Womanhouse (1972) was a massive collection of installations and performances housed within an abandoned 17-room mansion in Hollywood, California. Led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro for CalArts' budding Feminist Art Program, a team of 30 women artists painstakingly renovated and transformed the dilapidated building, knowing that it was scheduled for demolition soon after the exhibition closed. The installations and performances, which were recorded in the accompanying documentary film, consisted of parodies and exaggerations of domestic scenes and tropes that entice the viewer with laughter and play, only to leave them with an overwhelming sense of dread at the bitter realization of how these societal roles consume the waking hours of women each day.

A few especially memorable installations included laborious and repetitive performances of household chores, the meticulous application, removal, and re-application of makeup, and a bridal staircase featuring a mannequin in a bridal gown with an exaggeratedly long train that ominously descends the stairs as if creating a silky slide into the pits of eternity.

On September 15, 1983, Michael J. Stewart, a 25-year-old black graffiti artist, was arrested for spraying graffiti on a New York City subway station. Stewart died 13 days after being brought to Bellevue Hospital in a coma within an hour of his arrest. The three white arresting officers were charged with criminally negligent homicide, assault, and perjury. Protesters took to the streets of New York as the news of Stewart's death spread.

Soon after Stewart's death, the renowned painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, using acrylic paint and marker, made The Death of Michael Stewart on a wall of Keith Haring's studio. After Basquiat's death, Haring cut the painting out of the wall, had it placed in an ornate frame, and hung it over his bed, where it remained until he died from AIDS complications in 1990. In 2019, The Guggenheim held an exhibition featuring the Basquiat original, as well as an original created by Keith Haring. Spike Lee cites Stewart's murder as the inspiration for the ending of his movie Do The Right Thing (1989), where the character Radio Raheem is strangled by police. The artist and the community rallied behind these images, determined to speak out against the injustice.

The first meeting of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, more commonly known as ACT UP, took place in New York City on March 12, 1987. The most iconic image associated with ACT UP is their Silence = Death poster, pictured here. Although this poster is almost synonymous with ACT UP, it was created prior to the coalition's conception by three gay men in an attempt to push the gay community into action. The pink triangle is a symbol easily recognized by LGBTQ communities, as it has signified violent homophobia since the Nazis employed it to mark queer prisoners in concentration camps. The use of this identifying symbol also serves as a commentary on the 1986 call by William F. Buckley to tattoo HIV-positive individuals.

Branding themselves as the "conscience of the art world," the Guerilla Girls have been active in calling out institutional misdeeds since 1985. Their focus is primarily on critiquing the New York-centered art world for ignoring the contributions of women and people of color. Their activism began as wheat pasting bombastic flyers close to institutions they have critiqued to continue their feminist goal of furthering inclusion in the art world. Using the tactics of humor, data, and anonymity in their works, the Guerilla Girls have been influential in the art world for almost forty years. The Guerilla Girl's anonymity may be their most striking feature, as the group members adopt the names of dead women artists and don expressive gorilla masks when representing the group.

The mid-1980s were a time of rapid economic shifts in Europe and the Americas. Increased international trade compacts, the movement of industrial labor to developing nations, and the rise of financial capitalism inaugurated a new era for global economic policy, what many critics call the neoliberal era. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 helped to cement this new form of global capitalism, both in the US and globally. Under neoliberalism, public and private life changed. As theorist Michel Foucault argued, it increasingly came to feel like all forms of human interaction had been financialized—we now imagined we were "investing" in ourselves when we continued our education or "invested" in our children when we enriched their play. Simultaneously, the commercial world rapidly adapted to incorporate not only counter cultural forms but also criticism—by the 1990s, punk music and activist aesthetics became marketable. What were politically conscious artists to do?

One response came from within art institutions. Artists adapted the feminist mantra "the personal is political" to mount a critique of "identity," demanding not only greater representation of diverse American populations in the museum, but also demanding greater forms of identification with underrepresented, subjective American experiences. One response to these calls came in the form of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition included not only a more diverse group of artists, but also an expanded definition of art. One of the most provocative projects in the show was Daniel Martinez's museum admission tags, which were composed of words forming the phrase "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white." The project not only served to decenter whiteness in the exhibition, but since visitors were required to wear the tags in order to enter the show, it also destabilized the fixed racial positions of the majority-white museum audience.

