"This project was launched in the wake of the police shooting of 16-year old Brooklyn resident Kimani Gray. Blue NYPD barricades left in piles around the city were spray-painted with the names of people killed by police, then re-deployed in public space."
A major exhibition by Ai Weiwei this autumn features a new series of monumental sculptural works in iron, cast from giant tree roots sourced in Brazil during research and production for last year’s survey exhibition, ‘Raiz’, at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed OCA Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.
Note before the post: This article is great in highlighting a specific case of creative activism in the streets of New York City, but also gives some contextual background to how this project manifested.
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
The Veterans Memorial in New York City, located at 55 Water Street, closes every day at 10pm. However, veterans often find themselves wanting to come to the memorial at all hours of the day and night. The organization Veterans for Peace organizes a sit-in every year on October 7th to protest their limited access to the memorial. That's not the only aim of the action, though.
National Museum of Women In the Arts:
To maintain their anonymity, group members wear gorilla masks in public and adopt the names of historic women artists, such as Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, as pseudonyms.
In order to raise awareness about the global issue of arranged child marriages, 21-year-old YouTube star Coby Persin decided to push the envelope by asking a 12-year-old 'bride' to pose with a 65-year-old 'groom' in the middle of Times Square. Child marriage is not only legal in 91 countries around the world, but even continues to be legal in the United States - with some having a cut off as low as 12 years of age.
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.
Two members of the Yes Lab brought a dozen thrift-store suits to Zuccotti Park and asked for volunteers. Then, within earshot of the police, the group made a human microphone announcement about a "highly risky, very arrestable" action. Then, together with a brand-new police escort, the group headed towards the Wall Street Bull chanting "Castrate the bull!" and other angry slogans. More police joined.
Xu Bing, the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist, has brought his “Phoenix” installation to the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two phoenixes, both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors of the Cathedral, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night.
The initiators collaborated with the Street Vendor Project (SVP) of the Urban Justice Center to campaign against New York City Council Member Jessica Lappin’s 2010 law project. The bill, intended to revoke permits issued to street vendor trucks if they got parking tickets, was so restrictive that it threatened to put most food trucks out of business.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York City temporarily closed off its entrance on Saturday afternoon, November 11, after eight artists and cultural workers took to the institution’s iconic spiral ramp to denounce the Israeli military’s ongoing killing of Palestinian children in Gaza.
On Sunday, September 16th at around 1am, a white van—labelled with “Van Wagner’s” blue logo and topped by a yellow strobe light—circled through permanently lit Times Square. Inside the vehicle, the driver and passenger, both dressed as construction workers, were nervous. They had just vandalized one kiosk a few yards away from an NYPD tower, now they were about to hit another one right underneath the nose of a large white NYPD security camera.
A source of delicious egg creams and daily newspapers since at least the 1930s, an unassuming shop at the corner of St. Marks Place and 2nd Avenue was renamed Gem Spa in 1957 and swiftly transformed into a meeting ground for generations of downtown artists, musicians, poets, and activists.
Huffington Post put together a digital, interactive map of some of the so-called best and brightest street art collections. Street art is important because it allows artists, usually from the community where the street art is taking place, to interact with the community and bring color/brightness to the environment.
On the eve of International Women’s Day and the one-year anniversary of its SPDR®SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF (ticker: SHE), State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), the asset management business of State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) is calling on the more than 3,500 companies that SSGA invests on behalf of clients, representing more than $30 trillion in market capitalization1 to take intentional steps to increase the number of women on their corporate
There were still bloodstains outside the Midwood Mobil gas station on Friday night; a fresh sign taped to a lamppost read “A Hate Crime Happened Here.” This is the place where, less than a week prior, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley, a gay Black dancer and choreographer, made a pit stop with friends after a Jersey beach day.
At the press preview for Sharon Hayes’s new full-floor exhibition “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You” at the Whitney Museum there was a podium and a microphone set up in the center of the gallery that would eventually be used by director Adam Weinberg and curator Chrissie Iles to introduce the artist and her restless work.
On a freezing Friday in January, Khmer-American artist Kat Eng sits in front of retail giant H&M’s Time Square store working on a manual sewing machine. For eight hours, Eng stitches together U.S. dollar bills while wearing a surgical mask and bloodstained shirt. Her performance “</3 Less Than Three” protests the way fast fashion and consumer culture creates oppressive conditions for Khmer workers.
No matter how nuanced current superhero comics may be, to the general public they are still fairly simple. Superheroes are the good guys, supervillians are the bad guys, and it’s easy to see who is who. That’s why kids like to dress up as superheroes on Halloween — and why should they have all the fun?
Last month, a graduate student by the name of Josh Treuhaft set up the Salvage Supperclub in New York City—an establishment where diners pay US$50 to eat a six course meal made from food scraps salvaged from the dumpster.
Chefs from the Natural Gourmet Institute created dishes using overripe fruits and vegetables that would normally be thrown away, calling into question what we perceive as waste.
By Thia Shi Min
Design Taxi
Action as a response to viral video of Attorney Aaron Schlossberg's racist rant against Spanish speaking customers and employees at a midtown restaurant. The "Latin Party" included food, music, and dance celebrating Latina/o culture in the US.
From FB event page:
In 1932, Bennett Cerf, cofounder of Random House Publishing, acquired the rights to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States, believing that the book would be as successful as it had been throughout Europe. But Cerf had a problem. The book was banned in the United States and would be seized as soon as it came off the printing press, which would lose Cerf millions of dollars.