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.
"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.)
A fat cat, a pig wearing a top hat and five rats. All seven inflatables faced the 34th Street entrance of the Empire State Building last Thursday, two weeks into a protest by members of Laborers Local 79 who rallied, hundreds strong, in the afternoon shadow of the props.
Without having been commissioned—or even given legal permission at all—Haring set out to create Crack Is Wack on the wall of an abandoned handball court in a park at 2nd Avenue and East 128th Street on June 27, 1986. Upon the completion of the mural, Haring was arrested by the New York City Police Department for vandalism of city property and faced potential jail time in addition to heavy fines.
Four days before the U.S. presidential election, three Ukrainian activists gathered at a stranded fence in New York City’s East Village to hang an expansive information poster. “19546+ Ukrainian Children Abducted by Russia,” reads its headline in bold. From a black canvas, white letters jump out at the passersby, a haunting reminder of the toll the Russian invasion continues to inflict on Ukrainian families.
A dark cloud hovers above a stand of Eastern cottonwood trees in Tifft Nature Preserve, a 264-acre woodland nature refuge on Lake Erie. But this is no ordinary cloud; it is a high-tech habitat for one of the world’s most misunderstood species—bats.
Imagine walking into a silent room where a woman is mending. Now imagine that she's sitting underneath 1,500 pairs of sharp Chinese scissors that are suspended from the ceiling, precariously pointed downwards. This was the idea behind The Mending Project by Beili Liu.
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.
Thousands of empty shoes replace marchers at cancelled climate protest in Paris
After French authorities cancelled two climate protests in the wake of the Paris attacks, thousands of would-be marchers kept empty shoes in their place.
The moving installation coincides with the COP21, a climate summit of 195 UN nations in the French capital.
The protest was called by Avaaz
In the 1970s, inspired by the Black Power movement in the US, Aboriginal people were politically very active. In Sydney, Australia’s first Aboriginal legal and medical services were founded. Aboriginal people demanded land rights for the areas that they lived on since millennia.
Land rights were considered the key to economic independance, and land the base to generate resources and employment.
Renowned French artist JR and Oscar-nominated American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky have collaborated on The Standing March, a major public artwork exhibited in Paris during the UN’s COP21 climate conference. The video projection will remind leaders that the world is watching as they gather to negotiate a deal aimed at keeping global warming below 2°C.
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 massive "Above and Beyond Memorial" will be installed at the National Veterans Art Museum, The Harold Washington Library, and go on display starting Feb. 20, culminating a painstaking search to find a suitable — although temporary — home for the 58,000 replica dog tags honoring those who died as a result of their service in the war that stretched from March 1965 to May 1975.
Activists are working to bring a steel sculpture of a 45-foot-tall nude woman to Washington, where she will temporarily face the White House from a perch on the National Mall.
Transporting the sculpture from its home in San Francisco will be an undertaking, but its artist, Marco Cochrane, said he saw it as an opportunity to start a conversation about violence against women.
Late last month, Chinese citizens took up a creative means of protest over the nation’s strict “zero-COVID” policy. In a place with little tolerance for large public demonstrations, protesters have been holding up blank pieces of paper. Their ingenuity inspired a local artist Yolanda He Yang to stage a public art demonstration to subtly communicate their dissent.
From October to December 2020, Chinese university students nationwide launched a viral movement to install “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in women’s restrooms—free, wall-mounted containers stocked with disposable pads on a take-one, replace-one basis. Nearly 250 campuses joined within weeks. Some sustained their boxes for over a year, while others saw them vanish after bureaucratic pushback, logistical hurdles, or dwindling volunteer resources.
Buses serving several routes in central Seoul have acquired a new and highly controversial passenger: a barefoot “comfort woman”, wearing a traditional hanbok dress with her hands resting on her knees.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
In the Si 8 Do project, Seville activists convened in a neglected barrio during the Euromediterranean Conference on Sustainable Cities, which was taking place in Seville.
A major exhibition by Ai Weiwei this autumn features a new series of monumental sculptural works in iron, cast from giant tree roots sourced in Brazil during research and production for last year’s survey exhibition, ‘Raiz’, at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed OCA Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.
A village shop in Coniston is stocked by local producers with everything from farm meat and vegetables to paintings and knitted goods. The produce is all homemade and brought in by local suppliers. Customers are invited to buy goods in the shop for an 'honest' price, there are guideline price tags attached to the items by the producer but customers are expected to pay what they consider an honest, suitable price for the item.
A crew of occupiers makes a home of a Bank of Americalobby with a couch, a coffee table, a rug and a pottedplant. "Bank of America took our homes so we though we'dmove in here!"