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This chapter presents a new sociological theory of artist activism that addresses the question of how artist activists fashion their roles as artist activists. Specifically, the theory addresses how individual subjective orientations shape the repertoire of individual and collective actions and roles assumed and enacted by artist activists. The theory attributes individual variations in role assumption and enactment to artist orientations toward success, audience, risk, and career inspiration. This is a theory-building project of the new sociology of work. Research in the new sociology of work has addressed individual risk-management strategies for advancing individual careers and social mobility of free agents. In contrast, the sociological theory of artist activism presented here addresses how artist activists build a peer community for sustaining the livelihoods of individuals and the whole occupation.

This chapter describes how artist activists from Nashville are creating a “mechanically solidary” community of entrepreneurial artists alongside and partly from the ranks of an older, organically solidary corporate-era artist community. Nashville entrepreneurial musicians constitute themselves as a community by producing and performing for one another, showing up to each others' showcases, and extending mutual aid during trying moments in their lives. Here, the Nashville musician community has a tendency to “cross-promote,” and the chapter reveals how the community is largely very supportive of each other's art. In addition, the chapter also discusses the background of the present study and the approaches the author has taken in studying Nashville's artist community.

This chapter considers the pathways to becoming an artistic social entrepreneur. Previous research on social entrepreneurs has emphasized the impact of one's stock of human, social, and cultural capital on one's mobilization of requisite resources for launching and sustaining a social enterprise. Less sociological attention has been given to the influence of career-biographical factors, such as family, religion, education, and pivotal career turning points that may inspire and compel one to become a social entrepreneur and to envision and shape one's social enterprise, let alone an artistic social enterprise. The profiles of four artistic social entrepreneurs in this chapter illustrate how their strategic and risk orientations and career pathways shape the social enterprises they envision and influence their assumption and enactment of their roles as artist activists.

Because those who are of African descent are at times considered somehow as outcasts in society, and because this line of thinking has become hegemonic over other Americans, African Americans are going to great lengths just to establish their credentials as true American citizens privileged with equal treatment. A number of events like the separation of the civil rights movement from the Left, the independence of the civil rights movement from other anticolonial movements, the resistance to feminism, and other such events have aided in portraying the situation of black politics during the Cold War. This chapter aims to examine the developments during the Cold War and the civil rights and post-civil rights eras in order to have a further understanding of the artist-activist roles that blacks held and their attempts to formally represent the interests of the black community.

This chapter explores the politics of photographing the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa by focusing on Gideon Mendel, a photojournalist entirely committed to biomedical treatment of the pandemic. Mendel has spent much of his career documenting the impact of HIV/AIDS on the people of South Africa, his native country. More than merely documenting, however, Mendel has served for many as a prototypical model for artist-as-activist, using his photography to effect social change in arenas such as advocacy for access to antiretroviral therapies, and contributing to or fostering broader political campaigns (such as those related to the Treatment Action Campaign). This chapter considers Mendel’s attempt to change the balance of power that exists between photographers and their subjects.