In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
Since 2020, university students across China have launched a grassroots initiative to combat menstrual stigma by placing “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in campus restrooms. These boxes, often accompanied by signs reading “Take one if you need it, donate if you can,” provide free sanitary pads to anyone caught off guard by their period—offering both practical relief and a symbolic challenge to the cultural silence surrounding menstruation.
Direct Cause: Students' freedom to enter and leave the campus has been restricted for two weeks, but the university has not even issued an official document, only a verbal rule of "not leaving the campus unless necessary."
Objective: To protest the arbitrary closure policy of Beijing Film Academy.
Matthew “Levee” Chavez sits at a table in New York City’s Union Square, sporting a thrift store suit and tie, holding a sign that reads “Subway Therapy.” This act of social practice, which started as an invitation for conversation, went viral after he set up shop at the subway the day after the 2016 presidential election. He wrote “Express Yourself” on a Post-It and stuck it to the tiled wall.
A woman’s head is bisected by a line that splits her face into positive and negative halves. Over the image, a commanding text, stated in the second person, reads: “Your body is a battleground.”
During a cold January morning in 2020, Animanaturalis, a nonprofit group focused on ending the suffering of animals across Spain and Latin America gathered to protest the use, production, and sale of fur in Spain. In a blog post on their website, the group discusses the horrid living conditions on fur farms as well as statistics and alternatives related to fur sales (Animanaturalis, n.d.).
A group of protestors and organizers from Sunrise Movement, Earth Guardians, 350 Eugene, Cascadia Wildlands and more staged a bike march culminating with a die-in outside of the Northwest Natural Gas headquarters in Eugene, Oregon.
The protestors lie on the ground outside the NWN building, beneath tombstones donning the dangers of natural gas.
Now What? project has just finished a series of interactive workshops, where global citizens came together to reflect on the global sustainability issues, got inspired and empowered to imagine the world anew through poetry and imagery.
With the focus on the community and climate action, the project is live on social platforms and soon to be a collective street art too.
On Nov. 6, the day after the presidential election, the artist Hank Willis Thomas was at his studio in Brooklyn. His production assistants were poring over tables strewed with blobby red white and blue silk-screen prints of the words “Fragile/ Democracy / Handle With Care” in capital letters.
The Islamic Republic has always frowned upon dance but recently even a simple choreographed or ‘synchronized movement’ – as the regime calls it – has become an act of protest.
When And Where Will #TeamTrees Plant 21.5 Million Crowdfunded Trees?
Two months after reaching one of the most ambitious crowdfunding goals in YouTube history, #TeamTrees is getting closer to delivering on behalf of its 800,000+ unique donors.
Young women in South Korea are fighting for a new future. The #MeToo movement which has highlighted sexual harassment and abuse around the world has taken a surprising hold in this socially conservative country.
In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.”
On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.
Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.
Mine is not Arts for the sake of Arts. It is a revolutionary INSGINA carved into the artistic plaque of my DNA to speak FREEDOM of expression and then freedom after EXPRESSION. The footprints of my revolutionary walk are dipped in the paths of RESISTANCE. My Ideological Swag -word is CREATIVITY. My spiritual birth mark is RESILIENCE. My revolutionary slogan is a nonviolent but a poetic fist of MASS INSTRUCTION. I am non-selfish believer.
By going viral for the fashionable and aesthetically appeasing art for Trans lives, she has developed a new way to advocate for this cause while simultaneously growing her business. By starting by documenting their journey to living their most authentic life on youtube, they have gravitated to TikTok where they have found particular success in spreading awareness through their art and apparel.
We designed a WaterWaysWalk with interactive activity suggestions linked to both a Website and a hardcopy Zine, either of which could be utilised on the walk to raise awareness about Water Sustainability.
Below is an extract from the website explaining what the focus was:
Following the backlash of Netflix's support of Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" comedy special, which featured racist transphobic "jokes", Hannah Gadsby took a deal with Netflix to create a comedy special featuring genderqueer comics. The show, titled 'Gender Agenda', was tapped in the Alexandra Palace Theatre in London and released on Netflix on March 5, 2024.
Howardena Pindell presented her solo exhibition, “Rope/Fire/Water”, her first video in 25 years and a project utilized by the artist since the 1970s that The Shed commissioned and displayed in late 2020 and into early 2021. “Rope/Fire/Water” mines the history of violence against African-Americans and features Pindell’s personal anecdotes and anthropological and historical data related to lynchings and racist attacks in the United States.
"Los Palcos del Descubridor" (The Discoverer's Box Seats) was a project created by Sebastian Burga and José Aburto in 2012 that consisted of a large-scale installation on the street and a media campaign on the Internet.
The work simulated the upcoming construction of an apartment building that would replace Lima's Teatro Colón, a historical landmark.
Our NGO “Voices from the Conflict” seeks to open a conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of activist art. The history of the conflict dates back to the UN partition plan in 1947, followed by Israel’s independence in 1948. Since then, there have been several armed engagements between the two actors- causing massive civilian casualties and terrorism.
On the 5th of May 2021, the subway's 12-line partially collapsed, killing 24 people and injuring more than 70. Onboard, were children, young women and men, and the elderly. The accident also killed a man and injured a woman who was driving a car, upon which the train fell.
The poorly conditions of the subway structure had been repeatedly reported by neighbors living nearby. No institutional response was given.
Three months ago, when New York government officials ordered nonessential businesses closed to slow the spread of coronavirus, high-end retailers sheathed their stores in plywood barriers, as though readying for civil unrest.
On April 26th, 2012, Zheng Churan, a feminist activist who was a senior at Zhongshan University at the time, brought 500 letters of advocacy to the school post office on a bicycle.
From October to December 2020, Chinese university students nationwide launched a viral movement to install “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in women’s restrooms—free, wall-mounted containers stocked with disposable pads on a take-one, replace-one basis. Nearly 250 campuses joined within weeks. Some sustained their boxes for over a year, while others saw them vanish after bureaucratic pushback, logistical hurdles, or dwindling volunteer resources.