Outside of the museum another political turn was underway. In the streets, corporate board rooms, and even on fashion runways, artists and activists were developing techniques for disrupting or intervening into social power structures. In 2004, to capture this new 90s political art, Nato Thompson curated the exhibition "The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere" at Mass MoCA. Many artists took part in the exhibition and he organized them into four categories:

"Nomads" included artworks that require mobility and circulate in the public sphere. ParaSITE, for example, by Michael Rakowitz consists of a tent for the homeless that is inflated by existing apartment HVAC system discharges.

"Reclaim the City" features artists' actions that are usually aimed against the corporate take over the public sphere, many times directly influenced by radical DIY tradition. The Street Rec collective, for example, created posters and graffiti against the American wars and in support of the global south social movements.

"Ready to Wear" includes projects or artworks that are wearable, offering social justice statements or even solutions for the lives of underserved community members. Ruben Ortiz Torres made ballcaps that were modifications of famous teams' apparel, for example one cap transformed the LA Kings' logo to read "Rodney King."

"The Experimental University" describes when artists, academics and other professionals create a hub for learning, discussion, and art creation and theory around social issues. Often these hubs lead not only to new art and literature but also to action. 16 Beaver was a space in Lower Manhattan where many artists, activists, academics, and others participated in discussions, organizing and more.

iRaq (2004) is a striking example of anti-war art created by two anonymous artists under the name Forkscrew Graphics. The work imitates the design of a popular 2004 Apple ad campaign, which depicted silhouettes dancing to music playing through their thin white headphones. Instead of these dancing Figures, however iRaq shows a black silhouette standing on a box with a thin white wire attached to each hand, arms outstretched to mimic the crucifixion. In a jarring moment of realization, one recognizes this as an image of inhuman torture from the Abu Ghraib prison, specifically that of a hooded Iraqi man told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off the narrow box. The work, which is one of four in a larger series, seizes on the arresting combination of eye-catching commercialism and sickening atrocity to force a reconciliation between ideas of freedom and justice and the crimes presented.

During a televised appearance on BBC4 in 2004, in a dramatic reversal of their previously declared position, Dow Chemical publicly accepted responsibility for the Bhopal industrial disaster, a toxic gas leak that killed nearly 3,800 people and sickened tens of thousands more. Dow Chemical, now the owner of the Bhopal plant, promised on-air to spend billions to make right the human and material costs of the community. But this announcement came as a surprise to the real Dow Chemical, which had no intention to make any restitution for the damage, and they watched in horror as their stock value plummeted on the news. The announcement was later revealed to be a hoax by the artist/activist group, The Yes Men. For a brief moment, the group made it seem possible that a major corporation could invest in social responsibility over profit.

The work of The Yes Men mimics the shape and form of corporate capitalism. By exploiting the same media culture as major corporations, including websites and news interviews, they disrupt the image of their target organizations. These disruptions sometimes include posing as spokespeople for existing companies and non-governmental organizations in order to make uncharacteristically humane announcements. More often, however, the interventions come in the form of a parody corporate website or promotion that grapples with honesty and accountability—qualities that are all too lacking in real corporate branding.

Museum galleries have long regarded themselves as neutral, if sacred, repositories of culture. But after the 1970's turn to institutionally critical art, their status has been called into question. Today, artist groups often demand that cultural institutions answer for ethical shortcomings regarding their board members and sponsors. The Whitney Museum, and in particular the Whitney Biennial, has been a frequent site of artist protest over the years. In 2019, the Biennial faced perhaps the biggest act of reckoning thus far.

During the exhibition, eight artists withdrew their works to take part in a months-long protest calling for the removal of trustee Warren Kanders, president of the tear-gas and military equipment company Safariland. For their contribution to the exhibition, the group Forensic Architecture showed Triple-Chaser, an exposition on Safariland in which gas canisters were used on civilians. Groups such as Forensic Architecture and Occupy Museums work to hold cultural institutions to the values they claim to promote. No longer can museums pretend to be bastions of progressive art when they partner with people and companies that cause harm.