Frank Waln, a 25 year old Native American hip hop artist, tours the country and Canada performing and teaching motivational workshops to students across the country. He took to rap at a young age when he found a cd (Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP) on the side of the road. Growing up on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, he realized that the hip hop music genre was an outlet for expressing pain and frustration.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
A group of Chicago youth staged a “die-in’ at City Hall to demand that the city defund police and fund marginalized communities instead. The youth, all members of #NoCopAcademy, also announced that the organization is suing Mayor Rahm Emanuel for withholding critical emails regarding construction of the proposed $95 million building for a Police and Fire training center in West Garfield Park.
The Harlem Festival of Culture not only pays homage to the past but also envisions a brighter future. It serves as a platform to showcase the rich diversity and dynamism of Harlem's artistic community, while also acting as a catalyst for social change and community empowerment. The festival boasts a lineup of artists from various genres and backgrounds, including jazz, soul, hip-hop, gospel, blues, rock, Latin, and Afrobeat.
"The massive "Above and Beyond Memorial" will be installed at the National Veterans Art Museum, The Harold Washington Library, and go on display starting Feb. 20, culminating a painstaking search to find a suitable — although temporary — home for the 58,000 replica dog tags honoring those who died as a result of their service in the war that stretched from March 1965 to May 1975.
Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was born into the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico, and when his family moved to Chicago in 1967, he became interested in activism. After leaving high school early, he worked in various industries and began to use art as part of his activism work.
Beyoncé delivered an intensely, unapologetic celebration of Black and HBCU culture at the Coachella Festival 2 weekends in a row. Not only were her performances some of the best live performances to date but they sent a pretty significant message to the world.
Here are some assessments of this beautiful demonstration of Blackness and Black Girl Magic:
From BBC News:
The Repellent Fence is a social collaborative project among individuals, communities, institutional organizations, publics, and sovereigns that culminate with the establishment of a large-scale temporary monument located near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. This 2 mile long ephemeral land-art installation is comprised of 26 tethered balloons, that are each 10 feet in diameter, and float 100 feet above the desert landscape.
The Bed-Stuy “aquarium” is back.
The neighborhood’s beloved sidewalk fish pond was resurrected this week — in an act of defiance that comes just five days after the city cemented over the original and left the neighborhood’s goldfish to die.
To call attention to bullying, the Singapore Coalition Against Bullying for Children and Youth has released a video that gets shorter each time it is viewed.
Hosted on a site called Share It To The End, the short animated video depicts a boy getting bullied at school and telling us he always feels alone and doesn’t feel safe anywhere.
Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah is a photographic series exploring the complex identities of Muslim women in post-revolutionary Iran. Combining black-and-white portraits, Persian calligraphy, and symbolic elements such as guns and veils, Neshat interrogates themes of martyrdom, violence, femininity, and resistance.
ARTS/CULTURE
FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
"Thai artists and art students are on the frontline of their country’s swelling pro-democracy movement, calling for reforms of Thailand’s military-backed government, and breaking both taboo and national law to criticise the nation’s monarchy.
A trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, offering the latest illustration that some seemingly organic demonstrations are being engineered by a network of conservative activists.
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.
Oakland Wiki (oaklandwiki.org) is a free website about Oakland that anyone can edit. It's a wiki that can house any kind of information about Oakland, from historic figures to native plants to City Council meeting notes to your favorite leafy walk.
On March 21, just days after eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in the Atlanta-area shootings, thousands gathered at Columbus Park in Manhattan for a rally against anti-Asian violence. Activists took turns addressing the surge in hate crimes and hate incidents toward the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, when an 8-year-old stepped onto the stage. “Stop the hatred!” Chance yelled into the mic.
NAME OF PROJECT: ‘CHILDREN SHOULD BE SEEN AND HEARD’
TEAM MEMBERS: Caroline, Yasir, Sile, Audrey & Mary
GLOBAL CHALLENGE: To give children a voice and create empathy
among adults for children
♯childrenshouldbeseenandheard
Play Safe is a documentary film series created and directed by NYU alum Eddie Einbinder. The film, much of which now appears for free on YouTube, was originally released in 2013 after being filmed between 2011 and 2012. It debuted at the International Harm Reduction conference in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2013.
The project provides somatic rituals to solve the problems of creative makers, offering specific somatic instructions for how to deal with breaks in (or lack of) creativity. Rituals available as a live, interactive performance and as limited-edition chapbooks, and broaden an understanding of creative “results,” “ends and means,” and the idea of a muse/magic as relates to creative labour.
The community is invited to join with local climate activists in the “Earth Day Sing Out” from noon to 1 p.m. and 5 to 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 22, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
The event is designed to call for an economic stimulus to help prevent future climate crisis.
"a dinner cooked by six indigenous chefs, members of tribes from around North America, who are meeting together for the first time this week to launch a new indigenous activist group, called the I-Collective. Thursday’s dinner will be at Dimes, on Canal Street, and it will follow a dinner tonight for New York City’s local Native American community at the American Indian Community House, on Eldridge Street.
For Auli'i Cravalho, actions speak louder than words.
On Thursday night, the Moana voice actress stepped out for the premiere of Prime Video show The Power. There, the 22-year-old decided to raise awareness on missing indigenous women and girls by wearing a red lipstick-made handprint across her mouth and face.
Abandoned buildings have become such a common sight that they often slip quietly into the backdrop of our cities like an accepted part of our landscape. Looking for Love Again is a participatory public installation that renews attention to an abandoned high-rise in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska to celebrate its past and future.
Prison inmates in Mexico have suffered from coronavirus infections at a higher rate than the country as a whole, and pandemic lockdowns have reduced their already limited contact with the outside world.
But one group of women inmates at a prison west of Mexico City have managed to benefit, as the lockdown spurred a wave of professionals with time on their hands to donate online classes.