Legendary activist and artist Ed Bereal will be able to have his work displayed again in the newly reopened Portland Art Museum. He is a complex figure, gaining fame in LA in the 1960s for his abstract works and radical performances. His work also includes critiquing politicians in a satirical way.
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.
In the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
Immersing in the art is what they are known for. As they slowly reopen, so is their annual public art and performance festival. Their mission statement says:“AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.” The title of NORMAL is to push the boundary of what is.
A new exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that showcases activism through art and media in the San Francisco Bay Area, gets its name, Take This Hammer, from a 1963 documentary about the author James Baldwin as he went around San Francisco, talking to African-Americans about what it was like for them in the city.
The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments and blocked major intersections in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform — a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Los Angeles-based multi-media arts collective Asco (from the Spanish word for nausea) created performances, street theater and conceptual art that satirized the emerging styles of Chicano art and pushed the boundaries of what it might encompass.
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.
Blizzard Entertainnment an American gaming company that has created some of the world's most beloved games has permantly banned Blitzchung, a professional Hearthstone player from Hong Kong who shouted after a livestreamed game, "Liberate Hong Kong! The revolution of our age!" After the professional player shouted that out, Blizzard banned the pro gamer from playing Hearthstone for a year and reclaimed his prize money from the tournament.
“My intention was not to disappear in the environment but instead to let the environment take possession of me” Said Liu Bolin. With his strong photography, Bolin vanishes into the city, creating a powerful statement about our relationship, as humans, to our surroundings.
MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years.
In mid-November, the nonprofit group Asian American Federation released 10 travel posters designed to subvert a question that can instantly get under the skin of any person of Asian descent in the United States: “Where are you really from?”
This month’s blast of arctic air may have roused climate-change skeptics. But the composer Laura Kaminsky and the painter Rebecca Allan were unfazed. Holed up in their apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx on one of the coldest days in decades, these longtime artist-activists were doing what came naturally: fighting the planet’s warming.
Vince Staples mentioned Long Beach's Ramona Park approximately 80 times on his debut album Summertime '06 and even allotted the park two of its own tracks: "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 1" and "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 2." "The sun come down and guns come out, you know Ramona Park."
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide marked the International Day of Zero Waste, which spotlighted solutions to the mounting environmental and social problems caused by the fashion and textile sector.
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic” features six dances written inside a prison, a 35-minute dance film, and 11 artists (seven choreographic interpreters and four formerly incarcerated narrators) conversing on dancing in carceral spaces.
In 1995, Bogota was a chaotic city. Among others, it presented high ranges of homicides, delinquency, corruption, no sense of belonging, traffic chaos and financial problems.
A 20ft by 9ft scoreboard that reads "Capitalism Works For Me!" and allows visitors to vote on whether Capitalism works in their lives by pressing a button for True or False.
'Learning To Love You More' is a digital and physical presentation of artistic responses from the general public. These "assignments" were facilitated under the creative direction of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, managed on a website by designed and curated by Yuri Ono. In 2010, the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the website to persevere it as an archive.
When Patricia Stonefish returned home to the United States from Egypt in 2014, she brought with her a new outlook for conceptualizing women's self defense. Having seen firsthand the benefits and empowerment of Taekwando/ Hapkido/ Gumdo classes for Egyptian women during and after the revolution in 2011, she decided to put her decade of martial arts training to good use on home turf.
Ahead of a recent exhibition at the prestigious modern art museum OCAT Shanghai, the artist Song Ta described the process of creating his multimedia piece “Uglier and Uglier.” After secretly filming thousands of unsuspecting female college students, Song and three assistants painstakingly ranked them by their perceived attractiveness; those deemed most appealing featured early in the show, with the women on display getting progressively “uglier” as the
In 2008, an earthquake devastated Sichuan province in China, claiming the lives of more than 69,000 people. Following accusations from parents that substandard construction caused the collapse of schools across in the region, the artist Ai Weiwei set upon a political investigation that would name every missing student and call the government to account for their deaths.
A couple of weeks ago Danish chef Rasmus Munk made Michelin-starred dishes, now he prepares pasta salad and tartlets for the homeless in Copenhagen.
In the past few weeks, COVID-19 has forced several restaurants in Denmark to close, including the well-known Alchemist.