Editing Protest art (section)

===Strategy and practice===
In practice, activist art may often take the form of temporal interventions, such as performance, media events, exhibitions, and installations.  It is also common to employ mainstream media techniques (through the use of billboards, posters, advertising, newspaper inserts…etc.).  By making use of these commercial distributive channels of commerce, this technique is particularly effective in conveying messages that reveal and subvert its usual intentions.

The use of public participation as a strategy of activating individuals and communities to become a “catalyst for change” is important to activist art.  In this context, participation becomes an act of self-expression or self-representation by the entire community.  Creative expression empowers individuals by creating a space in which their voices can be heard and in which they can engage in a dialogue with one another, and with the issues in which they have a personal stake.

The Artist and Homeless Collaborative is an example of a project that works with strategies of public participation as a means of individual and community empowerment.  It is an affiliation of artists, arts professionals and women, children and teenagers living in NYC shelters, the A & HC believe that their work in a collaborative project of art-making offers the residents a “positive experience of self-motivation and helps them regain what the shelter system and circumstances of lives destroy: a sense of individual identity and confidence in human interaction.”<ref name=Wolper1995>{{cite book |last1=Wolper |first1=Andrea |chapter=Making Art, Reclaiming Live: The Artist and Homeless Collaborative |pages=251–282 |editor1-last=Felshin |editor1-first=Nina |title=But is it Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism |date=1995 |publisher=Bay Press |isbn=978-0-941920-29-2 |oclc=1148006167 |url=https://archive.org/details/butisitartspirit0000unse }}</ref> The process of engaging the community in a dialogue with dominant and public discourses about the issue of homelessness is described in a statement by its founder, Hope Sandrow: “The relevancy of art to a community is exhibited in artworks where the homeless speak directly to the public and in discussion that consider the relationship art has to their lives.  The practice of creating art stimulates those living in shelters from a state of malaise to active participation in the artistic process”<ref name=Wolper1995/>

The A & HC came into being at a time when a critique of the makers, sellers, and consumers of art that addressed social concerns became increasingly pronounced.  Critics argued that the very works of art whose purpose was to provoke political, social and cultural conversation were confined within the exclusive and privileged space of galleries museums, and private collections.  By contrast, the A & HC was an attempt to bridge the gap between art production and social action, thus allowing for the work subjects that were previously excluded and silenced to be heard.