In 1995, Bogota was a chaotic city. Among others, it presented high ranges of homicides, delinquency, corruption, no sense of belonging, traffic chaos and financial problems.
The State of Things was first performed in the spring of 2006 on the 3rd anniversary of the Iraq war. On September 1st, 2008 in collaboration with Northern Lights as part of the UnConvention, Ligorano/Reese recreated The State of Thing’s Democracy ice sculpture, weighing over 1,000 pounds and measuring 5 feet high and 20 feet wide, in front of the State Capitol Building in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a ECD 2.0 (Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand) project designed to repurpose inexpensive used mobile phones that have GPS antennas (through the addition of proper software which the TB project is designing) to provide emergency personal navigation, helping to guide dehydrated immigrants to water safety sites established by activists and to provide poetic audio nourishment
“Mapping skin deep” is an audiovisual public installation consisting of portraits with testimonies from refugee/undocumented immigrants currently residing in Montreal and elsewhere. Their bodies have been scarred in post-production tracing the route they took from their homeland to Montreal, hence mapping them skin deep.
In 1994, the human rights and environmental activist KenSaro-Wiwa was arrested and accused of incitement to murder. Eighteen months later, following a show trial condemned by human rights organisations, he and eight other leaders of the Movement For the Survival of the Ogoni People were executed by hanging, an act that propelled the story on to the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
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.
In the fall of 2011, Urbano’s teen artists and artist-in-residence Neil Horsky partnered with professional artists,
educators, librarians, and historians to undertake a critical investigation of
Boston’s Freedom Trail. During the
investigative process teen artists questioned the assumptions, accuracy,
comprehensiveness, and impartiality of public presentations of the city’s
DIWO (Do It With Others) is a distributed campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices instigated by arts and activist network Furtherfield in 2006.
I Wish This Was began in New Orleans in November 2010. It was inspired by vacant storefronts. There are a lot of them where Candy lives in New Orleans. There are also a lot of people who need and want things. What if we could easily voice what we want, where we want it? How can we influence the businesses and services in our neighborhoods?
In 2005, Rebar, a design studio in San Francisco, transformed a single metered parking space into a temporary public park. The area where this two-hour park took place was one that lacked public open space. This was the first Park(ing) Day project.
Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime.
The Nanny Van is a public art initiative run by REV- and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. This project aims at shorting distances, gaps and obstacles between domestic workers and the proper information of their rights. Therefore, Nanny Van is a smartphone app every person can download in order to access information about the legal conditions and state any kind of questions or claims.
On the one-year anniversary of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, artist-activists at Liberate Tate staged a guerrilla performance in the Tate Britain galleries to highlight the museum's ties to BP.
Valentine Peace Project (VPP) Community Valentine actions started on the streets of Los Angeles with the sharing of thousands of poems on peace and expressions of love given out wrapped around carnations and later Fairtrade roses. Students also made paper flowers to give out with their own written reflections or submissions selected from Valentinepeaceproject.org.
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.
The project (created in 2009-2010) consists of painted plats and posters depicted with drawings of police torture scenes. Images also include snippets of email exchanges. The plates have been exhibited in numerous galleries in Ukraine, and posters were hung in public spaces.
Turf the Turf hopes to inspire you to reconsider your front lawn by sharing existing examples of creative uses on a fun bike tour around the city of Kelowna. There are many options, such as xeriscaping (using native plants), front yard gardening or even installing original art that can display your creativity and offer you new ways to relate with your environment and your neighbourhood.
"A new photographic work created by Ayyam Gallery artist Tammam Azzam has captured the imaginations of the world, going viral and being shared across social media as a symbol of the power of love and human spirit in times of war. The Syrian artist has superimposed Gustav Klimt’s iconic work, The Kiss (1907 – 1908), over the walls of a war-torn building in his native country in a powerful juxtaposition of beauty and devastation.
A Colombian college student created this idea to improve Bogotas citizens experience when using the public transportation. According to one scientific study, the worst problem Bogota citizens had to deal within the public space was public transportation; this problem represented the principal cause of high percentages of stress and anger among citizens.
Maria was psyched to travel to the Philippines where her hand-made basketball nets were well received. Invited with the Institute for Infinitely Small Things (Boston/Mass based) by Clara Balaguer and the Office of Culture and Design (Manila) she worked in Zamboanga City with students of Western Mindanao State University to carry out a 6 day arts and activism workshop.
The website 'Street art utopia' has an amazing collection of pictures of street art from Belgium, NYC, to Brazil and Israel Palestine. Talented people sharing their art publicly for the streets and the world to see!
Activism: reclaiming a public space, maybe...not sure, but it is public art with various messages...
The Immigrant Yarn Project (IYP), organized and created by Cindy Weil was a massive work of public and democratic (crowd-sourced), yarn-based art honoring our immigrant heritage and promoting tolerance, difference, and community. Weil reached out across the state and beyond to collect yarn-based creations by immigrants and their descendants.