Politics Is Personal In Powerful Show of Protest Art at Nasher Museum

“Just because an artist is not thinking directly about politics while making a work does not mean they are outside the political context,” said Xuxa Rodríguez, curator of “Turn the Volume Up!,” the newest exhibition at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The timely—or timeless—exhibition surveys art’s place in both the great and mundane moments of social justice. While it would not be wholly inaccurate to call it a show of protest art, that label doesn’t capture the full scope of Rodríguez’s imagination. Using the ideological drama of the United States’ 250th anniversary as fuel, she has reanimated a century-spanning archive of posters, paintings, sculptures, and photographs into urgent imperatives: Vote. Petition. Meet your neighbors.

Pointed messages are dispersed throughout the show, including questions like “What may be hidden between the lines of stories we’ve read before?” and “If your remarks on history could be recorded, what would you say?” Visitors to “Turn the Volume Up!” will encounter works by Kara Walker, Bruce Davidson, Marlene Dumas, the Guerrilla Girls, and others who have given civil rights a body, a face, and a voice.

Artists, the show argues, function best as messengers: How does awareness gather into an avalanche of action? What moments make a movement?

ARTnews recently spoke with Rodríguez over Zoom to learn more about the show, which runs through July 2027. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: How did this project begin?

Xuxua Rodríguez: It began with the ways people have been left out of the conversation from the beginning—thinking about the U.S. Constitution and how, for two centuries, we’ve been working to repair and reinforce it.

In spring 2024, we began looking ahead to the midterm elections. I said, “I want to continue the conversation in a different way.” I had been spending a lot of time with the Nasher’s collection while building [the exhibition] “By Dawn’s Early Light,” and I noticed that we had many works focused on demonstrations. I thought, “I think I’m going to do a show about protest.” For curators, exhibitions are iterative. I kept researching and digging, and then fall 2025 came around. The New York mayoral election was all over the news. You’re a New Yorker, but I’m in Durham, North Carolina; mayoral elections are important, but they don’t usually make national and financial headlines.

Then the numbers came in: two million people turned out to vote. When was the last time that happened? Some reports said New York hadn’t seen those numbers since 1969. I thought, “Wow, this is history happening live.” I started watching. 

I watched Mamdani’s election speech, where he quoted KRS-One. He said, “I have four words for this administration: ‘Turn the volume up.’”

What did that mean to you?

The KRS-One song is about sharing histories and stories through hip-hop with a wider audience—people who may not otherwise have access to that information. Mamdani laid out a platform that included voices that hadn’t been centered before, and it resonated with the work I was doing for “By Dawn’s Early Light.” I thought, this is the spirit of this moment, the importance of bringing people to the table and making that table bigger, whether through music or art.

I thought, that’s the title for this show, because, effectively, what happened in that mayoral election was that the volume was turned up. Two million people turned out to vote and said, “here’s my voice.”

So how did that translate into an art exhibition? 

The exhibition is about how artists, activists, and everyday people organize for change. As I gathered more works along those lines, five sections emerged: “Remarks,” “Organized,” “Records,” and “Petitions,” along with a fifth section that I’m still confirming in the exhibition materials.

“Remarks” looks at artists commenting on historical and sociocultural events and responding to them. “Organized” looks at how artists organize for change, making works that are not only artworks but can also be used—taken off the wall and shared as flyers, for example, or used to raise funds for causes.

“Records” explores how artists document events, literally through photography, painting, or other forms of record-making. It also considers how artists speak back to existing records and highlight issues that were not resolved—effectively disagreeing with what has entered the historical consciousness.

“Petitions” looks at how artists present contemporary issues and ask people to advocate for change around them.

The section titles are intentional. At the heart of the show is the idea that these are terms used both at the federal level—in Congress, the Senate, or the House of Representatives—and in community contexts, such as a local city hall meeting or a neighborhood organizing group. You hear people say, “I’d like my remarks recorded for the congressional record,” but you also hear people in a community say, “We need to organize.”

You’re trying to remind visitors that politics is personal.

It’s important to me that visitors understand that they matter, that what they care about matters, and that using their voice to advocate for issues they care about matters. 

When you think about the context of time, space, and geological history in which we exist, it’s already a miracle that we exist at all. A meteor could have hit millions of years ago, and we wouldn’t be here. In a sense, I need people to see and believe that they themselves are this miracle, and that they need to use this one wild and precious life to fight for the things they care about. 

