Bob and Roberta Smith has been at the forefront of activist art for 2 decades; so who better to ask about how art is responding to these politically bleak times?
"Potatoe Walkout" is a series of art installations located outside public food venues, featuring potatoes and cucumbers outfitted in sunglasses, picket signs, umbrellas, and other objects (depending on the depicted scene, which varies). Some scenes represent protest, others represent army battles, and other represent acts of crucifixion.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.
No Home Gallery is a traveling gallery that curates exhibitions and happenings in various living and studio spaces in New York City. In an attempt to make contemporary art accessible and inviting, No Home offers emerging artists and art enthusiasts a forum for collaboration and creation.
Empty chairs were laid out in Sarajevo today in honour of the 11,541 people killed in the city during the Bosnian war which began exactly 20 years ago.
The seats - lined up along the city's main street - were left empty in memory of the victims of the 44-month Serb siege of the city.
Hundreds of the chairs are small representing the children slain in the conflict.
Visible Distance / Second Sight is an art installation by Jennifer Bolande for DesertX. The temporary artwork can be found along the Gene Autry Trail near Vista Chino (33°50’41.70”N 116°30’21.02”W), where a series of consecutive billboards have been replaced by perfectly aligned photos of the landscapes they are blocking.
From the DesertX project page:
This is the image confronting Greeks from an Athenian drain . "Hello, I live in the sewers of Athens," says the cockroach. "Yes, me too," says an Athenian walking past, apparently unfazed by the idea of an insect talking to him from a drain.
Non-profit organizations and a multitude of Guatemalan girls protested together demanding justice and security from the government. Guatemala's insecurity and cases of girls' disappearances have increased over the years. The protest started outside the Government Ministery (Ministerio de Gobernación) early in the morning, where protestors gathered riding their bikes.
Howardena Pindell presented her solo exhibition, “Rope/Fire/Water”, her first video in 25 years and a project utilized by the artist since the 1970s that The Shed commissioned and displayed in late 2020 and into early 2021. “Rope/Fire/Water” mines the history of violence against African-Americans and features Pindell’s personal anecdotes and anthropological and historical data related to lynchings and racist attacks in the United States.
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.
In France, abstention, vote of protest, lassitude or violent reactions rise from all over the crisis of our "representative democracy ».
What about thinking the other way round ? What if we reappropriate the iconography of the election?
At 12:00 noon (New York time) on November 19, 2016, Chinese artist Ning Kong, wearing a wedding dress with hundred dove, appeared at the 911 site in New York. Even though the theme of performance art is calling for peace, the police banned it and showed the handcuffs because doing performance art was not allowed at the 9/11 site. So Kong Ning turned to Times Square, New York, successfully completing her performance art.
Hello and thanks for viewing.
This was a little installation that took place in the beauty of West Texas. The goal was to reorientate the site specific Prada Marfa into something more relevant, TOMS Marfa. Prada Marfa, being in the middle of nowhere, a structure placed as sort of a apocalyptic trophy for the high art world meant to challenge time; TOMS Marfa was to accelerate that vision with 2014 subject matter.
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.
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.
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.
Two children stand back-to-back, but they are facing two very different Chicagos. One child blows bubbles in a park under blue skies. The other wears a gas mask against a backdrop of scrap metal and billowing smokestacks.
Brainstorm of ideas and collection of the group individual experiences and input.
Preparation and design of the action.
Interview of a member of local organization that is working with homeless.
Research of data,concrete stories.
Build up the scenario to establish the environment to raise awareness of the rising local issue of homeless, specifically female homeless and their challenges in daily life.
Artist: Félix González-Torres
Media: Candies in variously coloured wrappers, endless supply, ideal weight of 175 lb
Date & Location: 1991
Where can I find this item?: Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Art, Gallery 293
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered a Berlin landmark with thousands of refugee life jackets for his latest installation. The striking display was the activist's attempt to highlight the scale of migrants taking to the seas every day.
For one artist, the ugly and the beautiful are equivalent concepts. In 2018, designer and artist Choi Jeong Hwa featured an exhibition titled 'Alchemy' at The Artling where he uses recycled and non-biodegradable materials in his work that he has been collecting for 30 years, such as household trash, glass, and steel. 'Dandelion' is one of his masterpieces installed in the outdoors in Seoul, South Korea.
The city of Douala in Cameroon had a huge problem associated with malfunctioning water drainage systems. This is due the fact that in many illegally constructed areas of the town, the sewers are without cover, and after heavy rainfall, this would generally lead to floods and related threats to public health.
Time as currency is an interesting economic model related to artistic practice.
According to the creators of Time/Bank, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, the project "is a tool by which people or a group of people can create an alternative economic model where they exchange their time and skills, rather than acquire goods and services through the use of money or any other state-backed value."
In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently.
Tiny Pricks is a public art project created and curated by Diana Weymar. Contributors from around the world are stitching Donald Trump’s words into textiles, creating the material record of his presidency and of the movement against it. Tiny Pricks Project holds a creative space in a tumultuous political climate.