This gallery-based course examines how the visual arts have played a central role in movements for social change in Britain and the Americas since the 1960s. How have artists – as makers, thinkers and organisers – challenged the systems of value that underpin conventional ways of seeing? In what ways have their personal experiences and cultural identities inflected their work and the narratives that are built around it? How have artists’ relationships with their patrons and publics changed over the last fifty years? And what should the social role of the artist be? These are some of the questions that we will address through selected case studies drawn from London’s collections of modern and contemporary art, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as well as temporary exhibitions at the Whitechapel and the Wellcome Collection. We will consider the vexed relationship of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark to modernism, as well as the political activism of other Latin American artists such as Cildo Meireles and Eugenio Dittborn. We will ask how African American artists such as Romare Bearden and Sam Gilliam responded to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and how they negotiated the expectations placed on their art to be representative of their racial identity. Finally, through a discussion of works by British women artists such as Jo Spence and Lubaina Himid, we will examine the intersection of art and feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.