On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of China, Tibet activists projected messages of support for human rights and freedom from inside and outside of the Empire State Building, countering China’s public relations stunt to bathe the building in red and yellow light. “NY [Hearts] Human Rights” was projected from inside the ESB onto a nearby building.
Vermin Supreme is an American performance artist, anarchist and activist who is known for running as an alternative candidate in various local, state, and national elections in the United States since 1988. Supreme is known for wearing a boot shaped hat and carrying a large toothbrush. Vermin Supreme's four-plank platform is simple, yet elegant:
1) Mandatory tooth-brushing laws.
2) Zombie preparedness.
In October and November 2016, Breathing Lights illuminated the windows of hundreds of vacant buildings in Albany, Schenectady and Troy, NY. Warm light filled each window with a diffuse glow that mimicked the gentle rhythm of human breathing. Concentrated in neighborhoods with high levels of vacancy, Breathing Lights transformed abandoned structures from pockets of shadows into places of warmth.
If you headed into the West 4th St. Subway Station on March 9, 2014, you may have seen a group of people writing on cardboard, taping it to the walls, and seemingly holding a small class in the underground space. Those were some of the members of Free University NYC, a radical educational project started during May 2012 as a form of educational strike. They hold classes in public spaces like parks and subway stations, and are entirely free.
The U.S./Iraq War Memorial is an augmented reality public art project and memorial, dedicated to the thousands of individuals who have died on both sides of the conflict.
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.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
Flushing Creek is so hidden by industrial sites and highways, it’s almost invisible to those passing through the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. “I lived in Flushing my whole life and didn’t know that I lived near waterways until I was 20 years old,” Cody Ann Herrmann told Hyperallergic.
Serene colors and technical set pieces create a surreal ambience as performers delicately hover into the black void above the stage. These performers belong to Kinetic Light, an "internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble". In 2022, the ensemble performed Wired, a "potent contemporary aerial dance performance that explores race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States".
Since summer 2011, FARM’s activists have been paying people $1 each to watch a 4-minute video depicting the inherent cruelties of raising animals for food. This tactic, known as “pay-per-view,” has led 80% of participants to reduce meat consumption, sparing tens of thousands of animals from abuse and slaughter.
On July 4, 2012, several members of MicCheckWallSt, a subsidiary group of Seattle's larger Occupy Wall Street that formed in December, 2011, anonymously checked into a room at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Downtown Seattle.
"A few months ago artists John Peña, Jon Rubin, and Dawn Weleski opened Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. Nowadays the Iranian food is served at the counter. More precisely, the kubideh, a dish made of grilled ground meat in freshly baked barbari bread with onion, mint, and basil.
Despite the pushes to motivate more young girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, women are still very underrepresented in almost every scientific field. Part of this motivation is because a lot of young girls would rather do something else.
Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono’s instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: ‘Just blue like the ocean.’ You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white.
Creative Time, Social Practice Archive: Brinco is an art project, product, and intervention created by the Argentinean artist Judith Werthein for the 2005 inSITE Biennial held on the border of Tijuana and San Diego. Brinco—Spanish for "jump"—is a specially designed shoe the artist created for illegal migrant workers and immigrants who navigate the border region at night.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory” will span Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. Expanding the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, the exhibition will place six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique Fourth Floor installation.
Faith Ringgold, the 93-year-old doyenne of African American art, a trailblazing master who foreshadowed the recent rise of art activism and Black figuration, is having her first solo museum show in Chicago.
A new exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that showcases activism through art and media in the San Francisco Bay Area, gets its name, Take This Hammer, from a 1963 documentary about the author James Baldwin as he went around San Francisco, talking to African-Americans about what it was like for them in the city.
In 1984, a group of women in New York gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of a protest. A group show, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, was showing 165 artists, 152 male artists exhibited alongside just 13 women.
Outraged, they attended the protest, bringing placards and chanting outside the museum. But a handful of women within the larger crowd learned something.
Hello and thanks for viewing.
This was a little installation that took place in the beauty of West Texas. The goal was to reorientate the site specific Prada Marfa into something more relevant, TOMS Marfa. Prada Marfa, being in the middle of nowhere, a structure placed as sort of a apocalyptic trophy for the high art world meant to challenge time; TOMS Marfa was to accelerate that vision with 2014 subject matter.
In El Paso more than 100 murals have been painted since the mid-1960s. The murals, located throughout the city's various corridors, often depict themes common to Chicano muralism, such as mestizo heritage or social problems, but they also tell unique stories about the "merging of ideas, cultures, and dreams" along the United States-Mexico border.
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.