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.
Since Christmas Eve, some lights along the streets and in the houses of Bushwick have spelled out a number of messages quite different from the festive wishes one usually finds during the holiday season. “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM,” “NOT 4 SALE,” and “NO EVICTION ZONE,” some read.
The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history.
Thrive Collective mobilizes students, parents, artists, and community stakeholders to partner with public schools for transformational change. They function both as a matchmaker and direct service provider of arts and mentoring programs that cultivate the character and competencies necessary for students to thrive in today’s world.
You enter a narrow corridor where backlit Plexiglas panels offer three compelling narratives about whiteness and blindness: Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and hard labor in Robben Island’s limestone quarry under a blinding sun; Bill Gates’ purchase of the Bettmann and United Press International archives, consisting of 17 million images, and their subsequent burial deep underground in a limestone vault for the sake of preservation, after Gates’s company C
On June 17, 2013, Russell Brand (a stand-up comedian and actor) visited MSNBC’s
'Morning Joe' news show to promote his international stand-up tour, 'The Messiah Complex', but he also managed to mock the 'Morning Joe' news anchors, as well as the mainstream media. Clips of this particular interview immediately went viral on YouTube, and one of the videos is linked to this page (see the first link below).
"The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) is a small, informal group of people who are unconditionally opposed to the installation and use of video surveillance cameras in public places.
Heroin sold in the northeast, specifically in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey tends to come in little glassine baggies. The art comes from the individual and unique "stamp" on said baggie sold to a user.
Julia Bluhm told The Huffington Post: “I’ve always just known how Photoshop can have a big effect on girls and their body image and how they feel about themselves”. So on May 2, 2012, 14-year-old Bluhm lead an anti-Photoshop protest in front of the Hearst Tower, which is home to Seventeen Magazine. Other protesters included her mother and members of the SPARK movement (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge).
Bernie Sanders supporters know how to bring the party! And they did it big time for the Democratic Debate in New York this week, with help from The Illuminator & the NYC Light Brigade. They installed an interactive video game featuring Bernie jumping over obstacles and WINNING!
Sam Durant is an LA based artist who engages in social, cultural and political issues through his interactive public sculptures. Durant is interested in investigating historical narratives and their contemporary communities. From 2005-2010 Durant was part of the collective Transforma Projects, a grassroots cultural rebuilding initiative in New Orleans. One of his most recent interactive public sculptures Scaffold is on view at the Hague.
Sporcle is a website deisgned with an endless array of trivia games that aim to boost your knowledge and perhaps increase your useless information understandings. These games, designed rather simply in most cases, were actually very useful in getting me to learn things like maps, countries, cities, populations, and beyond.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
Students at the NYC iSchool, a high school in Manhattan, worked for 9 weeks to create works of activist art with art teacher Gretel Smith. We were lucky enough to have Stephen Duncomb and Steve Lambert from the Center for Artistic Activism come to our class to teach a lesson inspiring students to think like activists; they came back later to critique students’ works-in-progress.
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
Desi is giving all she has to the project Women In the Making (WIM). From rooftop farming and summer education, to her radio show and online presence. She is an advocate for better health, food, and policy in Brooklyn, and nurturing young activists.
There are few artists more innocuous, more neutered, more universally loved and reviled than Thomas Kinkade. His soft-focus images present an idyllic vision of America and of Christianity, like Norman Rockwell without the blue-collar populism, where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, and there’s always a warm fire going in the Lincoln-Log cabin just down the trail.
IMAPCT are youth activists who view the creative arts and leadership training as a way to develop ourselves and change the world in a positive way. They believe that they must be the message that bring through hardwork, focus, discipline, unity and the principles of S.O.S. safe space, outstanding effort and service to their family friends and community.
Street harassment is one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against. Comments from “You’d look good on me” to groping, flashing and assault are a daily, global reality for women and LGBTQ individuals. But it is rarely reported, and it’s culturally accepted as ‘the price you pay’ for being a woman or for being gay.
“The Grace Period” is a live blogging platform with seven anonymous contributing bloggers called: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Through, videos, writings, and visuals they present multiple perspectives of landing/creating a meaningful job after school in a country where personal and national debt is high and jobs are few. In this environment, will our creative spirits be resilient?
New York City Food Not Bombs
Food Not Bombs--NYC is now working out of a kitchen provided by the Catholic Worker: 36 East First Street, between First and Second Avenues.
Every Sunday they start cooking around 1:00pm and are in Tompkins Square Park to serve around 3:30pm.
The Declaration of Sentiments, also known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, is a document signed in 1848 at the first women's rights convention to be organized by women. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, the convention is now known as the Seneca Falls Convention. The principal author of the Declaration was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who modeled it upon the United States Declaration of Independence.
"This Ain't a Eulogy" is both a staged performance and a durational, outdoor, public performance that reclaims and takes public space. The artist statement is as follows:
The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space. In New York City, enforcement is heavily skewed to ignore illegal commercial advertising, while simultaneously aggressively targeting graffiti and, in some cases, symbols of dissent.