Exhibition visitors have expressed feelings of uneasiness or even pain and nostalgia when seeing Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei1. The 51 vases that make up the artwork are originally treasures from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BCE) and the artist has dunked them in common industrial paint.
Why did Ai Weiwei do it?
I get catcalled on the street by a construction worker. He says that he can see I’m smart because I have enormous books. He tells me he’s reading the latest Zadie Smith novel. I invite him to join my book club, and spend all night fantasizing about his insightful commentary around non-linear plot structure.
In April, 2011, Food and Water Watch partnered with Yes Lab to raise questions regarding drinking water around New York City. Yes Lab, an organization that collaborates with activist groups, aims to create successful media-related creative actions that help raise awareness regarding pertinent causes and create desirable action, often by staging interventions for the existing status quo by imitation and alteration.
Today over 40 people gathered at the Ministry for Internal Affairs in the centre of Tirana, the capital of Albania. The issue is Tirana's drinking water, which is not clean, unreliable as it comes out of the tap only a few hours a day and that sewage systems continue to pollute the water sources.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
Most nights since a coup returned Myanmar to military rule on Feb. 1, a spectral symbol of protest has glowed on a mildewed side of a building.
Where the next illumination will appear in Yangon, the country’s biggest city, is a mystery. But, suddenly, a projected image appears in the dark. Three fingers raised in a rebellious pose. A dove of peace. The smiling face of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was ousted in the army putsch.
Anti-Fur advocates have been protesting through demonstrations for decades, throwing red paint on women wearing fur coats, passing out leaflets and sporting the slogan “Fur Is Dead” on t-shirts and stickers and spray-painting it on buildings in cities throughout the globe.
Norwegians raised their voices in unison on Thursday to get under the skin of admitted mass killer Anders Behring Breivik. An estimated 40,000 people turned out in central Oslo's Youngstorget square to sing "Children of the Rainbow," a Norwegian version of "My Rainbow Race," written by American folk singer Pete Seeger.
A performance of empathy, democracy and power, created fresh in each city where it is presented, with local artists, activists, government officials and other citizens.
The project takes as its departure point the formal structures of local government. An emphasis on the formal elements helps us engage, play, critique and enliven, among other things.
A new exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that showcases activism through art and media in the San Francisco Bay Area, gets its name, Take This Hammer, from a 1963 documentary about the author James Baldwin as he went around San Francisco, talking to African-Americans about what it was like for them in the city.
What happens to explicitly political art when it’s placed inside of the White Cube? Paint the Protest, a group show curated by Nancy Spector at Off Paradise self-consciously poses this question, and further aims to reveal the place and purpose of activist art in general.
Montreal: The City of Lights
In Canada Alfredo Jaar completed a project referred to as Lights in the City, in 1999. Keep in mind this is considered one of the richest cities in North America. with a large population of homeless individuals. Is there not a way, for such a rich city, to help people in dire need of just basic necessities?
Beauty in Transition is an artistic project created by multi-media artist Jody Wood, that established a pop-up mobile hair salon providing beauty services including a hair wash, cut, color and/or style service to willing participants living in homeless shelters. By provoking face-to-face dialogue in a calming recuperative salon environment, this project aims to facilitate empathetic understanding and to unravel the reductive label of homelessness.
The post (r)evolutionary exercises are the outcome of a meeting/friendship/project that started in summer 2010, when we took part in "Goings on" seminar in Beirut, Lebanon. In this seminar, curated by Cecilia Andersson, Scandinavian and Middle east art groups were invited to meet and learn about each others practices. That's what we did, we got along really well, and we started at once to think of ways to do something together again.
Action as a response to viral video of Attorney Aaron Schlossberg's racist rant against Spanish speaking customers and employees at a midtown restaurant. The "Latin Party" included food, music, and dance celebrating Latina/o culture in the US.
From FB event page:
What he captured became one of the most influential images in history. A driving force of the environmental movement, the picture, which became known as Earthrise, showed the world as a singular, fragile, oasis.
The nativity scene at Fellowship Congregational Church in Tulsa, Okla., looks a little different this year: There is a chain-link fence surrounding Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.
The display has been up since the beginning of December, but it drew news coverage this week after the church changed the message on its marquee to read, “The holy family was a migrant family,” and posted photos of the nativity on Facebook.
Tania Bruguera, in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, began a long term art project in form of an artist initiated socio-political movement. Immigrant Movement International is an organization headquartered in the multinational neighborhood of Corona, Queens. The organization engages local, national and international audiences and focuses on the issues of immigration reform.
The Sex Workers' Opera is a multidisciplinary show featuring stories of sex workers from 17 countries and produced since 2013. It is written and performed by sex workers and their friends.
See below for a link to the performance of the song at the Academy Awards.
From Salon: How Common and John Legend’s performance of “Glory” fired up Oscar night’s idling empathy machine by Sonia Saraiya