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?
These Nuns mean business!
Like most Nuns, the Sister's of St. Francis in Philadelphia fight for causes in social justice, from fighting for farm worker's rights to battling McDonald's over childhood obesity.
However, these nuns have recently taken it to a new level by "using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority."
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
On December 2014 I've been artist in residence at MANY MINI RESIDENCY a short-term residency program organized by Sarrita Hunn and Ryan Thayer and hosted by GYB BYG in Mexico City. During my 12 hour residency I’ve worked on the case of the 43 students from Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa who went missing while in the custody of Iguala’s police force in September 2014.
Gum Election
Gum Election is a guerilla art project which started in New York City in October 2008. It encouraged people to vote during the presidential election in 2008 and also not to spit out their chewing gum carelessly on New York Cities already dirty streets. Now the Gum Election is back and New Yorkers are voting again “who’s sucking the most”.
A group of unidentified guerrilla activists staged a unique pro recycling flashmob in a Quebec mall in July 2015. An actor 'forgot' an empty water bottle on the ground in a food court a couple of feet from a recycling receptacle. Numerous people walked past the bottle and did nothing. Finally a woman walking past it reached down and recycled the bottle. She was then given a standing ovation and thunderous applause from the entire food court.
Just 15 months after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, AU has seen a dramatic increase in activism, according to student leaders interviewed by The Eagle about the state of activism on campus. However, other students say the level of political polarization on campus has eclipsed those activism efforts.
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.
Located in Thomas Paine Plaza, across the street from City Hall, Hank Willis Thomas’s All Power to All People was a public art intervention that dealt with racial identity and representation in Philadelphia.
She seeks to utilize her feminist art to spread awareness on mental health issues. Sravy is a nomad in her own right, and throughout her experiences in Asia she has noticed that there are stimas surrounding women's autonomy and how they handle mental health struggles.
Beauty in Transition is an artistic project created by multi-media artist Jody Wood, that established a pop-up mobile hair salon providing beauty services including a hair wash, cut, color and/or style service to willing participants living in homeless shelters. By provoking face-to-face dialogue in a calming recuperative salon environment, this project aims to facilitate empathetic understanding and to unravel the reductive label of homelessness.
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.
In Tunisia, a country gripped by economic uncertainty and still in the midst of rebuilding its identity after the Arab Spring, hip-hop culture is viewed as part of an ongoing dissident movement. Just a few events, such as the recent Mafia Wallitili Festival in the heart of downtown Tunis, offer the local hip-hop community an opportunity to share their values with the broader population.
The upcoming year of fashion shows look set to be charged with climate change and environmental themes.
This year, more than ever before, we have seen that the business of fashion, at the highest levels, is responding to the push to take the very pressing issue of climate change and environmental damage seriously.
One of the oldest forms of human expression is art, so it’s no surprise that art is constantly used to critique another of humanity’s oldest practices, violence and war. In the world of art activism, the power of creativity and innovation has been used to create commentary about war since the beginning of time. Art that speaks out against the atrocities of violent conflict embodies empathy, care, and a plethora of other human emotions.
Filling Stomachs to Open Minds on Immigration
In Sweden, Dinners Melt Cultural Barriers
STOCKHOLM — Last year, when Ebba Akerman, 31, was teaching Swedish to immigrants in the suburbs of this city, she ran into one of her students on the train and asked him whether he enjoyed living in her country.