Anarchist art groups radicalized into armed gangs through urban insurrections

Evidence

Solanas was claimed by militant feminists, including Ti-Grace Atkinson and the lawyer Florynce Kennedy. She was championed by the anarchist anti-art “affinity group” Black Mask, now a self-identified gang that, further radicalized by the Newark Insurrection, had turned to political theater—or rather had instrumentalized political theater, by, among other things, staging a fake assassination of the poet Kenneth Koch. They took a new name, the Motherfuckers, initially an ironic comradely greeting, from a line in Leroi Jones’s 1967 poem “Black People!”: “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the origin of the Motherfuckers name and the shift from an anti-art affinity group to a self-identified gang.
• XREF: connects to: Walnut Street prisoners mounted armed insurrections echoing revolutionary ideals — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 157