19th Annual Line Breaks Festival Closing

Da Hoodzeum presents: In Direct Action - A decade of Activist Art at University of Wisconsin-Madison

This exhibition brings together student-created artworks from the past ten years that emerged through activism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Beginning in 2016, movements such as #RealUW challenged official campus narratives by naming lived experiences of racism, exclusion, and harm, opening space for art to function as testimony, refusal, and collective voice.

Alongside student artworks, the exhibition features a curated showcase of everyday historical artifacts connected to Black radical movements, including materials from the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Newspapers, flyers, ephemera, and other ordinary objects reveal how activism has long depended on creative tools meant for daily use—objects designed to circulate, educate, and activate communities.

Placed in conversation with contemporary student work, these artifacts situate campus activism within a longer lineage of Black resistance. Together, the art and objects form a living archive, showing how activist art at UW is not isolated or new, but part of an ongoing tradition of creativity as action, care, and collective struggle.

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