ICA Boston curator Helen Molesworth on the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, which opens at the Walker Art Center June 30: [W]ith the coming election, the show feels more and more germane to me in ways that I didn’t see coming. For instance, it didn’t occur to me that the right wing would organize itself in such a repressive way around women’s reproductive rights, but it has, and of course it’s shades of the culture wars from the 1980s. And I think Occupy Wall Street is strongly indebted to Act Up [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an activist group that in the late 1980s began using civil disobedience to raise awareness around the AIDS crisis]. It shows in their strategies and their discourse and in the number of artists who are involved in Occupy movements across the country, just as they were with national Act Up chapters. So the show felt timely when I first started organizing it, and it continued to feel timely as the process developed. When it finally opened, even I was a little surprised. Pictured: General Idea, Imagevirus, 1987

ICA Boston curator Helen Molesworth on the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, which opens at the Walker Art Center June 30:

[W]ith the coming election, the show feels more and more germane to me in ways that I didn’t see coming. For instance, it didn’t occur to me that the right wing would organize itself in such a repressive way around women’s reproductive rights, but it has, and of course it’s shades of the culture wars from the 1980s. And I think Occupy Wall Street is strongly indebted to Act Up [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an activist group that in the late 1980s began using civil disobedience to raise awareness around the AIDS crisis]. It shows in their strategies and their discourse and in the number of artists who are involved in Occupy movements across the country, just as they were with national Act Up chapters. So the show felt timely when I first started organizing it, and it continued to feel timely as the process developed. When it finally opened, even I was a little surprised.

Pictured: General Idea, Imagevirus, 1987