A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
A new exhibition titled “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures” will debut at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to examine Afrofuturist expression and culture as it relates to music, activism, art, and more.
“As a Black woman, I can grow absolutely anywhere," Aiyanna explains. "I can adapt to any storm, any weather, any changes. In the Black community, that's something that we're really good at.”
So when Aiyanna, 25, was asked to contribute the first L in a Black Lives Matter mural made by a group of artists in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, she knew her letter would include a flower person.
The Protest Mask Project was co-organized by Maggie Thompson and Jaida Grey Eagle. During the George Floyd protests, the artists' studio, Makwa Studio, created hundreds of masks to give to protestors in the city of Minneapolis where the demonstrations began.
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San Francisco, California
Corrected Billboard Defends Transparency at Guantanamo Bay
The California Department of Corrections (CDC) has unveiled a new billboard campaign to assist the U.S. Navy with transparency at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Heroin sold in the northeast, specifically in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey tends to come in little glassine baggies. The art comes from the individual and unique "stamp" on said baggie sold to a user.
Haeryun Kang reported the following for NPR on February 24, 2016:
"On the eve of South Korean President Park Geun-hye's third anniversary in office, protesters gathered in Seoul... to condemn the administration's increasing crackdown on free speech. These protesters were unlike any others Seoul has seen. They were holograms"
The resistance to Trump’s ICE militia is strong and is documented in the online art exhibition, “ABOLISH ICE” https://sites.google.com/view/abolish-ice/home The participating artists-activists are from New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space. In New York City, enforcement is heavily skewed to ignore illegal commercial advertising, while simultaneously aggressively targeting graffiti and, in some cases, symbols of dissent.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening to the public on April 26, 2018, will become the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
On Sunday December 18th from 6-8pm, the night before the Electoral College meets to vote, join me in lighting a candle for humanity.
The lit candles will be a peaceful
protest against Donald Trump being selected the 45th President of the United States of America.
More importantly,
we will send a message to any Elector who would like to vote faithless that we support them.
Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”
From 1998 to 2004, pro-democracy activist Htein Lin was jailed for challenging the military dictatorship in his home country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. Prior to his imprisonment, Lin acted in films and with a theater troupe. While behind bars, he continued to organize performance artworks with his fellow prisoners.
Henry Taylor (born 1958) is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his experimental figurative paintings and exploration of contemporary and relevant historical social issues. Taylor rewrites art history, often with art historical references, to amplify Black people who have been overlooked or undermined by the canon and systems of power and control.
They’re real fashion police: Fed up with sloppy cops, the NYPD has moved to update its dress code, banning shorts on transit beats and white turtlenecks while on patrol.
The department’s updated style guide, set to take effect next month, also instructs patrol officers not to wear tactical cargo pants and reinforces longstanding guidance including a ban on shoelaces that are not black.
"This Ain't a Eulogy" is both a staged performance and a durational, outdoor, public performance that reclaims and takes public space. The artist statement is as follows:
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.
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.
Caucus-goers in Des Moines will arrive to a disturbing sight on Monday, with dozens of chain-link cages appearing to hold migrant children cropping up across the city overnight.
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.
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown Shows How Black People Are Portrayed in Mainstream Media. The hashtag demonstrates that the narrative the media continues to portray regarding black people isn’t always truthful.
"May you live in interesting times" is the familiar Chinese saying, usually spat out as a curse. You can see why in "A Touch of Sin," a film by renowned director Jia Zhang-ke. That kind of time is now, in the history of his country. With four vignettes inspired by real-life "ripped from the headline" events, he shows what the great economic expansion of China is doing to the majority of its people.