There were still bloodstains outside the Midwood Mobil gas station on Friday night; a fresh sign taped to a lamppost read “A Hate Crime Happened Here.” This is the place where, less than a week prior, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley, a gay Black dancer and choreographer, made a pit stop with friends after a Jersey beach day.
On the opening day of the Spring/Summer 2011's season of Mercedes Benz's New York Fashion Week, former fashion editor, speaker, and fashion activist Michaela Angela Davis led a protest of approximately 20 black women, dressed in black suits, carrying signs with the names of every fashion editor in the 40 year history of African American fashion and lifestyle magazine, Essence Magazine.
Inspired by the Laughing Farmers of Karnataka, protesters in New York make Carlos Slim's visit to New York uncomfortable while he appears on a "Live From NYPL" program. This excellent video summarizes the action.
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.
Join acclaimed director Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred, Fierce Light) on a journey deep inside the revolution of the heart that is erupting around the planet, as he asks the question, “How could the crisis we are facing become a love story?”
I love New York. When I was younger, the city was my playground. You could find me on any given weekend catching brunch with a friend at a café, going to an East Village restaurant for dinner, and then hopping the subway, headed to a nightclub in Chelsea. But at age 25, nine years ago, I was told I had multiple sclerosis, and I saw my freedoms slowly vanish.
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.
After the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, misogynistic sentiments were amplified due to Trump's policy positions and rhetoric. One position Trump made clear was against Planned Parenthood, which largely threatened women's reproductive rights and access to healthcare.
Come across a poster like the two above on your commute recently? Laid out in classic MTA style, but adorned with Orwellian imagery and an appropriately ambiguous hashtag, they warn of two possible hazards to your health: an upcoming “airborne non-toxic test” in which the NYPD will disperse “harmless, colorless gas” around the five boroughs, and an at-risk nuclear reactor that’s just 28 miles from NYC.
"Brooke Shields is one of 200 famous faces that the artist Jonathan Horowitz identifies as vegetarian in head shots he has hung on the white-tile walls of a former meat locker in the south Village. Horowitz, 44, swore off meat at the age of 12, after his parents took him to a bullfight on a vacation in Mexico.
It’s the radiant baby, the barking dog and the dancing man; the badges and the t-shirts; the unmissable mural spelling out CRACK IS WACK. Keith Haring’s career was short but spectacular, and he leaves behind a lasting legacy. From his chalk drawings in city-wide subway stations, to his collaborations with the superstars of his day, Haring’s life was founded on a belief in the power of people to change the world.
For third world artists who are forced into exile, the creativity process could be greatly challenged due to displacement in language, community and history. Many filmmakers in exile tend to look at their connection to the homeland in strictly political terms, or give up making films overall.
The Pilobolus Dance company, famous for their beautiful aesthetics of shadow play formed out of the dancer's bodies, started the #PilobolusVOTEproject, encouraging people to form the words VOTE with whatever material they had around them, take a picture of it and to upload it on instagram with the hashtag #PilobolusVOTEproject.
The Hungarian artist, undercover as an oligarch, infiltrated Manhattan’s ultra-luxury high-rises with her fake husband, Zoltan, for a book of intentionally unartful photos.
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.
Rage Against the Machine have always been rabble rousers, but the political statement that got them banned from Saturday Night Live sounds positively prosaic compared to other acts of protest they committed in their heyday, like shutting down the New York Stock Exchange or sporting a "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" shirt on live television.
David Opdyke’s wry, panoramic visions of an America perceptibly in the grips of climate crisis were born of an artistic crisis—of “needing to come up an idea by digging somewhere other than my own brain.” Having drawn on his imagination to conjure up the trenchant, ecologically-inflected critiques of American imperialism and late-stage capitalism that have defined his work for twenty years, he wondered what more he might, artistically speaking, say.
Wafaa Bilal’s brother, Haji, was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who have lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.
As the death toll from Israel’s attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip continues to rise, a guerrilla projection on May 13, 2021 illuminated a building in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood with messages of solidarity with Palestinians.
For one day, a group of artists known as the INDECLINE Artist Collective turned a hotel room in New York City's Trump International Hotel into a single jail cell for Donald Trump without the hotel's knowledge. The inside the jail cell was a Donald Trump impersonator in a suit and a "Make America Great Again" hat and at his feet were McDonald's food wrappers and live rats.
The ad agency Badger & Winters in collaboration with immigrant rights nonprofit organization Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) installed 20 cages with mannequins representing immigrant children inside across New York City. Each cage had a sign that said #NoKidsInCages and played audio of a child crying.
Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS
“awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and
there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the
streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for
death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for
A source of delicious egg creams and daily newspapers since at least the 1930s, an unassuming shop at the corner of St. Marks Place and 2nd Avenue was renamed Gem Spa in 1957 and swiftly transformed into a meeting ground for generations of downtown artists, musicians, poets, and activists.