In November 2016, citizens of Flint, MI filed a historic class action law suit against both city and state for the damages wrought by lead contaminants in the water supply. The city's 100 thousand inhabitants have faced damages not only to their homes for the corrosive qualities of the water, but in myriad physical ailments; skin lesions, hair loss, high lead blood levels, vision loss, depression and anxiety are all reported symptoms.
Los Angeles is at a critical moment when it comes to art. Not because it's "underappreciated as a world art center" as The New York Times informed us in 2011. Or because it's a "burgeoning art capital" as The New York Times revised in 2014. No, it's because L.A. has actually moved past the "up-and-coming" stage into a fully integrated part of the art world.
#NYTIMES Why are there no U.S. anti-slavery monuments? http://antislaverymonument.org project is an answer.
Standing 60 feet tall, corten steel of two hollow chain links the upper one broken.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
Mayor Gilberto Kassab passed a Clean City Law that banned all public advertising in Sao Paulo, one of the world's most populous cities. The mayor gained the support of the city's elites in pressing the law as an anti-pollution measure targeting "visual pollution". The city was quickly stripped of its ubiquitous billboards, signs, graffiti and other public ads.
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.
Students from the School of Communication and Art of the University of Sao Paulo perform a skit titled 'Blind Ones' as a protest against consumerism inside a shopping mall of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte state, December 9, 2013.
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Brazil shopping malls: New epicenter for social protest?
A site-specific art intervention intended as a call to action in response to Brazil's water crisis. Strategically planned to coincide with UN World Water Day, Gota D'Agua gathered onlookers around an abandoned Olympic size swimming pool at the foot of Edificio Raposo Lopes, a towering luxury condominium building situated on a steep incline overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
Students from Colombia College teamed up with Greenpeace and The Yes Men to take on the Chicago coal industry in an elaborate, multi-layered hoax. The group created a scheme to announce that a new coal plant was planned—but instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist), this one would be built in a rich one.
“Discovering Columbus,” by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi.
Nishi built a living room around the sculpture in Columbus Circle in New York City. The living room is mounted on scaffolding and turns the sculpture into a domestic center-piece.
AMNA NAWAZ: Since anti-government protests erupted in Iran last year, people around the world have taken to social media to show their support.
That includes an Iranian American ballerina who's tapping into her own heritage and her art, in solidarity with those pushing for more rights.
The "NewsHour"'s Julia Griffin reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
It was once the most feared address in Berlin, a place easy to enter but very hard to leave. Now the ruins of the former engine room of Nazi terror at Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin have been preserved in a new exhibition space open to the public from tomorrow.
This week, I got to make history. At 18 years of age, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of London for my work in climate justice, making me the current youngest holder of the award globally.
A giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.
"This project took aim at a public relations campaign produced by The Union Square Partnership, a local Business Improvement District (BID) attempting to privatize the north end of NYC’s Union Square park and install a high-end celebrity chef restaurant. They hosted historical walking tours of the park for decision-makers, as a means of getting buy-in for their development initiative.
In Cape Town, South Africa the design firms Design Indaba Trust and Thinking have teamed up with artist Faith47 to help raise funds to bring more light to their urban city. Their goal is to raise funds to light up 700 meters of Manwabisi Park, which will ultimately reduce the crime rate in the area through more light. In order to get the community involved in the project, they have combined street art with community engagement.
Members of three organizations – Artists Building Communities, Essential Food and Medicine, and Living Earth Structures – have built a kitchen, clinic, free store, stage, toilet, oven, and shower with and for a homeless community near Wood Street in West Oakland.
A mainland couple allowed their 2-year-old son to relieve himself by the road at Mangkok, Hong Kong and conflicted with local pedestrians who took photos of the child caused quite a stir among Chinese netizens. While the majority of mainland netizens show understanding for the couple, HongKongers think differently.
Artist Luke Jerram created a genderless sleeping figure made of glass lying on a piece of cardboard and exhibited in the streets of London. The artist said in an interview "For every person you see sleeping on the streets, there are many others sleeping in hostels, squats and other forms of unsatisfactory and insecure accommodation.
São Paulo went through a process of privatization of the public spaces. The local government implemented several rules that beneficiated the real state speculation, the city is expensive, and it's not for the poor.
Besides that, in october the elections were a hard game for the progressive party, PT, since two conservative candidates had big shares.
Close to 100 artists and activists staged a protest at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon in response to displacement — both in Brooklyn and Palestine.
Spread over three institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
Some 70 or 80 local activists, politicians and other concerned citizens gathered outside Irvington Village Hall Sunday evening, two days after the release of gut-wrenching video of the murder of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols at the hands of policemen in Memphis.