In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
Vem Pra Rua is a nonpartisan, democratic, and pluralist movement that emerged in response to society’s fight for a better Brazil. Brazilians of all regions, social classes, and ages began mobilizing at the end of 2014—building on the 2013 marches that protested corruption, inequality, and other socio-economic and political problems.
Last November, when you Googled the phrase “ugly Black woman,” Vanessa Rochelle Lewis’s photograph was the second to come up.
“Which I’m offended by,” says Lewis, a Bay Area–based artist and writer, “since I’m an Aries and I like to be number one in everything.”
‘I’m an Egyptian, Muslim drag queen who aims to raise issues about Middle Eastern / LBGTQ issues within the Arab world and Muslim community. For too long it was drilled in my head that I was wrong, that I was going to Hell, and that’s simply not fair. No one speaks about the harsh mistreatment we go through as gay people in the Arab world. The internal torture and shame is more than enough.
Last month, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, dozens of women gathered outside the supreme court building in Santiago, Chile—a country now beset by popular uprisings against inequality—for a feminist flash mob.
On October 6th, 2007, we beat a new world record. Thousands of people in cities all across Spain simultaneously shouted: “You won’t own a house IN YOUR WHOLE FUCKING LIFE!” The decibels radiating from this collective cry were registered by an interactive meter, baptized “The Fuck-o-meter” for the occasion.
From 1993 to 1998, Spanish activist group Lesbianas Se Difunden (LSD) produced and published a collection of texts and visuals called Non-Grata (Snyder 10), using erotic images of the female body and sexual relationships to capture their audiences’ attention. Within these graphic publications would be calls for queer activism, female freedom, anti-capitalist critiques, and the overall necessity for protest (Snyder 10).
How a Dating App Helped a Generation of Chinese Come Out of the Closet
Blued, one of the biggest gay dating apps in the world, has succeeded because it plays by the ever-shifting rules for L.G.B.T.Q. China — bringing together a minority community without activism.
By Yi-Ling Liu
March 5, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
On the eve of Wells Fargo’s annual shareholders meeting in San Antonio, TX on Tuesday, home defenders, students, community groups, and activists in ten cities took peaceful action against the bank. Petitions signed by thousands of people were delivered to Wells Fargo branches and offices across the country calling on CEO John Stumpf to change the bank’s predatory practices.
User @ArmoredSuperHeavy on Twitter recently posted a master document detailing their explorations into bookbinding, fanfiction preservation, and the online gift economy. Their bookbinding venture, named Dead Dove Publishing, is a project that seeks to preserve and legitimize fanworks and celebrate the fandom gift economy. The document explains their actions and the work they have done since they began two years ago.
The internet has reshaped the ways we learn and communicate. Information becomes heuristic, concomitantly - knowledge becomes protean. If you dedicate enough time to any particular platform, you are likely to acquire a community with congenial individuals. Social media’s proliferation has obfuscated the lines between reality and fiction. Embraced as a tool for many, these digital spaces typically have no monitoring process.
The beacon flashed incessantly. On. Off. On again.
Like some sort of traffic light gone crazy, it pierced the thick nighttime mist hovering over San Francisco Bay. The light sent a message five miles across the dark waters from Ghirardelli Square to Alcatraz Island. There, cheers erupted as the light flashed the words, "Go Indians!"
From this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27632527
A campaign by one of Brazil's biggest football clubs to encourage fans to become organ donors has led to a massive rise in the number of life-changing transplants and reduced waiting lists for organs in the area almost to zero.
Four prominent Australian artists – Aretha Brown, Claire Martin, Kaff-eine and Jane Gillings – will gather in Canberra this Sunday, to discuss their art, activism and ideas, marking the closing weekend of Kambri’s HERE I AM festival.
The Art Activism by Great Women Conference is a day-long event, involving artist talks, Q&A sessions, panel discussions, afternoon tea, wine tasting and networking.
In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.
"Beginning in 1910, the Mexican Revolution spawned a cultural renaissance, inspiring artists to look inward in search of a specifically Mexican artistic language. This visual vocabulary was designed to transcend the realm of the arts and give a national identity to this population undergoing transition.
In 1987 with AIDS deaths in the thousands and government policy still criminally indifferent, activists formed ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) with the purpose of turning grief and fear into rage and action.
For the past few years around election time in Serbia, people have taken to the streets to protest government corruption, attacks on free press and voter suppression. This Spring, despite a nationwide lock-down to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, activists are finding new ways to protest the country’s increasingly-repressive government.
In 2020, GLITS raised over one million dollars in less than a month through a grassroots organizing campaign with a clear objective, a call to action, and an open source toolkit. The objective was to raise one million dollars to purchase a building that would permanently house and provide services for transgender peoples of color in New York City. They created a toolkit with coordinated and captivating imagery and made it available to everyone.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser renamed a street in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had the slogan painted on the asphalt in massive yellow letters, a pointed salvo in her escalating dispute with President Trump over control of D.C. streets.
At ‘Arcadia Earth,’ Dazzle Illuminates Danger
Using augmented reality, virtual reality and installations of light and art, the creators of this pop-up exhibition hope to inspire action on climate change.
By Laurel Graeber
Oct. 23, 2019
The creators of “Arcadia Earth” want to awaken your conscience. But they also plan to make that guilt trip extraordinarily fun.
from "Laugh, O Revolution: Humor in the Egyptian Uprising" by Anna Louie Sussman, in 2011.
Revolutions can be messy. They can be tragic. As long as the Internet is working, they can be tweeted. And, as Egyptians demonstrated during their 18 days of protest, they can also be funny.
Immersing in the art is what they are known for. As they slowly reopen, so is their annual public art and performance festival. Their mission statement says:“AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.” The title of NORMAL is to push the boundary of what is.
The large crowds and brightly coloured placards of the school climate strikes became some of the defining images of 2019.
“There would be lots of chanting and the energy was always amazing,” says Dominique Palmer, a 20-year-old climate activist from London who has been involved with the strikes for more than a year. “Being there with everyone in that moment is truly an electrifying feeling. It’s very different now.”