Novelist, playwright, and scholar Yxta Maya Murray has been a law professor for the last three decades and long moonlighted as a respected art critic. An important bridge between the academic and artistic worlds she inhabits, We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law (2024) allows Murray to bring her legal expertise into the critical sphere to elucidate 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.
Murray opens the introduction in Tijuana, Mexico, in August 2021, a sweltering end of summer marked by desperate migrants caught in the crosshairs of a hostile, xenophobic immigration policy a year after the Trump presidency. Local news stations report that an elderly woman was fatally seized by cardiac arrest while waiting in her car for hours to cross the US-Mexico border. It is against this backdrop that Los Angeles-based and Tijuana-raised artist Tanya Aguiñiga deepens her commitment to change policy. She created Línea Pak — an action during which the artist distributes crucial survival provisions to migrants such as water packets, granola bars, saladitos (salted dehydrated plums), and port-o-potties — in addition to writing a petition advocating for elderly and disabled migrants. Aguiñiga’s efforts constitute a crucial contextual example for legal scholars. Murray breaks down how the study of narrative in the humanities, including projects such as Línea Pak, allows legal scholars to “introduce excluded perspectives to jurisprudence.”
Weaving elements of legal theory, history, artist biography, memoir, and narrative, Murray’s essays comprise a richly researched critical compendium that places the artworks and political commitments of queer, trans, nonbinary, and feminist artists of color in conversation with one another. It also highlights the work of artists who are directly challenging legal frameworks that structure and limit their full capacity and liberation. Murray shepherds readers through a vast, often hostile landscape occupied by multiple generations of artists of color who built and refined their practices within the language of justice and direct action.
For anyone who’s ever wondered about what it meant to occupy queer, marginalized embodiments in the first half of the 20th century, there is Gladys Bentley, who in the 1930s performed drag against so-called anti-perversion laws, protesting segregationist policies in New York as direct actions. Or for any artist of color who finds themself structurally affronted by contemporary cultural institutions, the story of Elizabeth Catlett, who in her role as the chair of the art department at Black Dillard University in New Orleans had to intervene against the racist exclusion ingrained in the city’s park system that barred her students from attending a Picasso exhibition at the Delgado Art Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). Murray explains that these projects paved the way for critical genres we know today as participatory art, social practice, institutional critique, and my new favorite categorization: crime commission, which entails breaking laws as performance art.
The nucleus of the collection is divided into profiles of Aguiñiga, Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, and their respective pursuits of justice where race and gender intersect with disability, immigration status, housing rights, and mutual aid. Murrary powerfully narrates the chilling history of how Weems became acquainted with the daguerreotypes of Renty and Delia Taylor, enslaved Black people whose photographs were commissioned by Harvard University ethnologist Louis Agassiz and are now at the center of a years-long legal fight led by their descendant, Tamara Lanier. The images later inspired Weems’s installation “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” (1995–96). The artist signed a contract with the university’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to not use the images without permission, which she ignored after learning of their nefarious purpose: to advance Agassiz’s belief in “polygenesis,” a retrograde dogma positing that God created races as separate species and racial domination as the natural order.
While the Agassiz House at Harvard was named not for the ethnologist but for his wife and son, for Murray this exemplifies the continued profiting from slavery and persistent marginalization in the mid-1990s of Black faculty (then roughly 5% university-wide) and Black students (then around 7.5% of the student body). Murray’s narration of this case is doubly powerful because she cites her own legal scholarship from Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. It makes for an exciting exegesis reminding readers today what it meant for Weems to break copyright law and remain unshakeable.
We Make Each Other Beautiful proves to be a particularly interesting stage for the unique role of citation. It is not often that an art critic can draw on her experience as a legal scholar to deepen our understanding of the artist’s role in transforming society, as well as to enhance the art histories we thought we knew about Weems or Yoko Ono, Judy Baca or Faith Ringgold.
These connections are best articulated in the book’s conclusion, where Murray writes more memoiristically as she narrates her childhood with her grandmother, María Aldrete Adastik, a Mexican woman who could have been a great artist were it not for the violation she endured as a teenager or the humiliation of a mail order marriage. But she was an artist nonetheless, a woman who protested on her own terms — silently and in assemblage. As with several artists in We Make Each Other Beautiful, Murray’s grandmother created art as a world-making modality “inextricable from many homegrown forms of problem-solving” and, as such, “both a tactic and a way of life.”
We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law (2024) by Yxta Maya Murray is published by Cornell University Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.
