Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono’s instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: ‘Just blue like the ocean.’ You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white.
Faith Ringgold, the 93-year-old doyenne of African American art, a trailblazing master who foreshadowed the recent rise of art activism and Black figuration, is having her first solo museum show in Chicago.
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.
At a time when the city of Portland was considering stripping Martin Luther King Jr.'s name off a local street, a covert organization calling itself Group X changed the name of another downtown street to Malcolm X Street in a clandestine overnight action.
"The Uni Project aims to do one thing and do it well: temporarily
transform almost any available urban space into a public reading room
and venue for learning. We start with the conviction that books and
learning should be prominent, accessible, and part of what we expect at
street-level in our cities." (From site.)
The Democracy Machine! is a performative sculpture that gives participants the opportunity to experience the thrill of democracy in action, in a competitive game that challenges people to work together toward understanding a better society. Using the spectacle and play of performance drawn from Las Vegas Casinos, gambling machines and game shows, The Democracy Machine!
‘Since Plotinus’, writes Joseph Tanke (2019, p. 486), ‘Western art has been consecrated to beauty, and beautiful art has been understood as the achievement of good form’. But alongside this interest in beauty and form, art has been committed to politics and perspectives, equity and rights. Consequently, and particularly since the start of the modern era, artists frequently initiate or participate in ‘difficult conversations’.
From Public Delivery:
For Ice Watch (2014), he extracted 30 blocks of glacial ice from the waters of Greenland and in 2018 strategically placed them in front of Tate Modern in London . The ice was left here to melt. Ice Watch was to inspire public action against climate change, advocating for a rapid public response.
At the press preview for Sharon Hayes’s new full-floor exhibition “There’s So Much I Want to Say to You” at the Whitney Museum there was a podium and a microphone set up in the center of the gallery that would eventually be used by director Adam Weinberg and curator Chrissie Iles to introduce the artist and her restless work.
In 2005, Rebar, a design studio in San Francisco, transformed a single metered parking space into a temporary public park. The area where this two-hour park took place was one that lacked public open space. This was the first Park(ing) Day project.
Stream of Conscience is a site-specific, literary sculpture made out of torn pieces of cover-weight paper upon which people of all ages write their thoughts, feelings, and reflections about water. Prior to writing, participants engage in a dialogue about local water issues within a global context. The conversation is further distilled to include our personal relationship to water. Thousands of people have participated in this traveling exhibition.
The Guardian:
Olafur Eliasson is putting the chill into climate change. The revered Scandinavian artist has placed 24 large blocks of centuries-old ice, harvested from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, in a circle outside the Tate Modern in London, with another six on display in the City.
We at "Left Youth ['solid] Kreuzkölln" have been around long enough of this policy and its lousy consequences for us. But how to solve the problem now? The problem is clearly the capitalist society for us. Even at school you will be prepared for competition and profit motive. We say: Stop it!
The manifesto:
Barbie Dream House in Berlin? Not with us!
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.
In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres lost his partner Ross to AIDS (the artist would face the same fate in 1996). In a tragic and highly personal tribute to Ross, Gonzalez-Torres took a picture of his still-indented empty bed - an image of universal intimacy and loss - and placed it on two dozen commercial billboard spaces throughout New York.
On Sunday April 3rd, Art Not Oil coalition member group BP or not BP? occupied the Great Court of the BP-sponsored British Museum with a 'disobedient exhibition'. Called 'A History of BP in 10 Objects', the exhibition featured artifacts submitted by frontline communities around the world who are fighting back against the impacts of BP's operations.
Waterpod™ was a floating, sculptural, eco-habitat designed for the rising tides. It launched in the summer of 2009, navigate down the East River, explore the waters of New York Harbor, and docked at several Manhattan piers on the Hudson River before continuing onward. The Waterpod™ demonstrated future pathways for water -based innovations.
The Bed-Stuy Aquarium (also known as the Hancock Street Bed-Stuy Aquarium) is a makeshift goldfish pond located on a sidewalk in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City. The pond, originally formed by a puddle from a leaky fire hydrant, garnered attention from locals and the press beginning at the time of its creation in August 2024.
Cyclist activists from the Koce, Return to the Street initiative set up sculptures symbolically showing the marginalization of cyclists in the city, the inadequate and dysfunctional infrastructure for this means of transport, but also to point out the large number of trampled bikers in Skopje.
As part of the commemoration of this year’s World Art Day (April 15), Ghanaian-based Tapioca Foundation and Imposters Art Collective have embarked on a campaign to educate the public about environmental sustainability.
The project, which was launched in Ada in the Greater Accra Region, is intended to use art pieces to highlight issues relating to environmental protection and climate action to boost awareness in local communities.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Activists with a big fake polar bear have occupied a Shell service station in the Swiss resort of Davos to protest Royal Dutch Shell PLC's oil drilling in the Arctic.
About 25 activists from around Europe chained gas pumps together Friday at the station near where the World Economic Forum was being held and hung a banner on the roof reading "Arctic Oil - Too Risky."
In “Speech/Acts,” a group exhibition organized by Meg Onli at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden stood out as artists who take up voices, histories, and experiences that can help audiences move forward and endure in the future.