"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
Hundreds of artists, cultural workers and activists gathered on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York on Sunday (24 March), demanding that the most visited museum in the US publicly call for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza and commit to preserving Palestinian cultural heritage.
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.
Say hello to ArtActivistBarbie (AAB), whose modus operandi is small signs, big questions and a fabulous wardrobe. With her inviting call to arms, “Refuse to be the muse!” this fierce new incarnation of Barbie is helping to challenge art galleries and museums worldwide about their woeful lack of women and other minorities in their collections, and reluctance to consider the female gaze.
Keith Haring was an American artist and activist in 1980s New York, whose artwork raised awareness on social issues at the time. One the main awareness campaigns Haring participated on was AIDS awareness and activism.
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:
Tong Wenmin is a Chinese performance artist affiliated with works exploring movement, interaction, and humanity. Her art is a relationship between human behavior and the natural world, a round dynamic between physicality and environmental elements. One of her most compelling works, "FLYING THE WIND," is outstanding in merging performance art with a deeper exploration of the interaction between humans and nature.
For artists exploring themes of violence towards humans and animals, there is a fine line between thoughtfully engaging and needlessly shocking the viewer; being sensationally explicit can turn people away while being tacit or innocuous may fail to make an impact.
In “Speech/Acts,” a group exhibition organized by Meg Onli at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden stood out as artists who take up voices, histories, and experiences that can help audiences move forward and endure in the future.
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) presents visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces. AiOP also produces an annual festival along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October.
To some, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) might appear to be but a ragged bunch of activists sporting false noses, a smudge of grease paint, camouflage pants and bad wigs. And those people may be right. But it is also a highly disciplined army of professional clowns, a militia of authentic fools, a battalion of true buffoons.
Reading the introduction to Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens a few years ago, I was stunned to learn that George Orwell, then a struggling writer in London, worked by letter with a group of refugees to publish the novel in Ukrainian in the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe.
La Casa Invisible project was started in 2007 in Malaga, Spain, when a group of socially involved participants squatted in a run-down building, aiming to eventually claim the legal rights to the property (Moor & Smart, 2016). The space was opened to local artists and creators, quickly becoming a hub for free local music, performances, and seminars as well as creating an important meeting space for social groups (Moor & Smart, 2016).
Sophie Calle's works discuss the issue of "privacy", the composition of an individual's identity at the social level, and the relationship between "private" and "public/group/society", including personal information, personal records, public surveillance, and other topics. An obvious feature of her works is the unique and extremely subjective criteria of judgment and reference for measurement.
After artists learned that London's Design Museum was connected to Leonardo, a large arms dealing company, and hosted an event for them, many of the artists featured in their Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-2018 asked the museum for their work to be removed. After receiving no response, one third of the show's artists removed their work from the show.
Crazy Rich Asians is a 2018 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Jon M. Chu, from a screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, based on the 2013 novel of the same title by Kevin Kwan. The film stars Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Yeoh.
Chen Boer's first heroine film, which she co-wrote and directed, was "Daughter of China," about female soldiers in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. They didn't have much filmed material at the time, but as a feminist, Chen Boer clearly wanted to record the sacrifices and contributions of Chinese women in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Los Angeles-based multi-media arts collective Asco (from the Spanish word for nausea) created performances, street theater and conceptual art that satirized the emerging styles of Chicano art and pushed the boundaries of what it might encompass.
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 24 artists committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods.
"When it comes to the effects of the virus on black lives, the roots run deep.
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This is one of the hardest illustrations I’ve ever done. Not because of the tree - but because of the overwhelming nature of the subject at hand. Seeing headlines like “Blacks are Dying at Higher Rates from Covid-19” SHOOK me!
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In 2017 Ge Yulu became a national sensation in China. That year, he submitted his final project as a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, revealing the unnamed road in Beijing that he had claimed in 2014 as his own. Because the Lu character in his name means road, he erected a sign for Geyu Road that blended seamlessly into the setting.
The signature angst of our time was profoundly expressed in the poems submitted for WOMAWORDS Literary Press June 2020 edition, Imaging Life After COVID-19, offering women poets an opportunity to write about their experience of the pandemic and their vision of or for the future. The universal trauma wrought by this virus, invisible and silent and pouncing with madness and mendacity, brings us to a place we’d like to forget but never will.
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.
Promoted as a DIY festival with no corporate sponsorship, the 2015 Latino Punk festival in Brooklyn, NY featured bands from all over the Americas. With an emphasis on local bands supporting each other and nurturing local scenes, this festival functions in reference to the ideals of the punk and Riot Grrrl movements in the 1990s.