Scholar and curator Faye Gleisser’s book Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 won the 2025 Charles C. Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, and the 2025 committee called Gleisser’swork “gamechanging.” Risk Work is about artists in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, who started using new tactics in response to changes in policing. Rather than creating art that would end up in museums, they showed up in public spaces. A group called Asco staged a photo of a gang war victim. Pope.L started crawling across and along city streets. Gleisser argues that these artists show us how policing and surveillance were intensifying through that period, and that art history and the history of policing and surveillance are not as distinct as we might think.
Alex Chambers talks with Gleisser about her book, and about how art has always been used to enforce power relations as much as to challenge them.