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.
Horror stories about treacherous boat journeys from Africa to the Mediterranean far too often make headline news. The men, women and children fleeing their homes to start a new life in Europe become faceless numbers in the media, and are ‘othered’ by conservative politicians for their own agenda.
Frank Waln, a 25 year old Native American hip hop artist, tours the country and Canada performing and teaching motivational workshops to students across the country. He took to rap at a young age when he found a cd (Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP) on the side of the road. Growing up on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, he realized that the hip hop music genre was an outlet for expressing pain and frustration.
Over the past twenty-five years or so, ever since her spectacular New York début at the Drawing Center, in 1994, the now forty-four-year-old artist Kara Walker’s visual production—sculptures, cutouts, drawings, films—has been diaristic in tone.
Post revolution Tunisia is all too familiar with protest – usually through demonstrations - but one group of activists are using the power of street art to get their message across. Calling themselves “Fanni Raghman Anni” (Arabic for “My Art in Spite of Myself”), the group simply scouts the streets of Tunisia bringing theater and drama to random passers-by.
Wajiha Jendoubi is an actress and one of Tunisia's best-known comedians. To be a woman comedian in this North African nation can be a challenge, but the country's gender gap is narrowing for the first time in almost a decade and Wajiha sees Tunisia as a country that stands for women's rights and supports it.
Mayday is a neighborhood resource and a citywide destination for engaging programming, a home for radical thought and debate, and a welcoming gathering place for people to work, learn, drink, dance and build together.
Last week, a dozen of female artists turned the walls of a downtown parking lot in Cairo into a street art gallery. Colourful group murals carrying personal stories and spreading messages to increase women’s visibility, and positively affect public consciousness.
In a conceptually odd but undeniably memorable PSA campaign, the Mexico City Metro has installed a “penis seat” in one of its subway cars, featuring a molded likeness of a man’s torso and penis, to get male riders thinking about the sexual harassment that women endure every day.
The seat is labeled “For men only.”
CAIRO — Seven Egyptians were arrested on charges of promoting homosexuality after concertgoers waved rainbow-colored flags at a rock concert in Cairo last week, Egyptian officials said.
The arrests were the latest assault on social freedoms in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose government has imposed harsh restrictions on free speech and led an aggressive campaign against gays.
By Nora Fakim, BBC News
Several hundred women's rights activists have demonstrated outside Morocco's parliament to demand the repeal of a law on sexual violence.
Morocco's penal code allows a rapist to marry his victim if she is a minor as a way of avoiding prosecution.
A 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, killed herself a week ago after being severely beaten during a forced marriage to her rapist.
"Improving
the livability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street,
block, or building scale. While larger scale efforts do have their
place, incremental, smallscale improvement efforts are increasingly seen
as a way to stage more substantial investments. This approach allows a
host of local actors to test new concepts before making substantial
At noon today, a group of artists and activists including members of the Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (known as G.U.L.F.) unfurled a large parachute in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum, demanding to meet with a member of the institution’s board of trustees to discuss the labor conditions at its Abu Dhabi site.
Julie Dillon is a critically acclaimed illustrator, having been nominated and won multiple awards, including two Hugos and a Chesley. Her work often deals with science fiction and fantasy stories, and her work in the field has made her aware of the lack of diversity in this optimistic speculative fiction.
Access Denied is a working project that started in 2015 that deals with inaccessible art spaces around Los Angeles. I am a physically disabled person who has been going to visit art shows for over 10 years and during that time I have experienced many instances of Inaccessibility. After many instances of exclusion I could no longer ignore my experience so I decided to make work about my denied access.
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.
Gregg Segal -- a California-based artist who is known for using the medium of photography to explore culture with the "sensibility of a sociologist" -- asked family, friends, neighbors and other acquaintances to save their trash and recyclables for a week and then lie down and be photographed in it:
Justin Brice Guariglia’s We Are the Asteroid employs a highway message sign to bring attention to how anthropocentric, or human-centered, attitudes have allowed for unsustainable systems that contribute to climate change. The artist generated the slogan for this work with eco-critic and professor Timothy Morton.
As the world watches Cairo burn, I can’t help but think that the flames of protest engulfing Egypt were sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17 after police confiscated his vegetable cart. The desperation that he expressed through his act of self-immolation caught on, literally, and spread across the country, into Algeria, and now to Egypt.