Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a New York City based radical performance community, with 50 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. We are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and Earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on four continents defending community, life and imagination. Our Devils over the 15 years of our "church" have remained the same: Consumerism and Militarism.
Comic artist Huda Fahmy has been breaking down walls with her hilarious comic "Yes, I'm Hot in This."
In her own words, "What started as my therapeutic way of dealing with the Islamophobia and prejudice I encounter on the daily has now turned into this amazing opportunity to tell the story of the American hijabi."
Kanami Kusakima, also known as the woman who dances in Washington Square Park with the long black hair and the paint, was happy to allow the Mayor's Office of NYC use her image as a promotional tool for a "post-coivd" New York. Yet, she has had multiple encounters with police who want to shut her performance down.
Kenyan-based photographer Boniface Mwangi has captured his country's political and civic turmoil since the controversial presidential election in 2007. The violence and disorder he witnesses daily motivated him to take action, setting up a creative hub for activism called PAWA 254.
The Couple in the Cage documents the travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”.
Artists Dionne Bonner, Kenya Adams, Gwen Jones, and Charles Taylor planned the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Additional artists Breyahna Monet and Danielle Jordan joined the project in the second phase and helped complete the mural painting project.
When Rage Against the Machine arrived in Philadelphia to play their 15-minute set as part of Lollapalooza ’93, the Los Angeles band knew they had a problem. Zack de la Rocha, the band’s incendiary frontman who was as outspoken on the mic as he was loud in his cadence, had no voice. A month of playing shows on a tour to support their self-titled debut album released the previous November had taken its toll on the frontman’s vocal cords.
As part of a nationwide day of action against fossil fuel pipelines from Pennsylvania to Texas, several hundred New Yorkers succeeded Monday in halting construction of a radioactive pipeline threatening the West Village--after unrelenting daily vigils at the Spectra pipeline site over the past several weeks.
Greta Thunberg has launched a campaign video of a housing burning to the ground as she calls for more action on climate change.
The shocking clip shows a family waking up, having breakfast and talking as their home is engulfed by flames and clouds of smoke.
The video was released by the Swedish climate activist's Fridays for Future, which has partnered with LA-based creative agency FF.
From March 29 to April 28, 2012, artist Angel Chen transformed Toronto's Whippersnapper Gallery into a pop-up call centre to field questions on the financial crisis. Phone lines were manned by passers-by, volunteers and guest operators, all of whom solicited callers for discussion about the current economic climate.
According to the World Health Organization, China is home to two-thirds of the world's women who wear IUD devices. This is a form of contraception that was developed after World War II, and in essence, comes from discrimination against women. In 2014, artist Zhou Wenjing made a work of IEDs, which was recently exhibited in Beijing.
Petr Pavlensky, a Russian performance artist, sent a nail through his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in Moscow (on a holiday in celebration of law enforcement). He was later charged with hooliganism.
Pavlensky, as quoted in the Guardian: "The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society."
Fridays for Future strikers around the world shared their demands for bold climate action online Friday as many youth activists heeded public health experts' recommendations in the face of the coronavirus pandemic by eschewing public protests in favor of digital demonstrations.
The online displays followed the call earlier this week from school strike for climate pioneer Greta Thunberg to #ClimateStrikeOnline.
Rufina Bazlova is not afraid to surrender her art to activism. Born in Belarus, a former Soviet republic ruled by the authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko for 29 years now, Bazlova knows all too well that being apolitical is a privilege many Eastern Europeans cannot afford. 2020 was a pivotal year for Belarus, not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the presidential elections, which declared Lukashenko president for the sixth time.
Seattle Times:
In 1921, just four years after the Bolshevik Revolution, American journalist Albert Rhys Williams wrote: “The visitor to Russia is struck by the multitude of posters — in factories and barracks, on walls and railway-cars, on telegraph poles — everywhere.”
After a spate of bullying-related suicides of LGBT youth, gay columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller decided to launch the It Gets Better project to see what they could do about it. They began with a simple YouTube video in which both of them described their experiences with bullying in high school, coming out, their families, and the story of their relationship and the adoption of their sun.
Power Call is a nomadic, interactive energy commons in San Francisco to the Bay Area. Using low-tech systems, Power Call harnesses, stores and dispenses energy for recharging a variety of cell phones. Anyone can contribute to the energy commons by spending a few minutes pumping the machine, creating a charge for yourself or a future person in need.
On Monday, a grassroots, anti–corporate tax-dodging coalition called Flip the Debt crashed a "Fix the Debt" party at St. Anselm's College in New Hampshire hosted by Honeywell CEO David Cote to tell the gathered deficit hawk disciples that paying their "damn taxes" would be a better solution than crippling the nation with fiscal austerity measures.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions.