We Make Each Other Beautiful

Yxta Maya Murray is David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of eight novels, including Art Is Everything and God Went Like That. Her art criticism and journalism have appeared in Artforum and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

We Make Each Other Beautiful swan dives into the activist projects of US-based and diasporic artists as wide-ranging as Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown that trace the emergence and cultural trajectories of these artivists' networks of radical affinities and models of care.(Hyperallergic) An important bridge between the academic and artistic worlds she inhabits, We Make Each Other Beautiful elucidates not only the role that artists play in society with syntactical brio but also how the most rigorous critiques of the law often emerge from artistic practice.(Hyperallergic)

• Introduction1. Artivism Avant La Lettre2. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie MaeWeems' Challenge to Copyright and Property Law3. "I just didn't feel safe, but I don't feel safe a lot of times in alot of different places:": Young Joon Kwak's Mutant Salon andthe queer need for safer and thriving spaces4. "How did we get here?": Tanya Aguiñiga's art about theborder and disability law5. "There are so many stories like that, too, of the governmentand private companies relinquishing their responsibility to thepeople of New Orleans, who had lost everything":: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Blights Out, and Live Action Painting(20156. "We wanted to open up and surpass those usualunderstandings:": Drawn Together and fair artists' contractsConclusion: An art dedicated to survival: Art, law, hope, and the wayahead