking community and belonging beyond a normative logic of assimilation across temporal and spatial boundaries, and (3) artmaking as a dialogic performance of resistance through collective care and radical representation. These findings yield critical insights into the social implications of community-driven artmaking in seeking (1) horizontal humanization, (2) reparative placemaking, and (3) resistive non-violence. At the end, I also suggest a theoretical extension of “minoritarian intersubjectivity” and elaborate a “triangulation of positionality” as a methodological implication for future critical and humanistic qualitative inquiry.