El Sistema, also known as The National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestra and Choir, was established in Venezuela in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan educator, musician and activist. The music education program operates within the voluntary sector and is funded publicly.
You could hear their chants from the White House.
On June 6, hundreds of activists and protesters gathered on Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block section on 16th Street in Washington D.C. that was renamed amid BLM protests.
Chanel Miller is a Palo Alto–born artist and writer. She first came into the public eye as “Emily Doe,” the victim of a 2015 Stanford University sexual assault whose impact statement presented in court went viral. Miller relinquished her anonymity in 2019, when she published the acclaimed memoir, “Know My Name.” "I was, I am, I will be" is Miller’s first commissioned artwork for a museum and is on view through February 2022.
In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance.
In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.”
Collective Creativity in the Beginning
Project Row Houses (PRH) is, and has always been, a unique experiment in activating the intersections between art, cultural and historic preservation, affordable and innovative housing, community engagement and development, neighborhood revitalization, and human empowerment.
Urban Landscape as Canvas
The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time human rights activist, author and lecturer Cleve Jones. Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS.
When mothers take to the streets — particularly those from privileged groups — governments take note. The “wall of moms” in Portland has taken up the cause against police violence.
For the completion of her residency as the NYU Steinhardt 2023-24 Scholar-in-Residence, Dominique Jackson collaborated with NYU students to honor the fem queen (trans women) and their historical meaning to not only ballroom but popular culture at large.
At first, you don’t know what you’re looking at. A gray expanse of uneven geometry surrounded by undulating brown. Shift your perspective a bit and it might be a close-up of a distressed textile, with subtle hues and textures surfacing as your eyes adjust.
And then the horizon comes into focus. Now you know where you are. In the distance are the classic jutting buttes of Monument Valley, familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a John Ford Western.
Through the use of mythical and archetypal iconography, Bourgeois translated her encounters into a very individualized symbolic imagery, employing things such as swirls, arachnids, cages, surgical equipment, and sewed appendages to represent the feminine mind, beauty, and mental agony.
The Hong Kong 1 July protests are a surprising sight on the often chaotic stress. This day marks the transfer of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China (PRC) and is a public holiday it was originally thought to be a day of celebration. However, now it is mostly known for hundreds of thousands of people flooding the streets who protest for democracy, universal suffrage, and other political concerns.
In the summer of 2011, squatters take over an unused building, once an animal shelter, and begin renovating it into a social and cultural center for a neighborhood on the outskirts of Amsterdam. They call it Op de Valreep ("in the nick of time").
Brisbane, Australia — The flash mob descended on Brisbane’s city square, wearing double denim and blond wigs in the style of a legendary Australian singer as they danced with wild abandon to one of his 1980s hits.
Over the winter break, I was actually able to see the recently re-decorated Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. After the height of the Black Lives Matter Protests over the past summer, it couldn’t be torn down, but it was fully wrapped with protest art. All phrases and slogans (such as Black Trans Lives Matter, ACAB, Etc.) were in full display over the statue of the infamous Confederate General.
Zanele Muholi, the self-proclaimed visual activist and photographer, investigates the fraught relationship between post-apartheid South Africa and its queer community, who, despite being constitutionally protected since 1996, remain a constant target of abuse and discrimination.
In 1900, Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race, and conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites, and buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership.
Street artist, graphic designer, and activist Shepard Fairey created this visionary portrait of then Senator Barack Obama in 2008 as a form of grassroots activism to support Obama’s first presidential campaign. Fairey based the work on an Associated Press photograph by Mannie Garcia, which he transformed with his signature high-contrast stencil technique, inspired by the political message and bold graphics of Soviet Socialist Realism.