Glowing softly in the West Texas desert night, artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, was once an ordinary school bus but is now a richly decorated, mobile site for remembrance and healing. Like much of the artist’s work, this piece commemorates and confronts the artist’s journey to the United States as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor fleeing civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s.
Alokananda Roy walked into Calcutta's Presidency Jail on International Women's Day, 2007. The Indian classical dancer had been invited to watch female inmates perform, but it was the men who caught her eye.
"They shook me," she says. "Their body language — it was as though they had no future, nothing to look forward to."
As local rapper Naty says, a group of young people are intent on making their mark in Madagascar's cultural history. From gifted slam poet Caylah to inventive visual artist Temandrota and a crew of entrepreneurial skateboarders, a generation of young Madagascans are making space for creative projects.They are inspiring in their enthusiasm and hopeful for the future despite the poverty in their country and its colonial past.
Cheril Linett is a female artist from Chile, with a background in performance art and stage performance, who primarily focuses her artwork on feminist issues in Chile, especially ones involving violence, murder, hate crime and different kinds of oppression and assault, but also creates artwork reflecting issues in other parts of Latin America.
When Jonathan D. Chang visits the 626, he often wears a black hoodie emblazoned with a colorful print of Guangong on the back. A military general from the Three Kingdoms era turned Taoist guardian deity, Guangong, or Guan Yu, is known throughout China and parts of Vietnam as a symbol of wealth and protection. Chang’s hoodie features his own design of the deity, which he drew in classic chibi fashion with a big head and smaller limbs.
About a year ago my girlfriend moved to Japan to teach English in Tokyo for two years. (Don’t worry, this isn’t a sob story.) Having spent the greater part of our relationship physically separated, thought it was a challenge we felt prepared for. Like any other self-respecting relationship, we constantly exchange obtuse pop culture references and niche anime memes thanks to text and wifi.
The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra is planning to immerse a British flag in blood donated by indigenous peoples from countries colonised by the British Empire.
The resulting artwork, titled Union Flag, is intended to be an “acknowledgement of the pain and destruction colonialism has caused First Nations peoples, devastating entire cultures and civilisations,” the artist said in a statement.
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.
Se sacuden la desconfianza y entran al camión. En él no hay frutas, ni verduras, ni carnes. El piso, igual que el techo y las paredes están inmaculadas y pintadas de blanco. Solo ellos y algunos compañeros inmortalizados en fotos llenan el espacio.
First cut the banks! In 2012 Bankia declared itself bankrupt and, almost immediately, asked the Government of Spain for €23 billion. The Government accepted, yet that very same week ordered €20,000 million worth of cuts in health and education. It was then that we realized that what they called a crisis was actually a scam. You wouldn’t believe how pissed off we were. So we threw a party, because there is nothing like partying to relieve your anger.
In Tunisia, a country gripped by economic uncertainty and still in the midst of rebuilding its identity after the Arab Spring, hip-hop culture is viewed as part of an ongoing dissident movement. Just a few events, such as the recent Mafia Wallitili Festival in the heart of downtown Tunis, offer the local hip-hop community an opportunity to share their values with the broader population.
The artist I chose to focus on personally is the photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero. I used photos from her photography essay España Oculta, in which Rodero traveled to small villages in Spain to document the resident’s lives. Our group's main focus is on gender issues, and I personally wanted to focus on activism involving women and representation. Rodero uses photos of rituals and activities among those outside of the majority population.
As the New Museum’s 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence, Camilo Godoy will create a performance exploring movement, breathing, and mourning practices. The title of his residency is borrowed from an embroidered work made by the queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión in 1995, the year before he died of AIDS-related complications.
At a gallery within a shopping complex in the South Korean capital, a couple saw paint cans and brushes at their reach and use next to what was actually a finished portrait worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thinking the available paint and brushes was a signal to be a part of the art, they ended up technically vandalizing the artists' work.
I've decided to post about a recent experience, considerable an "action" in its nature, and how it felt, which was comparable to solicitation rather than activism. However, there was a sense for consciousness-raising regardless of any tangible outcome.
When dancer Sheen Jamaal saw a video of protestors doing the Cupid Shuffle in New Jersey, inspiration struck to do something similar in New York. He immediately called his friend and collaborator Allison “Buttons” Bedell, and the seed for the Dance For George protest was planted.
The veteran Malian master puppeteer Yaya Coulibali, born in 1959 in the village of Koula, around 100 kilometres north-east of Bamako, has more than half a century of experience in puppetry and has toured the world to perform his art.
Daniel Arzola, a digital artist and activist originally from Maracay, Venezuela, began his series, 'No Soy Tu Chiste' ('I Am Not A Joke') in 2013 intent on combating the stereotypes and cruelty so often facing LGBT identifiers; youth in particular. The project went viral in 2014, around the same time it teamed up with the It Gets Better Project based in the United States.
Room13Delmar is a tricycle-based mobile studio conceived as a sculpture: a cross between a vending tricycle and a ‘Mary Poppins’ bag that unfolds to create a space for creativity on the sidewalk, at a senior center and at a veterans medical center, north of Delmar in the city of St. Louis, Missouri.
Spread over three institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
Say hello to ArtActivistBarbie (AAB), whose modus operandi is small signs, big questions and a fabulous wardrobe. With her inviting call to arms, “Refuse to be the muse!” this fierce new incarnation of Barbie is helping to challenge art galleries and museums worldwide about their woeful lack of women and other minorities in their collections, and reluctance to consider the female gaze.
American Born Chinese is a graphic novel published in 2006 by the American author and illustrator Gene Luen Yang. Through three interweaving stories that span from the 16th century to the present, the novel explores issues of Chinese American identity, anti-Asian racism, and assimilation. American Born Chinese is the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award.
Google entered the art game in 2011 with the introduction of its Art Project, working with 17 museums and expanding further to over 150 institutions in 2012. Last June, Google added 5,000 images of street art from around the world to the project and today it has announced that it will be doubling that number to 10,000 with the launch of the second edition of its Street Art Project.
In March of 2022, JR, with the help of 100 volunteers, unfurled the portrait of five-year-old, Ukrainian refugee Valeriia in Lviv, Ukraine. Leaving Ukraine, JR saw firsthand how difficult it was for women and children to get to safety due to long queues at the border. In response, he released two NFTs of Valeriia as part of his solidarity project titled: Can Art Change the War?