Nothing is too small. It could mean helping your neighbors or recognizing that an older population does not have access to resources and asking how you can support them.

People have power. Just because it looks in the news as though only a handful of people have power, that doesn’t mean it’s true. The show includes reflective questions throughout that ask visitors to think about the exhibition from the perspective of “I am part of this.”

How is that idea reflected in the exhibition’s design?

The exhibition has a very intentional design treatment. Joel Johnson, our head of graphic design, and I worked closely to create visuals that position visitors to see themselves as part of the show.

There are silhouettes of demonstrators holding placards, and the placards are perfectly blank. The idea is that visitors are walking in and joining this line of people carrying signs. As they read the reflective questions throughout the show, their own personal placard becomes visible to them: What are the things they care about as they look at the works and think about the exhibition? The first questions visitors encounter are: “How are you showing up for your communities every day?” and “What actions are you and your neighbors taking to shape your local government policy so it can support your shared welfare?”

The questions appear on the walls, in the interpretive text at the end of each section. The exhibition text says that the show meditates on the state of the world as we face challenges to the fabric of our social-welfare systems. It also asks us to reflect on our responsibility to make a difference as active participants in shaping a nation.

The art explores pivotal chapters in American history, like the Civil Rights movement, from intentionally unfamiliar perspectives. What’s a work that surprised you? 

I’m thinking of several works on display. We have a wonderful loan of Robert Colescott’s painting The Wreckage of the Medusa, which shows the global context of what the exhibition is discussing. The show is not only about the United States; it also asks us to think as global citizens. The things we are experiencing are not happening out of the blue. They have historical resonance.

Colescott’s work speaks back to Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. When Géricault made his painting, the shipwreck was in the news throughout France. The ship had capsized, lives were lost, and people built a raft to survive. Reports even described cannibalism among those stranded. Géricault’s operatic painting shows people reaching toward the sky because a rescue ship is visible on the horizon. Colescott looks at the moment after the ship has fallen apart, when the ship has capsized and people are in the water.

Colescott includes himself among the passengers. The people he represents are not only identifiable passengers—such as the captain wearing a hat or someone holding a life raft. He also includes racialized stereotypes and caricatures. The captain is on the left side of the painting, looking at these figures with his eyes completely covered. I think, “What an incisive commentary on the history of racism, especially in the United States, and on arguments such as, ‘I don’t see race.’” Covering your eyes suggests that if you don’t see race or consider it a factor in discrimination, what happens is what Colescott is painting: the perpetuation of stereotypes and problematic representations that continue to harm people.

In the “Organized” section, we have a work by Carlos Vega, a portrait of Malala Yousafzai. It is the first time we have shown the work, which is a recent acquisition. Yousafzai is presented with references to the Virgin Mary: Her hijab is a similar blue, and the rays of light around her resemble a Renaissance votive image. Vega has included small stars around Yousafzai. Inside the stars are portraits of other women and femme organizers who have worked for access to education or for the advancement of women and femmes in society.

The show takes its name from a political victory, but it is also set against a contemporary moment marked by violence, censorship, defunding, and attacks on freedom of expression. How did the national state of art and politics shape your curation?

For me, art is almost always inherently political because a human being is behind it. That person is shaped—whether they intend to be or not—by the structures of the nations and states in which they live. A lot of my dissertation research looked at artists’ experiences of exile: what it means to leave one’s homeland, adopt a new homeland, and struggle through that process. Politically, these artists had been written into or out of structures through policies, legislation, or other acts. Friction entered into their ability to move through the world. They are not outside their lived historical or political experience, whether or not they are actively participating in politics.

When we look at artwork, it is critical not to forget that there is a person behind it, with lived experience that may or may not emerge visibly in the work. When you see many works together, threads begin to appear. Threads from a particular period that may not have seemed loud at the time can resonate later, and moments that were loud when they first occurred can continue to resonate because history moves in cycles.

I’m thinking of a Carol Summers work from a Vietnam War portfolio created by artists and writers protesting the war. The work is titled Kill for Peace. It shows a woman and children with a large red X over them and circles that resemble bullet holes. For me, it is a comment on how warfare dehumanizes people. Warfare almost requires us to forget that human lives are behind the violence and are being affected and lost as a result. Summers made the work in 1967, but it feels even more resonant now. 

