I Wish This Was is a participatory public art project that explores the process of civic engagement. Inspired by the limited dynamics of community meetings where the loudest people ruled, as well as the volume of abandoned buildings, Chang posted thousands of “I wish this was ___” stickers on vacant buildings across New Orleans to invite residents to easily share their hopes for these spaces.
It has been a tumultuous and anxious week for women in Turkey. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree at midnight last Friday, annulling Turkey's ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, women poured onto the streets of Turkish cities to protest. Further demonstrations are planned.
The Vivienne Foundation exists to honour, protect and continue the legacy of Vivienne's creativity and activism.
Since the start of her career in the 1970s, Vivienne was renowned not only for her fashion design, but also her activism. Vivienne always utilised her platform of prestige to make the world a better place.
The campaign bus was attracting funny looks. On its side was the by now all-too-familiar last name of the Republican presidential frontrunner. Somewhere inside the castle-shaped hotel next door, Donald Trump was holding court, as hundreds awaited another rally of bombast and branding.
The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action (https://theamplificationproject.org) is a crowdsourced community digital archive aiming to raise the visibility of art and cultural productions inspired, influenced, or affected by forced migration and refugeehood.
This month’s blast of arctic air may have roused climate-change skeptics. But the composer Laura Kaminsky and the painter Rebecca Allan were unfazed. Holed up in their apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx on one of the coldest days in decades, these longtime artist-activists were doing what came naturally: fighting the planet’s warming.
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.
It’s women’s history month, and your favorite radical feminist avengers want you to go ape. The Guerrilla Girls have been making noise about gender and racial inequality in the art world since 1985. Fighting discrimination with a sense of humor and their signature faux fur, these masked feminists continue to challenge major museums to spotlight more women and artists of color.
Shine, written by Stoneman Douglas students Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña in response to the tragic shooting at their school on February 14, 2018 to inspire unity, hope, and change. MSD alum Brittani Kagan collaborated with students and faculty to create this music video to honor the victims and the school.
"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 the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
Less than a month after Mauricio Macri's inauguration as president of Argentina in December 2015, a manual for micro-resistance was released online to guide resistance against Macri's election and policies. The manual suggests specific actions that people can perform in their everyday lives to build opposition against the new president.
In the wake of the amount of police brutality that has been occurring since the dawn of the damn police, an institution that began as a way to find escaped slaves, across the United States, #manisfestjustice chooses to make its explicit artistic mission to demand that power take responsibility, and to provide avenues to community empowerment in the meantime.
The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments and blocked major intersections in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform — a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, two Chicago-based organizations, For the People Artists Collective and Chicago Community Bond Fund, worked together to create Decarcerate Now, a virtual quilt honoring individuals who died of COVID-19 while in the custody of the Cook County Jail (CCJ).
Nadya Tolokonnikova is a Siberian artist and a creator of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot. Tolokonnikova’s political actions and wide-ranging performance interventions have established her as a leading voice in the fight against authoritarian power. During her residency, she will compose performances that demonstrate her multifaceted approach to resisting systems of oppression and dehumanization.
Pepe Espaliú was an artist from Cordoba who made various art from paintings to sculptures and public actions. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990, and up until 1993 when he died, he focused on drawing attention to those affected by AIDS. The Reina Sofía had a small exhibition of some of his work in 1994, in which the work on display had a lot of symbolism about his condition and suffering.
The “Wearable/Portable Architecture project” discussed the possibilities of having a locale create portable architecture based on the conditions of its environmental, urban and cultural conditions. It is structured to find ways in providing new arguments and sustaining an artistic impetus to our immediate environment.
A Norwegian physician who has volunteered in Gaza for decades said Friday that Western leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, are complicit in Israel's intensifying assault on the Palestinian enclave's hospitals, which are overwhelmed with airstrike victims and displaced people seeking refuge.
Croatian artist Sanja Iveković started Women’s House (Sunglasses) in 1998 in collaboration with a women’s shelter in Zagreb and later with women’s shelters elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Iveković organised workshops with women in these shelters to produce plaster casts of their faces, as well as to give them the space to write their life stories.
Creative Leaders
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