On gender: art activism as entrepreneurship

Academics and practitioners are working to understand the connections between activist art and art making (artivism) and entrepreneurial activity and behavior, seeing both as catalysts for social transformation. Here we explore artivism as entrepreneurial effectuation in relation to gender inequality. We observe artivists raising awareness of the political nature of artistic creation, framing it as a way of bettering society from the bottom up. By engaging affect, they seek to engender agitational and participatory practices that challenge power relations within art, culture, and wider society. To explore this through the lens of effectuation, we engage with an exhibition on gender inequality, produced in 2016 in Paris. We recreate the exhibition, again in Paris, with twenty of the eighty-one original artworks in 2018 to analyze observer reactions to their own engagement. From the data, preliminary in form, we surmise that artivism moves the public to envisage a change in behavior in relation to gender inequality, as the possibility of new behavior is expressed in a spontaneously effectual way. We conclude that the integration of artivism with entrepreneurship for redressing gender inequality has positive effects when artivism is conceived of as opening the realm of possibilities for self and others without expectations about outcomes or gains.