Indigenous people in Minneapolis supporting Black Lives Matter cite similar struggles
Jingle dress dancers held a ceremony at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis on Monday, the place where George Floyd was killed by police last week.
It can be important to reflect on the artistic recounts of activists experiences under state imprisonment. In a revealing interview with Artspace, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei reflects on his 81-day secret detention in 2011 and the psychological strategies used to dismantle identity and autonomy.
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg58d8opQKA
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“Another world is possible!” — so goes the popular activist chant at rallies and marches. Yet one of the most difficult aspects of sustaining a grassroots political movement can be imagining that other world and persisting even when it seems far away.
Alzayer put cages around Boston's "Make Way for Ducklngs" statues, separating the baby duckling statues from the mother. The original statues were created in 1987 by Nancy Schon and the mallard family is based on the children's book by Robert McCloskey.
As the Yippies prepared for protests at 1968 Democratic National Convention, Yippie Paul Krassner rattled Chicago leaders by suggesting that the Yippies were planning to put LSD in the city water supply. As Abbie Hoffman said at the Chicago Seven trial: "I read in the paper the day before that they had 2,000 troops surrounding the reservoirs in order to protect against the Yippie plot to dump LSD in the drinking water.
In this series featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, artist Alexandra Bell edited headline pages from the New York Daily News in 1989 concerning the case of the Central Park 5. Through redaction, highlighting, and censoring, Bell shows how the teens accused of this crime were painted as a pack of animals by the media.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser renamed a street in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had the slogan painted on the asphalt in massive yellow letters, a pointed salvo in her escalating dispute with President Trump over control of D.C. streets.
With delicate composition, striking details and strong emotion, five editorial posters drawn by Wuheqilin have attracted some half million followers to his account on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform. His political views expressed in his art have led to some netizens dubbing him the "Wolf Worrier artist."
In 2020 Noname, a Chicago rapper, activist, and poet, released the single titled "Song 33" to address racism in America and the Black Lives Matter movement. She specifically raps about the killings of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin Salau, singing, "A baby just 19/I know I dream all black/I seen her everything immortalized in tweets, all caps/They say they found her dead," she raps.
It all started a few months ago, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art got a phone call from Valerie Castile.
Castile is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016. Valerie Castile has since founded the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which helps victims of gun violence.
"It appears that Banksy has struck again, this time painting the brick wall of the former Reading Prison in Berkshire, England, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years over his “indecent” affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Máximas de Seguridad, a survival manual written and illustrated by Jhafis Quintero creates a new voice for the voiceless, vulnerable and underprivileged groups in prisons and creates empathy for those that are labeled as dangerous by society. The manual aims to provide empathy and humanity in light of the public scrutiny that ex-prisoners endure in the transition to social reintegration.
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is a revolutionary, writer, social activist and founding member and Minister of Defense of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, and member of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. At 18 years old, in 1990, he was convicted of murder, which he has consistently challenged on the grounds of misidentification.
At least nine protesters were arrested during a protest Tuesday at Geo Group headquarters — a Florida-based private prison company that operates facilities nationwide.
The White Paper Movement was a large-scale, decentralized protest movement that erupted across China in late November 2022, initially sparked by a student demonstration at the Communication University of China, Nanjing.
April 19th, 2020
Taylor, TX – On April 19th at 4 pm, around 70 human rights defenders in cars circled the T. Don Hutto Residential Center operated by CoreCivic in Taylor, honking and displaying signs urging ICE and local officials to release people from cages before COVID-19 turns prisons into death camps. This comes after news of the first detained immigrants in Texas testing positive for the novel coronavirus on Monday.
DAMN. Kendrick Lamar opened the 2018 GRAMMYs with a powerful and political performance of his hit, "XXX.'" The rapper featured an army of face-covered soldiers marching in the background of an American flag, that quickly turned into a "satire" taking a jab at the current political climate in the United States.
The Black, Dallas-based artist Jammie Holmes put George Floyd’s final words in a place where everyone could see them: the sky. Five days after Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis on Saturday, May 30th, Holmes’s piece took flight across Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York. Airplanes carrying banners flew between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. EDT.
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.
William Banks is a comedian and artist who, prior to his viral prison saga in 2025, was best known for a community that he led called Call World, which he describes on the website as “a planet in an alternate universe ruled by human-headed Worms sexually obsessed with William Banks.” The story goes that Banks was first visited by a worm from Car World after getting stuck in an industrial freezer and coming to terms with his death before eventually being
Prison inmates in Mexico have suffered from coronavirus infections at a higher rate than the country as a whole, and pandemic lockdowns have reduced their already limited contact with the outside world.
But one group of women inmates at a prison west of Mexico City have managed to benefit, as the lockdown spurred a wave of professionals with time on their hands to donate online classes.
The Mirror Casket project is a sculpture, performance, and visual call to action designed and orchestrated by a collaborative of St. Louis community artists in response to the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO.
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.