David P. Leonard Professor of Law Yxta Maya Murray was recently selected as a Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she will be in residence for academic year 2024-25. Her new book on law and arts activism, "We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law," was published by Cornell University Press in June, and it was recently reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Read the review. And in September, Murray will publish her 12th book, "A History of Hazardous Objects," a novel with the University of Nevada Press about family, love, risk, and science.
She talks with LLS about art and activism and "We Make Each Other Beautiful" as well as creative writing, law careers, and a new nonfiction book project here.
What was the inspiration for your new book, “We Make Each Other Beautiful”?
I started working as an art critic in 2017 for magazines and I had actually been writing about art as a law professor since 2012, so I've been thinking about it for a long time. I've been going to museums and studying art just as a side passion since college. But I eventually realized that the art that I was looking at mainly involved artists who were doing activist work at the same time. I had become a social movement scholar as a law professor, which means that as a legal scholar I was looking at how social movements interacted with legal developments. And a lot of these protests had had artistic elements in them, [such as] singing gospel songs or the famous feminist protest in 1968 of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City where people threw corsets and bras and pantyhose into garbage cans, which lent a theatrical element to the action. So I've been looking at a lot of artists, mostly queer artists of color, women of color artists, feminists of color, and artists who had been pushing against the legal institutions in one way or another: Ultimately that became a book.
What can the legal profession learn from artists?
[My book is] writing to the art and legal communities to show them how they have a relationship that can be strengthened productively, particularly when people like me think that we are in a dangerous state politically and that the rule of law is at risk of becoming fractured and compromised. I'm looking for new sources to revitalize and strengthen the law. I think that this sort of protest art, this emotionally coherent and evocative art, is a resource that shouldn't be ignored.
What do you think law students could learn from the subject and the artivists in your book?
It shows how the enterprise of interpreting the law and engaging with the law is a communal one, and it's not an elite project, and we all share in it. So this is just another piece of evidence that the community has to be involved in the legal undertaking. That, I think, is a very enthralling idea for any lawyer and any young lawyer to look to the community as a guide.
How do your creative writing and law careers intersect?
My initiation as a novelist began in the courtroom in 1994. I was clerking for a judge named Judge Harry L. Hupp in the central district of Los Angeles. Here in Los Angeles before a defendant in federal court is sentenced, they have the right to what's known as allocution; that means that you have a right to tell your story before the judge sentences you. As a young lawyer, I was sitting in a federal courtroom watching mostly men of color tell their stories before they were given these often very long sentences. I'm Mexican American, I'm Latina, and my family doesn't come from great wealth, and my parents have known poverty. I grew up hearing these infuriated stories of powerlessness and resilience in my home, since both my mom and my dad were both immigrants. So what I was hearing in the courtroom reminded me a lot of the stories that I had grown up listening to. That became the seed of my first book. I write very often from what I live through, and law is something that I live through.
What inspired you to become a lawyer?
I always wanted to join the legal profession. I was always interested in civil rights. I always wanted to help people. But when I was a very young person, I wasn't entirely clear what lawyers did. I didn't understand what their job was. I just knew that they were impressive to me, and they seemed to know things that I wanted to know and that they often could help people. And so that's what I wanted to do, too.
What do you want readers to take away from your book?
Well, I wanted to awaken people to the relationship between art and law. People other than me have written about activist artists and women of color artists. So I am certainly not the first person to write in this area. But as a lawyer, I am able to connect up worlds that maybe haven't had the spotlight shine on them as brightly as they could. I want to encourage people to think about how artists have a stake in justice, and very often aim to do justice through their work. Since at least the 1930s, as I try to trace in my book, artists and people in communities of care have been using the arts and crafts to help build justice, since probably before there was a written history. It is such a huge part, I think, of the human project even though there's been this lengthy tradition of saying that the arts and justice have nothing to do with each other. The division between art and law is a product of white supremacy and capitalism in the more modern era. But I just wanted to shed some more light on how artists are creating roots and pathways to justice. They are making visible injustices that have not been mapped by lawyers. They're often the first to speak out about issues of injustice and to issue-spot for lawyers what particular problems are like. So it seems like a bad idea for a lawyer or anybody interested in justice to not be literate in this field.
What’s your next project?
I'm working on a book and a film about the Central Valley of California. I go there often, but in 2021 I drove there, and as I was approaching it from Los Angeles, I saw this brown halo around it, this dark dust. I'd always seen pollution, but never at that level. People said that the new dust bowl had begun. At that point I was interested in, and I still am, drought and heat and the effects of it. And then, about a year after I started looking into it, the rain started, and all of the lands that had been rendered so fragile by the drought collapsed; homes washed away and flooding commenced. Meanwhile there are public health crises there. It has an immense concentration of prisons. And of course Latino farm workers who are undocumented are doing by far the largest share of the labor that gets produce onto plates. So things just are coming together there in a way that I wanted to pay attention to.