Throughout history, artists have used their work as a platform to espouse political opinions. In the twentieth century, art became a particularly effective medium to spread political messages, and particularly to express liberal views. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists like David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Gober, the artist collective General Idea, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres used their work to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic and the devastation it wrought.

Often used for explicitly political or even propagandistic purposes, such as the socialist realism used to prop up the Communist leaders of the Soviet Union, or Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous “Hope” poster of Barack Obama, which played a role in the 2008 American presidential election. Other contemporary artists send political messages in more subtle ways. Influenced by the military dictatorship under which he spent his youth, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has long been dedicated to raising social consciousness through his work. In his “Pictures of Garbage” series, he worked with trash pickers at a garbage dump to create vivid portraits out of otherwise overlooked materials, drawing attention to their plight and raising money through the sale of the work to benefit their union. Despite several arrests, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has frequently criticized his country’s government through his work, with a focus on democracy and human rights.