Organised in collaboration with the Art of Management & Organisation conference, co-hosted by the Bluecoat and the University of Liverpool, the group exhibition Do They Owe Us A Living? brings together twelve artists and artist collaborations and takes as its point of departure the conference theme ‘art-as-activism’.
Each artist was asked to respond to the theme of activism within the broader context of the conference. The exhibition features a diverse range of practice: from community-focused projects engaging with care in the workplace and council-approved regeneration programmes; through to artworks directed at the histories of prejudice surrounding different communities; as well as work that questions the efficacy of art to function as an act of political resistance in its vulnerability to political co-option; ‘activism’ proposed less as a given than a complex
proposition.