Artist Maya Lin first burst onto the scene in 1981, when her design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while she was still a senior at Yale. Since then, Lin has turned her focus to environmental issues, with her most recent show at Pace Gallery investigating Manhattan’s landscape and environmental history.
The long-awaited New Museum retrospective of conceptual art pioneer Hans Haacke fell victim to internet hackers over the weekend trying to make a political point. The intervention drastically skewed the results of an iPad-based artwork that was meant to record real-time visitor responses.
It was 1974 when Beuys arrived in New York City, ready to tackle a whole new challenge and create what was to become one of the most famous works of art of the time. Upon arrival, his assistants wrapped him in a large piece of felt and transported him, by ambulance, to the René Block Gallery in SoHo. There, awaiting the artist, was a live coyote. Beuys spent three consecutive days, eight hours at a time, locked up with the wild animal.
At 12:00 noon (New York time) on November 19, 2016, Chinese artist Ning Kong, wearing a wedding dress with hundred dove, appeared at the 911 site in New York. Even though the theme of performance art is calling for peace, the police banned it and showed the handcuffs because doing performance art was not allowed at the 9/11 site. So Kong Ning turned to Times Square, New York, successfully completing her performance art.
Documentarian Clayton Patterson captured video of police brutality during the Tompkins Square Park riots in the summer of 1988. When District Attorney Robert Morgenthau ordered Patterson to hand over his camera and tapes as evidence, Patterson refused, citing distrust of the criminal justice system. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, but after a 10-day hunger strike, his lawyers negotiated a deal to free him.
The idea was born in an instant.
A curator attending an opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art was immediately captivated by a painting from an artist she had barely heard of, Mary Lovelace O’Neal.
Carolee Schneemann is largely associated with her performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, in which she boldly addressed feminist and political issues in ways that shocked and engaged viewers. But she has always maintained that she is a painter, a fact often overlooked in discussions of her larger body of work. At the heart of her approach is her ongoing exploration of the boundaries of painting and drawing, as in Up to and Including Her Limits.
The Guerilla Girls are a group of feminist activist artists, who use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture in their artworks. In 1989, they designed this billboard for the Public Art Fund (PAF) in New York, aimed to criticize the museum institutions for under-representing female artists and objectifying women.
Gum Election
Gum Election is a guerilla art project which started in New York City in October 2008. It encouraged people to vote during the presidential election in 2008 and also not to spit out their chewing gum carelessly on New York Cities already dirty streets. Now the Gum Election is back and New Yorkers are voting again “who’s sucking the most”.
The Survivaball made its first appearance in 2006, when "Halliburton representatives" attended a conference on catastrophic climate change and demonstrated the functionality of the large inflatable suits ("a gated community for one"), which keep corporate managers safe from global warming. Not long afterward, in Berlin, the Yes Men learned they also work as disruptive, arrest-resistant tools.
In 1932, Rivera was commissioned by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and her husband John D. Rockefeller Jr. to paint a mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center. Rivera kept the original, approved plan for the two outer sides of the mural but changed the inner panel to include a critique capitalism. This inner panel ultimately included: Lenin, prostitutes, and the upper class drinking alcohol and covered in signs of venereal disease.
"Writing Political Music in Today's World" I began studying composition with Fred Ho without knowing quite what I was getting myself into. I was 25 with a fresh graduate degree in composition under my belt, lost in that special way only millennial twenty-somethings get to be. I knew I wanted to write political works and, having met Fred twice before, I knew that he was the one who could help me do it.
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.
At ‘Arcadia Earth,’ Dazzle Illuminates Danger
Using augmented reality, virtual reality and installations of light and art, the creators of this pop-up exhibition hope to inspire action on climate change.
By Laurel Graeber
Oct. 23, 2019
The creators of “Arcadia Earth” want to awaken your conscience. But they also plan to make that guilt trip extraordinarily fun.
This afternoon, in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a mother and daughter threw coins into its reflecting pool while a couple posed for engagement photos in front of the Temple of Dendur, the man in red pants and a gray blazer, the woman in a black jumpsuit. A long line snaked out of the temple. It was tranquil, most people speaking in a whisper. That grand space has such an effect on people.
Between 1995 and 2017 the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin brought in $35 billion USD in revenue for Purdue Pharma, most of which went directly into the hands of the Sackler family.
A striking new cultural space is taking shape in New York’s Hudson Valley. Alex Grey and Allyson Grey, co-founders of CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to build Entheon, sanctuary of visionary art, to ask for support to complete the build.
On this International Women’s Day, we wanted to celebrate the commitment of a very special human being. Her name is Zaria Forman, a leading artist in contemporary art with a cause. She is not only an exceptional human being; she is also an incredible American drawer who uses art to convey the emergency of climate change.
Tania Bruguera, in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, began a long term art project in form of an artist initiated socio-political movement. Immigrant Movement International is an organization headquartered in the multinational neighborhood of Corona, Queens. The organization engages local, national and international audiences and focuses on the issues of immigration reform.
Four days before the U.S. presidential election, three Ukrainian activists gathered at a stranded fence in New York City’s East Village to hang an expansive information poster. “19546+ Ukrainian Children Abducted by Russia,” reads its headline in bold. From a black canvas, white letters jump out at the passersby, a haunting reminder of the toll the Russian invasion continues to inflict on Ukrainian families.
Through the Market Token program, wooden tokens are used as market currency, making it possible for customers with SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food-stamp benefits to get fresh, healthy, affordable foods at the Market. Customers stop at the Market office to swipe their Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card and purchase $1 and $5 tokens that function as cash and are accepted by dozens of Market vendors.
Bernie Sanders supporters know how to bring the party! And they did it big time for the Democratic Debate in New York this week, with help from The Illuminator & the NYC Light Brigade. They installed an interactive video game featuring Bernie jumping over obstacles and WINNING!
During 2008-2009, when the United States was entering a recession, the idea of the Homeless Art Gallery was popping up across Staten Island, New York City's least populated borough and biggest underdog. This is an example of art intervention, disrupting space to question the economic and political systems of capitalism. It was also an excellent community building project.
New York activists responded to a recent anti-Muslim subway campaign by plastering stickers over ads depicting the World Trade Center in flames, juxtaposed with text quoting the Koran. The day-glow orange and yellow stickers warn "Caution: This is war propaganda. You're the target". The ads were paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, led by notorious anti-Muslim crusader Pamela Geller, reportedly costing $70,000.