The Wisdom of the Universe was painted in 2014 by Métis artist, author, and activist Christi Belcourt. Based in Northeastern Ontario, Belcourt is best known for her large-scale acrylic paintings — like this one — that use hundreds of thousands of tiny dots to simulate Métis beadwork. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, where The Wisdom of the Universe lives, the painting has become a popular sight.
A video that was first posted on X (formerly Twitter) on November 8, of a Congolese man setting himself on fire has gone viral. The gruesome clip has started a discussion on whether a genocide is occurring in the DRC and is being ignored by both Africa and the rest of the world.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions.
The work of Marcela Cantuária (b. 1991, Rio de Janeiro; lives in Rio de Janeiro) often portrays female figures who navigate regional, international, and social boundaries. Often highlighting symbols from tarot and astrology as well as themes that reflect political and environmental activism in Latin America, she weaves narratives of social spheres, political associations, and ethereal wishes.
Exhibition visitors have expressed feelings of uneasiness or even pain and nostalgia when seeing Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei1. The 51 vases that make up the artwork are originally treasures from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BCE) and the artist has dunked them in common industrial paint.
Why did Ai Weiwei do it?
From an article in BoredPanda:
"If you’ve ever felt like your voice and opinion doesn’t matter in the vast world, then Seth is here to prove you wrong. This New Yorker runs the ‘Dude With Sign’ Instagram account where he uploads photos of himself protesting the strangest, weirdest, most random things. And the best thing is, we can relate to most of what he’s written on his signs.
Graffiti art is particularly viewed as a powerful form of social protest, and the (illegal) act of defacing can be as important as the message itself. Artist Void One has been arrested on numerous occasions for his politically-charged interventions.
“I didn’t set out to make political art but art is a platform where I can vent my frustrations” – Void One.
A climate activist smeared pink paint on a Tom Thomson artwork at the National Gallery of Canada as part of activities this week drawing attention to demands for a national firefighting service.
A video uploaded to Facebook by the group On2Ottawa appears to show Kaleb Suedfeld, 28, splashing paint onto Thomson’s 1915 landscape Northern River, kneeling and gluing his hand onto the floor before pulling a written speech from his pocket.
The son of an exiled political dissident, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s work is inherently political. Since 1995 Ai Weiwei has been traveling the world, photographing himself flipping off iconic monuments of power in his Study of Perspective series.
Man is a thirsty beast, and nowhere is that thirst more acutely exemplified than on Tinder, the matchmaking app that lets users swipe right in their quest to find love, lust, bots, or viral marketers. Now a California-based programmer has tweaked the app’s API, creating a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women — when in fact they’re talking with each other.
Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has drawn on the stool part of that French surrealist's pioneer work for his latest exhibition, the largest ever devoted to Ai, which opens in Berlin this Thursday. The show, entitled Evidence, is at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall, and consists of either entirely new works, or pieces never seen in Germany before. The exhibition is huge, taking up 3,000 square metres in total and running across 18 rooms.
Imagine walking into a silent room where a woman is mending. Now imagine that she's sitting underneath 1,500 pairs of sharp Chinese scissors that are suspended from the ceiling, precariously pointed downwards. This was the idea behind The Mending Project by Beili Liu.
Dan Perjovschi is one of Romania’s foremost artistic voices. Although known as a talented multi-disciplinary artist in his home country, particularly for his early performance work, he is most widely known internationally for his massive drawing installations.
TED TALK:
I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet.
Jacques-Louis David was an active member of the French Revolution, and his works often depicted his political affiliations. David’s painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons portrays the scene of Brutus, an important figure of the Roman Republic, reacting to the death of his sons. Since they wanted to overthrow the government and restore the monarchy, Brutus ordered their death.
Activists poured porridge and jam on a marble bust of Queen Victoria and sprayed fire extinguishers filled with soup onto a large bronze statue of the monarch during two recent protests in Glasgow, Scotland.
The group, called This Is Rigged, claimed responsibility for the two protests, which took place inside the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum at noon on March 3 and at George Square at 10:45 am local time on March 4.
William Banks is a comedian and artist who, prior to his viral prison saga in 2025, was best known for a community that he led called Call World, which he describes on the website as “a planet in an alternate universe ruled by human-headed Worms sexually obsessed with William Banks.” The story goes that Banks was first visited by a worm from Car World after getting stuck in an industrial freezer and coming to terms with his death before eventually being
In the 1980s, Holzer and Lady Pink used New York as a backdrop for their artworks: Holzer wheatpasted posters and slogans on walls throughout Manhattan, and Lady Pink spray-painted graffiti on buildings and subway cars. The two also collaborated on a series of paintings on canvas, such as this work, for which Holzer composed phrases and Lady Pink did the painting.
Song Byeok is one of the most acclaimed Korean artists living today. He is from North Korea, where he was a propaganda artist for the North Korean government for two decades. After defecting in 2002, Byeok has turned his prolific creativity into powerful, satirical art using North Korea’s ruling culture as motifs.
Shouting is one of Xu Zhen’s early works questioning the limits of individual expression. First exhibited at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, the video shows Xu hiding in crowds and performing a series of loud screams in Shanghai.
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (around 1503-19) was attacked at the Musée du Louvre, in Paris, today by environmental activists who threw soup over the world's most-recognised and most-viewed painting. The celebrated portrait, which has been protected by security glass for the past 70 years, was not damaged in the attack.
“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.
As the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, hundreds of people gathered inside the Museum of Modern Art and outside of the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday for protests.