When I watched them kill Elijah McClain, I couldn’t make any art for days. It had been week after week after week of gut-wrenching stories of Black lives taken from this earth too early. I wasn’t sure if I could handle another one. After seeing the way Elijah pleaded for his life while walking home from the convenience store, it was so hard for me to watch and process.
Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 17 of the United States Criminal Code:
"Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or
unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill,
draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking
association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System,
The Georgian government’s attempt in March to impose a repressive Russian-style “foreign agent” law has galvanised the cultural community in the country. Museum workers and artists have been at the forefront of dramatic protests during which police fired water cannons at crowds waving European Union flags, and say they plan to continue the battle despite the government backing down from the legislation.
The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time human rights activist, author and lecturer Cleve Jones. Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS.
Vetements' trademark is for subverting the fashion industry’s ways of doing things. Following its recent return to the runway after a short one season break, designer Demna Gvasalia has unveiled his latest project.
New York Times, DAVID FIRESTONE, Published: December 31, 1993
Your son tears the wrapping paper off his fierce new "Talking Duke" G. I. Joe doll and eagerly presses the talk button. Out comes a painfully chirpy voice that sounds astonishingly like Barbie's saying, "Let's go shopping!"
Does your son:
A) Furiously vaporize the doll with his own phaser rifle?
B) Go shopping with Joe?
The Bed-Stuy “aquarium” is back.
The neighborhood’s beloved sidewalk fish pond was resurrected this week — in an act of defiance that comes just five days after the city cemented over the original and left the neighborhood’s goldfish to die.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
Photo taken on Oct. 15, 2020 shows a "comfort women" statue in Berlin, capital of Germany. The statue was built to commemorate the more than 200,000 girls and women from 14 countries and regions, so-called "comfort women," who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)
From Black Power to Migrants’ Power
BY Robin Cembalest POSTED 01/22/13
As ’60s activist art enters museums, a new generation is creating an iconography of protest for today
Visual artist Alexandre Orion removes soot in an artful manner to produce skulls in the tunnels of the polluted city of Sao Paulo. Orion does so in an attempt to create intervention, raise awarenes, and decrease pollution. "From the ocular cavities of so many dead, his work looks out on the living and interrogates people passing by; it quietly criticizes our omission, our comfortable acceptance of pollution." ( Jose De Souza Martins)
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized erotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W.
“My image was inspired by the #MeToo Revolution, my personal experiences with the male gaze and a healthy amount of frustration and repulsion. What I hope to convey in this image is the sense of verbal, physical and energetic male ownership that is placed on women in society.”
— Beata Kruszynski is a freelance illustrator and art teacher in Ontario, Canada.
Creative Time, a public art fund, invited artists to make online comics that addressed contemporary issues. Every month for two years a new artist presented their comic strip online. At the end, there were a total of 24 comic works that were archived online and also released as a publication in 2010.
El Rey de la Ruina (The King of the Ruin) has become an act of powerful recognizable symbolism throughout Madrid. In terms of his popular heart symbolism, the artist chose the organ, a heart, as one of his favorite symbols because he was diagnosed when he was little with cardiomegaly, an abnormal increase in the volume of the heart, which is what inspired this organ as his prize art symbol.
Actor and comedian Jim Carrey has always been known for his slapstick silliness. You know the films — "Dumb and Dumber," "The Mask," "Liar Liar," "Ace Ventura," just to name a few.
But he also always managed to peel back the comic goofiness for more serious turns in films like "The Truman Show" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
In March of 2022, JR, with the help of 100 volunteers, unfurled the portrait of five-year-old, Ukrainian refugee Valeriia in Lviv, Ukraine. Leaving Ukraine, JR saw firsthand how difficult it was for women and children to get to safety due to long queues at the border. In response, he released two NFTs of Valeriia as part of his solidarity project titled: Can Art Change the War?
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
“Piano Stairs” is an interactive playful musical stairway installation created into the Odenplan underground station of Stockholm to make people use stairs more often than elevator. The project was part of a Wolkswagen initiative called “The fun theory” whose main objective and mission is to “change people’s behaviour for the better by making it fun to do.”
Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The "post-black" artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture -- and about the meaning of art itself.
Stephanie H. Shih is a Brooklyn-based ceramist who explores Asian American identity through clay interpretations of grocery items. The ceramicist has created life-size painted clay Sriracha bottles, Pocky cartons, soy sauce gallons, and instant ramen as part of a series Shih conceived in 2018 called Oriental Grocery, to explore nostalgic foods of the Chinese American diaspora.