How do artists reckon with the increasingly sophisticated instrumentalization of artistic expression? What happens when the aesthetics of dissent are absorbed into the dominant culture and shared as spectacle or entertainment? How can art be protected from the self-destructing logic of late capitalism?
These are some of the unwieldy questions that came up when viewing Ron Ewert’s exhibition I’ll Keep it with Mine, at Good Weather in Little Rock. The exhibition includes a monumental painting, scaled like an advertisement on the side of a semi-truck, that bisects the industrial exhibition space. Brashly-colored canvases with the obscured phrase “Destitution Ideology,” overfill the gallery and deliberately thwart viewers’ ability to take in the painting at a legible distance.
The décollage-like panels of Destitution Ideology (2016-2025) call to mind the lurid visual lexicon of mass marketing, the grandness of abstraction, and a palimpsest of graffiti—while representing a decade of Ewert’s unpublished work and revision. Reused, layered paintings also conceal non-abstract imagery, such as a portrait of activist and critic of the prison-industrial complex George Jackson. In a style that evokes the graphic qualities of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings and Jacques Villeglé’s compositions formed of ripped advertisements, Ewert’s accumulation marks the passage of time in an ongoing climate of deep political precarity and polarity.
By collapsing painterly strategies of abstraction and tropes of visual consumerism onto one another, a moment of illegibility occurs that mirrors the experience of ideology itself: In short, ideology operates without our full awareness or consent. Ewert’s approach in Destitution Ideology recalls the Situationist1 technique of détournement, a creative subversion of an image’s intended effect serving to reveal the ideology that constructed the image.
Change (2024), a looped video installation of the artist’s hands sifting mounds of coins in his studio, Barricade (2025), a graphic acrylic rendering of an overturned car in reference to protests against police brutality of the last decade, and the succinct painting Palestine Flag (2016-2025) connect to a decade of Ewert’s work to “foreground reality” within his artistic practice.2
Each of the works within the exhibition embodies the tension between the potential for multivalence within an image versus a conceptual collapse into a reductive symbol. The result, a reinforcement of a cultural unease in order to raise questions around art’s capacity to affect change, wherein revelatory forms of expression can be appropriated as logos for a monetized counterculture.
Ewert shared that the exhibition title, taken from a Bob Dylan song, is in reference to the musician being a formative influence on his own political awareness. Dylan, contrary to his wishes, became an emblem himself of the 1960’s counterculture—and a moment when dominant ideologies ruptured and new, unruly forms of expression coincided with a surge of political engagement, before it receded and its imagery was commodified.
Contemporary artists and activists may find themselves at a similarly watershed moment in this current political crisis. What forms of revolt will they find to resist the tide of the spectacle?
- For further reading, see Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), or more recently, Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012). ↩︎
- Conversation with the artist. May 17, 2025. ↩︎
I’ll Keep it With Mine is on view at Good Weather Gallery in Little Rock through July 12, 2025.
