Imagination/In Protest: The Body Invented Opening Reception

New York Live Arts Artistic Director Bill T. Jones posed the following question during a conversation with Dread Scott at the 2025 launch of Fall of Freedom: 

 “Where is the imagination in protest?” 

We echoed this question to our community, initiating Live Arts’ premier group Pride exhibition and open call. We proudly invited artists Lola Flash and Beau McCall to anchor the show, as these trailblazers teach us to wield a force queer artists–– and queer folx–– have cultivated throughout generations: Imagination. 

As artists part of an organization built on decades of service to body-based investigation, we were delighted that the majority of submissions engaged portraiture. Through a diversity of methodologies, the six selected artists reach beyond their mediums into space itself, speaking both to the viewer and, somehow, each other.

Harlem-born Black queer poet, public scholar, and activist June Jordan said, “I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.” Each of the works in this exhibition–– whether demanding attention or softly compelling the eye, interrogating the shape of presence or not appearing to be a figure at all–– unabashedly realizes the body itself as a source of power in queer protest and creative expression.   

In considering the power that freedom requires, freedom also requires all of us. These artists answered where the imagination in protest brims; now we ask the same of you.