Eight years after his death, the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition provides high school students from around the country an opportunity to carry on the African-American playwright’s legacy. That legacy includes Pulitzer Prizes for “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” two installments of Wilson’s 10-play series set in his hometown of Pittsburgh that examined 20th-century black life through the personal and political struggles of everyday people.
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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 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.
"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:
Call it art, exhibited as an installation piece in the October 2014 show "Crossing Brooklyn," a collaboration of more than 100 artworks by 35 artists (or groups) who live or work in Brooklyn, presented at the Brooklyn Museum... or call it "A survey of Art from Brooklyn" as hyperallergic journalist Jillian Steinhauer wrote... it exists on the streets as a social practice, albeit using creative means for community-building.
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.
The Brooklyn Paper
March 26, 2012
BY ELI ROSENBERG
Occupy Wall Street wants to occupy your wall space.
A collective of poster printers in Gowanus is attempting to help reignite the social movement’s flames for a May 1 “General Strike,” with a handful of new pin-ups it hopes will be as arresting as the image of a ballerina atop a bull that kicked off the whole protest in September.
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "Democracy Wall" in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, New York was established in 2009. This wall is a long-term, community art activist project that is part wall mural, part past information archive.
I went on a graffiti tour that went through NOHO, SOHO and the Lower East Side last weekend. We saw works by street artists - Space Invader and Roa - that were remarkable. Roa had created a commissioned mural of a bird on the side of a building, and the former artist derived his work from the unforgettable arcade game, Space Invader.
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.
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.
The installation consists on providing postcards to gallery visitors that they can use to mail their Elected Officials to advocate for gun control. The front of the postcard shows the photograph “Mommy, what is this?” (2018), which is the hand of Ileana's son, Lucca, holding a toy bullet while making the peace sign. The back of the postcard contains a short letter with the phrase “No more children should die from gun violence.
#SaveNYC is a grassroots, crowd-sourced, DIY movement
to protect and preserve the diversity and uniqueness
of the urban fabric in New York City.
As our vibrant streetscapes and neighborhoods are turned into bland, suburban-style shopping malls, filled with chain stores and glossy luxury retail, #SaveNYC is fighting for small businesses and cultural institutions to remain in place.
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.