Whether generated individually or collectively, and distributed at either traditional or nontraditional venues, how resolutely politicized artistic activity is manifest depends upon many factors, including purpose, location, material parameters, and the issues at stake. Historically, the visual arts have been politicized for a variety of aims, but activist impulses have been particularly forceful from the 1960s to the present. Many artists have sought to reconnect art to a broader cultural context, making work that functions explicitly as social critique. Protest campaigns, such as those orchestrated by the Art Workers Coalition, Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and the Guerrilla Girls, have been deployed to counter the elitism of the art world and the absence of women and minorities in museum exhibitions and collections. Alternative artist-run venues—such as 112 Greene Street, Artists Space, and ABC No Rio in New York—were created in the 1970s and 1980s to challenge the hierarchy of the commercial gallery system. Collectives such as Group Material have sought to control the display and distribution of their work and to express a strategy that operates outside the confines of museums and galleries. During these decades artists appropriated the strategies of advertising and mass culture; the collective Gran Fury used billboards and posters to disseminate information about AIDS and comment on deficient public and governmental responses to the epidemic.

Cultural activism can illuminate crucial links between culture, politics, and social agency. Activism is contextual; the material and methodologies it employs are constantly shifting. Critical activities, including those outlined above, have expanded accepted notions of the possible functions and definitions of art.