Main Gallery

Artist Rufina Bazlova uses embroidery as a form of ‘gentle protest’
Practitioner:
Rufina Bazlova
Date:
Jan 1 2020
Rufina Bazlova is not afraid to surrender her art to activism. Born in Belarus, a former Soviet republic ruled by the authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko for 29 years now, Bazlova knows all too well that being apolitical is a privilege many Eastern Europeans cannot afford. 2020 was a pivotal year for Belarus, not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the presidential elections, which declared Lukashenko president for the sixth time.
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MyPolarIce
Practitioner:
Artists
Date:
Apr 22 2012
MyPolarIce sells small pieces of polar ice at a popup store in Museum Square Amsterdam.
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4
THE GIVERNY SUITE
Practitioner:
Ja'Tovia Gary
Date:
Sep 1 2023
Filmed in Harlem, New York, and in Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny, France, THE GIVERNY SUITE is a cinematic poem that advocates for the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Employing techniques including hand-painted film animation and montage editing, Gary first developed the work during an artist residency in Giverny, where the gardens offered a space of respite.
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Cob Houses, Kitchens, Showers for Homeless People
Practitioner:
Artists Building Communities, Essential Food and Medicine, and Living Earth Structures
Date:
May 1 2021
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.
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NannyVan
Practitioner:
REV and Marisa Jahn
Date:
Jan 1 2013
Reversing decades of discrimination set into place when New Deal labor laws intentionally excluded domestic workers, New York State in 2010 passed the very first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Hawaii and California followed soon after with other states soon to follow.
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Music video in support of gay marriage rights
Practitioner:
Sam Smith
Date:
Feb 5 2015
Grammy nominee and Rolling Stone cover star Sam Smith unveiled the video for his new single "Lay Me Down," the latest track off his platinum-selling debut album In the Lonely Hour. The video, filmed at the parish church of St.
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3
TIME
Practitioner:
Garrett Bradley
Date:
Oct 16 2020
" Rich is a fighter. The entrepreneur, abolitionist and mother of six boys has spent the last two decades campaigning for the release of her husband, Rob G. Rich, who is serving a 60-year sentence for a robbery they both committed in the early 90s in a moment of desperation.
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Young Latinas are using their quinceañeras to get Texas voters to the polls this election
Practitioner:
Ride to the Polls
Date:
Oct 29 2022
A group of young Latinas donned their quince gowns on Oct. 29 and led their families and friends along the streets of San Antonio, urging them to harness their electoral voice and vote in the upcoming midterm elections. The event was part of Ride to the Polls, a national campaign from the nonprofit organization Harness that aims to encourage young BIPOC voter turnout through cultural milestone celebrations.
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Trump's old Iowa campaign bus turned into satirical art – stripper pole and all
Practitioner:
Mary Mihelic and David Gleeson
Date:
Jan 31 2016
The campaign bus was attracting funny looks. On its side was the by now all-too-familiar last name of the Republican presidential frontrunner. Somewhere inside the castle-shaped hotel next door, Donald Trump was holding court, as hundreds awaited another rally of bombast and branding.
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6
Pop Art as Social Commentary
Practitioner:
Kadarick
Date:
Mar 1 2018
A Côte d'Ivoire-based artist, known as Kadarick, draws on the fantastical powers of The Hulk, Spiderman and Wonder Woman to articulate today's fears. In a new pop-art series of 23 paintings titled Joker, the self-taught painter explores pop culture, politics, mass media and capitalism. The series was recently on display at the LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan.
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6
Reverse Graffiti
Practitioner:
Paul 'Moose' Curtis
Date:
Nov 29 2008
Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime.
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6
Artist Wages Drone War on Thomas Kinkade
Practitioner:
FredaTheArt
Date:
Jul 15 2013
There are few artists more innocuous, more neutered, more universally loved and reviled than Thomas Kinkade. His soft-focus images present an idyllic vision of America and of Christianity, like Norman Rockwell without the blue-collar populism, where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, and there’s always a warm fire going in the Lincoln-Log cabin just down the trail.
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Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia?
Practitioner:
Cao Fei
Date:
Sep 1 2005
Whose Utopia? is a color film which is 19 minutes 58 seconds long. It was originally commissioned by the Siemens Arts Program back in 2005. The projector-style video is based on the work and social lives of assembly line workers at OSRAM’s light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. This area has received huge numbers of immigrants from inland provinces seeking work and better lives in the wake of Beijing’s booming economy.
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Carnival
Practitioner:
Brazilian Culture
Date:
Feb 5 2016
"A week-long party characterizes Brazil’s Carnival, the Mardi Gras of the southern hemisphere. Celebrations and parades are held throughout the country, most notably in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Carnival celebrations vary in length and content, depending on the area.
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‘Stand by Her’: a compaign fight period poverty in China
Practitioner:
Students and Teachers
Date:
Jan 1 2024
HONG KONG — It started when a single box of free sanitary pads appeared in a middle school classroom in October. Then a plastic container with pads was attached to the walls of four bathrooms in a university in Shanghai. By Monday, boxes and bags of individually wrapped pads had popped up outside bathrooms in at least 338 schools and colleges across China. Each carried a version of the same instructions: “Take one, then put one back later.
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4
Activists and Residents Light Up Bushwick with Anti-Gentrification Signs
Practitioner:
NYC Light Brigade
Date:
Dec 31 2015
Since Christmas Eve, some lights along the streets and in the houses of Bushwick have spelled out a number of messages quite different from the festive wishes one usually finds during the holiday season. “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM,” “NOT 4 SALE,” and “NO EVICTION ZONE,” some read.
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2
The Climate Clock
Practitioner:
Andrew Boyd & Gan Golan
Date:
Sep 15 2020
For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.
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3
IT IS GUNS
Practitioner:
Jenny Holzer
Date:
Mar 1 2018
In response to shootings across the United States, and in sympathy with students’ demands for more gun control, artist Jenny Holzer wrote text that animates issues of the firearms industry and gun violence. Her hyperactive black-and-white writing flashed on mobile LED screens, with text popping in quick succession like free-association poetry, and sometimes in the awful rapid-fire of semi-automatic weapons.
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How Jean-Michel Basquiat's Art Challenges Status Quo
Practitioner:
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Date:
Jan 1 1983
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to fame in the 1980s. He is known for his graffiti-inspired paintings that often engage with issues surrounding racism and inequality. Basquiat's work challenged the status quo and incited a powerful social commentary on the struggles of marginalised social groups.
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Manifest Justice
Practitioner:
Manifest Justice
Date:
May 10 2015
Last August, as protesters marched in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed teen shot by a police officer, another group of activists began thinking about how to incorporate the creative community into the movement. The result is Manifest:Justice, a free pop-up art show taking place in Los Angeles.
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