There are few artists more innocuous, more neutered, more universally loved and reviled than Thomas Kinkade. His soft-focus images present an idyllic vision of America and of Christianity, like Norman Rockwell without the blue-collar populism, where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, and there’s always a warm fire going in the Lincoln-Log cabin just down the trail.
The artist has assembled a set of 300 installations around New York City, based around the concept of fences and borders, to showcase the ‘narrow-minded’ attempts used to ‘create some kind of hatred between people’
The New York City subway is many things, but clean isn’t necessarily one of them.
It doesn’t exactly smell great, either.
While the MTA hedges on solutions (and continues to debate whether eliminating trash cans from the stations actually solves sanitary issues), the artist and School of Visual Arts student Angela H. Kim is waging a personal guerilla war against the olfactory offensiveness of it all.
Jordan Peele discovered halfway through the making of “Get Out” what story he wanted to tell: A horror-thriller for black audiences that delivered a searing satirical critique of systemic racism.
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.
They call themselves feminist masked avengers in the tradition of Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman. They wear costume gorilla masks to remain anonymous, and they are devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the visual art world internationally.
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.
Eugene Lee Yang is an actor, filmmaker, producer, author, dancer, and digital content creator from Pflugerville, Texas. He received his education at the University of Southern California, and is most known for his contribution to the popular Youtube group, The Try Guys.
In 1900, Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race, and conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites, and buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership.
Public arts advocator, Creative Time, and the MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design (AFT) partnered to present Heard NY, a public art dance and music installation facilitated by artist, choreographer, and fashion designer Nick Cave. Heard NY was created to instill a production of wonder in a quotidian landscape.
The first legislative victory of the Civil Rights era was obtained by hundreds of people going where they weren't invited. In 1961, Black and white Freedom Riders, well trained by SNCC in nonviolent action, rode Greyhound buses from Washington DC southwards primarily in order to wait, together, in waiting rooms that were still unconstitutionally segregated.
Dawn Jones Redstone’s short film about reproductive justice features women of color leading the resistance.
The year is 2023.
Health care of any kind is highly inaccessible and in some cases outlawed.
Public utilities such as water are privatized and severely restricted.
Streets are filled with protesters clutching signs that say “Water is a human right” and chanting “Whose streets? Our streets.”
On March 3, 1913, President-elect Woodrow Wilson arrived at Union Station in Washington, DC. It was the day before his inauguration, but the teeming mobs that typically appeared to greet a new president were nowhere to be found. Instead, the streets of Washington seemed deserted. A disappointed Wilson asked, “Where are all the people?” “Over on the Avenue watching the suffrage parade,” he was told.
"I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object.
As the cold air bit our faces, and we hid deeper into our layer of sweaters, my family and I continued to wander around Manhattan, seeking a place which would provide warmth and food. And there it was, dimly lit: the Michelin-starred ramen restaurant, Tonchin. We ordered the highly-sought after ramen bowl, Tonkotsu, and awaited our meal. Out of the kitchen, the steam arose from a bowl of a warm, salty pork broth.
With past government shut downs and teetering the fiscal cliff, debt
ceiling now eliminated, credit line increase after credit line
increase? I thought my timely art piece may be interesting for your
viewers and spark healthy/heated discussion.
Huffington Post put together a digital, interactive map of some of the so-called best and brightest street art collections. Street art is important because it allows artists, usually from the community where the street art is taking place, to interact with the community and bring color/brightness to the environment.
As leaders across the world are getting ready to gather together to discuss climate change—and what to do about it—at the UN Climate Change Summit in New York next week, hundreds of young people across the world are going on birth strike to pressure policymakers into action.
The Stanford Daily:
There is no word short of “spectacular” that better describes the experience of examining “Pan American Unity,” Diego Rivera’s 1940 mural, housed since 2021 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The piece is the crux of SFMOMA’s soon-closing exhibition, “Diego Rivera’s America,” curated by James Oles and Maria Castro.
Shooting Without Bullets incubates young artist activists and eliminates systemic barriers in art and society for Black and Brown youth, all while spreading bold messages of justice and equity across Northeast Ohio and beyond. In Our DNA, their new public art initiative, uplifts Cleveland’s Black history to catalyze present and future racial equity, social justice, and civic engagement efforts across Cleveland communities.
"Las Carpetas looks at the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program that aimed to destroy the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Through still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera provides a counter-history to the way many understand this period of time and its aftermath.
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic” features six dances written inside a prison, a 35-minute dance film, and 11 artists (seven choreographic interpreters and four formerly incarcerated narrators) conversing on dancing in carceral spaces.
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.