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We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action \"artivism\" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists -Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown-and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.

This chapter discusses Young Joon Kwak's Mutant Salon, which was a queer and anti-capitalist venture that sought to create healing, community, selfhood, and liberation by practicing a species of playful “objectification” that did not involve oppression but rather affirmation and self-creation. This project required a horizontal approach to class status and the development of safe spaces where mutants—queer, poc, often femme-identified people who experienced economic precarity—could feel free to be beautiful. As a solo artist, Kwak has held gallery shows of drip ceramics, sculptures of atypical bodies, and cathartic video work navigating parental relations and queerness. The chapter then focuses on Mutant Salon's artistic, activist, and Black, Brown, female, queer, intersectional artivist lineage. It also examines the provocative questions the Salons raise about the law's role in the creation of identity and safe spaces, and these things' relationship to legal rights.

An interview with artist Young Joon Kwak (aka Xina Xurner) is presented. Kwak talks about the sense of a broad in-between identity in her work, the different ways of understanding queer and trans bodies, and Mutant Salon.