“He describes it as a “family theme park unsuitable for small children” – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why.
Banksy’s new show, Dismaland, which opened on Thursday on the Weston-super-Mare seafront, is sometimes hilarious, sometimes eye-opening and occasionally breathtakingly shocking.
Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections, brings together an art history of Chinatowns and their communities by historical and contemporary Canadian artists such Emily Carr, Unity Bainbridge, Yucho Chow, Fred Herzog, Paul Wong, Mary Sui Yee Wong, Morris Lum, and aiya哎呀, among others.
The origin of the Soviet disco tradition, one that lasts to this day in the DJ-laden nightlife of Moscow and St. Petersburg, lay in the Stalinist era. Western culture – modernism, cubism, rock and roll, all that good stuff – was “decadent,” perhaps even a plot by Trotskyists or the Western intelligentsia to dull the steely nerves of the Soviet people. But dancing – this was a-OK.
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.
The Ogden Ar(t)chives Mailbox is a community project that was initiated by Ogden poet, Angelika Brewer. The project involves a metal sculpture of a mailbox, which has various decorative elements such as a typewriter, a birdcage, and a heart. The mailbox serves as a platform for the public to submit their creative works such as poems, drawings, letters, or anything that can fit in an envelope.
There’s some great news for supporters of The Sarkeesian Effect, the seemingly random collection of badly filmed interviews with assorted people who dislike Anita Sarkeesian that is allegedly being edited into a film of some kind!
Xiao Lu was one of the most influential women in contemporary Chinese art, better known for provoking performance art works and sharp social commentaries. Her works address sensitive social and cultural issues that counter mainstream attitudes and values. In 1989, she put her work "Dialogue" up for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
After artists learned that London's Design Museum was connected to Leonardo, a large arms dealing company, and hosted an event for them, many of the artists featured in their Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-2018 asked the museum for their work to be removed. After receiving no response, one third of the show's artists removed their work from the show.
Jameela Jamil has opened up about how she’s “not here to be liked” in a frank new interview with Meghan Markle.
In the latest episode of Archetypes, Meghan’s Spotify podcast, the Duchess speaks with both Jamil and Shohreh Aghdashloo about the “stereotypes and judgements women face in the world of activism”.
Samaria Rice, left, and Terrence Spivey welcome the crowd at the Tamir Rice Sweet 16 event to raise funds for a new youth oriented cultural center Thursday, June 14th, 2018, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo by Tim Harrison/Special to The Plain Dealer
Inspired to carry on Tamir's legacy
A collective endeavor of Greek antiquity — no less than eighty different artists worked on the frieze alone — the Parthenon was built between 447 BC and 438 BC under the orders of Pericles, following a democratic debate, and overseen by the sculptor Phidias. It measures ten meters high and approximately seventy meters long by thirty meters wide.
Through their podcast, The Dance Union, Melanie Greene and J. Bouey have been confronting racism in the dance world, and highlighting the experiences of Black artists, since 2018. Their episodes cover a variety of topics and issues, ranging from mental health and sexual harassment to advocating for fair pay.
The Democracy Machine! is a performative sculpture that gives participants the opportunity to experience the thrill of democracy in action, in a competitive game that challenges people to work together toward understanding a better society. Using the spectacle and play of performance drawn from Las Vegas Casinos, gambling machines and game shows, The Democracy Machine!
Katharina Grosse's public exhibition "Just Two of Us" consists of eight large meteor looking sculptures painted in bright technicolors. The sculptures, which have been placed in the public plaza at Metro Tech Commons, have transformed downtown Brooklyn. Grosse is a German artist based in Berlin, who is known for her use of spray gun techniques to create abstract colorful paintings on unconventional surfaces.
Iran is a nation with a fine art tradition that stretches back thousands of years; its reputation for contemporary fashion design less so. Writing that from an external, Western perspective may read unduly dismissive, but it’s a statement that holds up even from within the country’s borders, Shiva Vaqar assures us. “Being a designer has never really been considered a serious job here,” she says over the phone from Tehran.
From Jezebel:
Marley Dias is an 11-year-old New Jersey resident who’s rounding up children’s books that feature black female leads so that she and her peers have more fictional characters to look up to.
The project, titled #1000BlackGirlBooks, started when Marley complained to her mother about reading too many books about white male protagonists in school.
The artist I chose to focus on personally is the photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero. I used photos from her photography essay España Oculta, in which Rodero traveled to small villages in Spain to document the resident’s lives. Our group's main focus is on gender issues, and I personally wanted to focus on activism involving women and representation. Rodero uses photos of rituals and activities among those outside of the majority population.
This print is one of several works documenting a performance Schneemann made at Women Here and Now, an exhibition of paintings accompanied by a series of performances, in East Hampton, New York in August 1975. In front of an audience comprising mainly women artists, Schneemann approached a long table under two dimmed spotlights dressed and carrying two sheets. She undressed, wrapped herself in a sheet and climbed on the table.
On Friday night, a painting by the anonymous street artist known as Banksy sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London for $1.4 million. But as soon as the auctioneer dropped the gavel, something unexpected happened: a beeping alarm went off and the frame began eating the painting, spitting half of it out the bottom in what may be the first instance of a self-destructing painting, reports Scott Reyburn at The New York Times.
Since the beginning of Bulgaria's transition to democracy, the monument’s meaning and future has been the subject of heated debates. Opponents to the monument aren’t happy about the presence of such a dominating foreign army monument in the country that is situated higher and more central than national symbols. In recent years, the monument has turned into a canvas for anonymous political statements on multiple occasions.
The work of South African artist Mary Sibande tells the tale of her alter-ego Sophie, a domestic worker who finds refuge in dreams where she emancipates herself from the ghoulish realism of an ordinary existence, cleaning other people's homes.
Exploring the construction of identity within post-apartheid South Africa, Sibande's work probes the stereotypical contextualisation of the black female body.
Cosmic Generator presents a network of characters working in nonsensical, and at times absurd, economies. Artist Mika Rottenberg uses footage from actual discount dollar stores in Calexico, CA; Mexicali, Mexico; and Yiwu, China to recreate the imaginary “life” of a product, from its production in the factory to the moment it is sold.
In 2016 an eye-catching sparrow was spotted in Scotland. The bird had ingested feed pellets from a nearby salmon farm, turning its feathers pink. Cramped in underwater feedlots, farmed salmon have no access to the prey that colour their flesh in the wild. Instead, they are fed artificial colourants mixed with supplements, drugs, and hormones, causing them to relentlessly produce the additive-filled flesh that fills supermarket shelves.