Reading history has a way of flattening the emotions of the moment, making political action seem inevitable in hindsight. Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the courage it took for people to make those choices. I’m thinking of the demonstrators who shut down the opening of this year’s Venice Biennale in solidarity with Ukraine and Palestine.

There is a direct correlation with the Guerrilla Girls’ Most Wanted portfolio, which is on display. The Guerrilla Girls are now canonical within art history, and people often accept their work as though it has always been recognized as important.

But in the context in which those works were made—during the 1980s, if I’m remembering correctly—it was radical to present statistics as art. The Guerrilla Girls compiled information from the news and showed how many women had one-person exhibitions at New York museums. The Guggenheim had zero, the Met had zero, the Museum of Modern Art had one, and the Whitney had zero.

They presented the information in black and white. There was no figurative representation or thematic subject. It wasn’t a romantic historical painting or a genre painting. It was statistics.

From the outside, infrastructure may seem fixed, but it’s malleable. 

Infrastructure is people.

I’m thinking of the works in the exhibition by Leonard Freed. He documented cases in Atlanta involving the murders of Black children. He returned to the story repeatedly over several years, between roughly 1975 and 1980. One image shows the family of the 21st child who was killed leaving a service. Freed continued to follow these stories and return to these places. He was there when the police arrived and when bodies were found. 

Freed’s photographs allow me, in 2026, to encounter moments I could not physically have witnessed. I can see the demonstrators, the police at the site, and the investigation room with the portraits, almost as if I were walking through it myself. That is critical to building empathy. Sometimes events are so far away that you have no way to grasp their severity and gravity. You can’t unsee these images.

I’ve been learning more about the Nasher’s history. The works in this show include loans, but there is also a deep permanent collection of activist and socially engaged work. Was the Nasher founded with that orientation?

There is a predecessor, the Duke University Museum of Art, which had been around since the late 1960s. The Nasher Museum of Art, as we know it today, was founded in 2005.

The earlier museum was an encyclopedic university museum that collected a little bit of everything from every period to serve as a learning lab. One gap became apparent quickly: contemporary art was not sufficiently present in that conversation. So from the outset, the Nasher’s goal was to collect contemporary art—and to collect it early and often. The collection quickly developed into a strong collection of contemporary African diasporic art. The museum also acquired works by artists who, at the time, were emerging and who would later become major names.

Is the Nasher’s history what attracted you to the institution?

Deeply. I had watched the Nasher from the time I was a graduate student in the early 2010s. I saw it coming onto the national stage and taking risks with its exhibitions. I thought, “This is a university art museum doing things.”

At the time, my now-director and predecessor, Trevor Schoonmaker, was the curator of contemporary art. He organized one of the editions of the Prospect triennial. I thought it was remarkable that a museum located within a university—and within a university in the South—was working across the region and internationally, centering artists from the South and artists from diasporic communities who were not always centered in larger contexts.

It’s not that larger museums weren’t doing this work, but I think it is now expected. Museums understand that building a great collection means attending to the many voices that make up a community and the stories a collection tells. They need to be attentive to the voices in the collection and try to tell a plural history or experience of life as we know it. The Nasher was already doing that from day one.

What feeling do you want visitors to leave “Turn the Volume Up” with?

I hope they take something from the title and the historical moment that inspired it. It is a midterm-election year and the 250th anniversary of the United States. Could you imagine if everyone voted? What if every person went to the polls and put their voice into the process? How radically different could the world look if every voice were taken into account?

I also want to say something more broadly about the work of museums—curating exhibitions and caring for permanent collections. It is a practice of radical hope. It is predicated on the conviction that there is a future beyond the time in which we exist, that we are working toward and imagining that future, and that people in that future will look back, remember, and learn from what we leave behind.

People participating in their local democracies, or even going to a museum and learning from the past, are already part of that longer story. We are all imagining that there will be a tomorrow. We don’t know what it will look like, but we hope it will be here.

And yet you’re also working on a show about the end of the world.

Yes. That is a 2029 exhibition about climate catastrophe. It asks: If we are the last generation to see the last sunsets and the last seasons, how do we hold on to what remains without falling into despair? How do we imagine what life might be like if we make it through climate catastrophe? How do we rebuild afterward?

I’m hopeful for the future. I know it’s coming, and I hope everyone embraces the idea that there is a future, even when it sometimes feels as though there isn’t one. It is there every day we wake up and work toward the things we care about. We are working from the conviction that there is a tomorrow.