"It
was important to me to present the whole story in a way that would
captivate people’s attention and make a memorable statement. Making
quilts seemed an ironic solution. Quilts act as a functional memory, an
historical record of difficult times. It
is during times of hardship that people have traditionally made quilts,
The International Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS) is the largest traveling African Diasporic art show in the United States. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, HFAS provides a platform for African Diasporic visionaries and American visual artists to exhibit and sell their artwork. The show also aims to create economic empowerment, educational opportunities and professional recognition within the multicultural community.
After winning the TED Prize on March 2, 2011, the French-artist JR launched the Inside Out Project, in his first TED Talk. Using his own artistic practice as inspiration, this participatory platform helps individuals and communities to make a statement by displaying large-scale black and white portraits in public spaces. Through their “Actions,” communities around the world have sparked collaborations and conversations.
Circus Amok is a New York City based circus-theater company whose mission is to provide free public art addressing contemporary issues of social justice to the people of New York City.
The collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle, a group of Kinshasa street performers turn their bodies into living sculptures, and use them to political ends. Among the artists is Jared, who regularly takes to the streets dressed as Robot Annonce. The costume, made from broken radio parts, is designed to raise awareness of fake news. “People receive so much incorrect information and many inaccuracies are spread. I want to fight this,” says Jared.
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.
With the intention of recognizing the work of the Latin American carreteros (garbage pickers) that collect recyclable materials in wheel carts, and increase environmental consciousness, artist Mundano created “Pimp My Carroça"
Face Your World was set up as a tailor-made educational program for the youngster to explore and participate in the process of city renewal. The project used Interactor software, an interactive tool to enable users to rebuild their neighborhood. The software creates a virtual environment which represents the neighborhood and enables users to see the result of its modification while it has been used.
There are no whistles, no loud speakers, and no placards held up high in this quiet act of subversion. Pimsiri Petchnamrob stands silently in a mass of sharply dressed Bangkok commuters, her hands clutched around a copy of George Orwell's 1984.
Next to her a small group of young men and women, their faces sombre and their heads bowed low, also read books about fictional and real totalitarian worlds in silence.
Zhuang Huan invited more than 40 men - laborers, fishermen, construction workers––who had recently migrated to Beijing from other areas of China to participate. Zhang Huan said, “In order to find these workers, I visited many of the shacks where they live.”
Los Angeles is at a critical moment when it comes to art. Not because it's "underappreciated as a world art center" as The New York Times informed us in 2011. Or because it's a "burgeoning art capital" as The New York Times revised in 2014. No, it's because L.A. has actually moved past the "up-and-coming" stage into a fully integrated part of the art world.
A troupe of approximately thirty women and men of various ages, sizes, ethnicities and performance backgrounds marched through the performance art space of SESC-Vila Mariana in Sao Paulo and then through the streets of downtown Sao Paulo, silent, blind folded, dressed in business attire, and covered completely with a gray mud. The performances walked slowly in unison at turtle's pace.
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.
Tina Piña, better known as Mother Pigeon (@motherpigeonbrooklyn), is an artist and self-described “high priestess of the pigeon religion,” whose passion for New York City’s often-overlooked bird has helped her carve out a unique creative niche centered around pigeons—as well as a lifestyle geared towards helping New Yorkers appreciate the misunderstood creatures.
Since Christmas Eve, some lights along the streets and in the houses of Bushwick have spelled out a number of messages quite different from the festive wishes one usually finds during the holiday season. “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM,” “NOT 4 SALE,” and “NO EVICTION ZONE,” some read.
The creative fusion of art and activism in urban spaces has propelled the British collective Led by Donkeys into the spotlight, garnering millions of views for their interventions on social media. Their critical visual occupations - whether billboard messages during the day or large-scale projections at night - raise a compelling question: which medium holds the greater persuasive power?
On January 12, 2016, Shanghai's temperature dropped to its lowest of the year. A little girl was seen selling matches in the cold wind on Bund street. The little girl, wearing a classic dress, wrapped in an ocher-red scarf and carrying a small bamboo basket full of matches, gave matches to passers-by.
A collective resistance movement dedicated to reasserting communal ownership of common spaces, Reclaim the Streets staged its first action on Camden High Street in 1995, when activists closed the road to vehicle traffic to make way for a street party. Combining the tactics of non-violent direct action with 90's UK rave culture, organizers kept the location secret until the last moment to preempt police interception.
It has been a long and exhausting battle for the bike activists in Puebla one of the cities in Mexico. Collectives and activist groups have long pushed for including bike infrastructure around the city, in a horizontal, democratic way.
The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.
Imagine affecting the global cultural Landscape through art and technology use. Imagine one-mile long installation in 100 city locations worldwide, each mile-long install is of 250 bronze plaques of different Peacemakers. Then imagine its own App that when any smartphone is pointed at one of the plaques an entire timeline biographical history of that peacemaker becomes available.
The New York City subway is many things, but clean isn’t necessarily one of them.
It doesn’t exactly smell great, either.
While the MTA hedges on solutions (and continues to debate whether eliminating trash cans from the stations actually solves sanitary issues), the artist and School of Visual Arts student Angela H. Kim is waging a personal guerilla war against the olfactory offensiveness of it all.
The Bed-Stuy Aquarium (also known as the Hancock Street Bed-Stuy Aquarium) is a makeshift goldfish pond located on a sidewalk in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City. The pond, originally formed by a puddle from a leaky fire hydrant, garnered attention from locals and the press beginning at the time of its creation in August 2024.
Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world.