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Charles Ryan Long (b. 1979, Chicago, IL) is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and Black liberationist whose work inhabits Black, queer, and feminist perspectives. Long’s artistic work centers around artist’s books, printmaking, and works on paper, using agitprop aesthetics and text to reveal the subliminal attitudes encoded within common terms and ideas—drawing attention, for example, to the way HIV serostatus is spoken about in terms of cleanliness (or dirtiness) and transmuting the acronym “DDF,” for “drug and disease free,” to “dying diseased faggot.”
Long’s visual practice is complemented by a long-term dedication to social work, engaging with people experiencing poverty, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, and unhoused persons, as well as those historically or currently struggling with addiction.
I try to use book, paper and print as a form of communicating narratives of remembrance and legacy in an effort to cause critical cultural shifts. My concern with material history is used to answer questions of what happens when individuals, places and spaces are taken away from our reality and stand unacknowledged or on the periphery and how their resurfacing can move us to action. Art must be used part and partial of building community capacity to organize for structural change and the advancement of liberation and deeper existence.