Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future

A volume devoted to artists addressing our politically tumultuous times.

Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others.

This expansive catalog includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and showcases work ranging from video and photography to sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collective histories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world.

Eungie Joo is curator of contemporary art at SFMOMA. Manthia Diawara is professor of comparative literature and cinema and head of the Institute of African American Affairs and of the Africana Studies Program at New York University. Adrienne Edwards is curator of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Yasmine El Rashidi, a Cairo-based New York Times contributing opinion writer, covers Egypt and the Arab world, urban life, and the arts.