Identity & Society

Identity and society as an art theme crystallized as a distinct movement in the 1960s and 1970s, growing directly out of second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement, which exposed the systemic exclusion of women, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ artists from mainstream galleries and museums. Where earlier self-portraiture, such as Frida Kahlo's mid-twentieth-century paintings, had already used personal iconography to explore selfhood, gender, and cultural heritage, the identity art of subsequent decades made systemic marginalization itself the subject. Landmark institutional moments, including MoMA's controversial 1984 'Primitivism' exhibition, the 1990 'Decade Show' featuring 94 artists from marginalized communities, and the 1993 Whitney Biennial's explicit focus on 'the construction of identity,' pushed questions of race, gender, sexuality, and disability into the center of the contemporary art conversation. Artists such as Cindy Sherman used photographic self-staging to interrogate constructed femininity, while Kara Walker's silhouette works confronted the legacy of American slavery. Kehinde Wiley extended this lineage by inserting Black subjects into the visual grammar of Old Master portraiture, most famously in his 2017 official portrait of President Barack Obama, challenging centuries of exclusion in Western art history. Today, identity art increasingly embraces intersectionality, recognizing that race, gender, sexuality, and disability interact rather than function as isolated categories, and it has fundamentally reshaped museum practice through decolonization initiatives and diversity-driven curation.