“The Garment Worker” an interactive installation piece that focuses on the daily life of a garment worker and the hardships she/he encounters working in a sweatshop. The installation in Kang Wei Laundromat simulated the sounds, motions and experiences of a garment factory while providing testimonials and information from immigrant workers on their sweatshop conditions.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
Dismaland was an experimental and interactive art installation that mimicked and mocked similar attractions and characters of the Disney franchise. He later referred to it as a ‘bemusement park.’ Although the bemusement park seemed to disappear as suddenly as it arrived, the exhibition lives on in the collective memory of the British public.
The US prison system is one of the world’s great shames. A quarter of the world’s prisoners are being detained in a country that represents only 5% of the world’s population. It is a system that has been compared to a modern-day version of the Jim Crow laws.
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.
Student loan debt in the US today totals over 1.7 trillion dollars and is collectively borne by more than 44 million Americans, including artist kelli rae adams. With her installation Forever in Your Debt, adams converts this abstract burden into a tangible volume. She has crafted hundreds of wheel-thrown vessels, sized to collectively hold the average individual student debt —$37,000—in the form of coins.
Occupy Wall Street's art offshoot, Occupy Museum, has a new initiative: deconstructing the commercial art fair model. They are calling this art fair antithesis the DebtFair. Last May at the Frieze Art Fair, Occupy Museum distributed flyers and protest literature for an Un-Frieze event.
The California Department of Corrections (CDC) has unveiled a new billboard campaign to defend the domestic spying operations of the National Security Agency (NSA). On July 23, 2013 the CDC successfully apprehended, rehabilitated and discharged a billboard at Bayshore Boulevard near Sunnydale Avenue in San Francisco. The CDC released the corrected ad one day before a U.S.
ParaSITE: Custom built inflatable shelters designed for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. The warm air leaving the building simultaneously inflates and heats the double membrane structure.
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.
In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres lost his partner Ross to AIDS (the artist would face the same fate in 1996). In a tragic and highly personal tribute to Ross, Gonzalez-Torres took a picture of his still-indented empty bed - an image of universal intimacy and loss - and placed it on two dozen commercial billboard spaces throughout New York.
Keith Haring is known to be one of the biggest artists raising awareness for HIV and AIDS, considering he had also passed away from HIV. Starting his career covering ads with spray paint and chalk in subway stations in New York City, his work started trending and he became an activist for this cause.
About 6 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, installation artist Marc Thompson began conceptualizing and constructing an installation that would reflect the absurdities of the divided city. Thompson´s work was part of the Ressource Kunst exhibition.
American artist Bob Partington created a wax sculpture of a Florida panther and her cub to display at a nonprofit zoo in Tampa, Florida this September.
When it debuted, the sculpture looked like nothing special. But as the wax began to melt under the heat of the sun, the bodies of the endangered species started to disintegrate. Within a couple days, the mother panther’s melting body revealed a simple message: “More heat, less wildlife.”
On the 6th February 2013, 40 activists across 6 states plastered 110 ANZ ATMs with 'Out of Order' notices, sharing them on social media the following day. The objective was to use a hoax style action to exploit mainstream media sensitivity around ANZ Bank's unethical funding of fossil fuel projects that had been generated by Jonathan Moylan's Whitehaven Hoax a week earlier.
An artist who sparked significant awareness regarding the issues of climate change was Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson’s main objective has been to catch people’s attention and make them feel emotions and care about climate change because many people do not connect to the effects of climate issues as they do with other controversial impacts solely because the effects are not played out directly in front of them.
order Crossers comprise a series of lightweight robotic sculptures that poetically explore the notion of borders and boundary conditions. The inflatable sculptures rise up to several stories high and extend across a given threshold. Their choreographed performance, originating on both sides of the border, would stage a symbolic connection.
Brick x Brick is a public art performance that builds human “walls” against misogyny. It is organized by the Public Displays of Affection, a collective of artists, designers, educators and organizers that engages in nonviolent direct art action. During the wall performances, participants wear brick-patterned jumpsuits adorned with colorful brick patches bearing statements of misogynistic violence made by US President Donald Trump.
The "Democracy Wall" in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, New York was established in 2009. This wall is a long-term, community art activist project that is part wall mural, part past information archive.
In Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border)", Ana Teresa confronted the fence between the United States and Mexico by putting on her black dress and heels and painting the fence sky blue.
Throughout the weekend, big box stores across the country were stocked with an unexpected item: “The Justice Kavanaugh Boof Kit.” The item, an alcohol enema kit (known as “boofing” or “butt chugging”), appeared on dozens of retailer’s shelves over the weekend in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Some of the stores included Walmart, Target, Bevmo and other major super market chains.
February 24, 2023 will mark one year since the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine began. Russia is attempting to take over Ukrainian territory and destroy its rich, vibrant culture. Ukrainians are fighting for their country and right to exist as free, independent people. For months, Ukrainians have endured relentless bombardment, destruction, and hardship.
An artist in Culiacan, Mexico—which has the highest rate of gun deaths in the country—has found a way to transform the agents of death into seeds of life.
In 2008, artist Pedro Reyes started running television ads urging locals to exchange their guns for food coupons to be redeemed at local stores.
The campaign—Palas Por Pistolas, or “Shovels for Guns"—collected 1,527 guns, which Reyes publicly smashed with a steamroller.