The Confined Hearts Project is creating 1468 terracotta anatomical human hearts, one for each person seeking asylum in Australia but being held in detention on Manus Island and in Nauru. Hundreds of people of all ages, backgrounds and cultures have been involved in making the hearts to date.
Huffington Post put together a digital, interactive map of some of the so-called best and brightest street art collections. Street art is important because it allows artists, usually from the community where the street art is taking place, to interact with the community and bring color/brightness to the environment.
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has recreated the image of drowned infant Alan Kurdi that in 2015 became the defining symbol of the plight of Syria’s refugees.
For the recreation, Ai lay on a pebbled beach on the Greek island of Lesbos. His pose was similar to that of Kurdi’s lifeless body, which washed up on a beach near the Turkish town of Bodrum and was captured in a September 2015 photo.
In the series The History of Korean Women, Cho's suggests that the cost of that gain cannot be paid for by a cultural amnesia masking the pain and suffering of previous generations. Here the semantic emphasis is on the official - the status of women and their contribution to the survival and growth of Korea. Their efforts have gone uncelebrated due to their relegated status within a five hundred year old social system.
The Center for the Study of Political Graphics and the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation have combined forces to bring 75 powerful and engaging poster works on broad issues of health care to audiences traditionally excluded from the art world in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Both organizations have been in the forefront of social change for three decades.
Is it possible that through affective design we can change our consumer behavior? Yan Lu and his "Little Fish Project" offer a design inspired solution to excess use of water. "As consumption is incalculable, saving is often neglected through daily consumption.
Four months ago, I was in a multifaith brainstorm for the People’s Climate March when someone said, “What if we had a giant ark?” I think we all had the same reaction: Great … but how do you build an ark?
Her name is Zaria Forman, a leading artist in contemporary art with a cause. She is not only an exceptional human being; she is also an incredible American drawer who uses art to convey the emergency of climate change.
Zaria’s ultra-realistic drawings explore moments of raw beauty, peace in the landscape, power in the ice and transition that allow the viewers to emotionally connect with places they may never see in real life.
One of the oldest forms of human expression is art, so it’s no surprise that art is constantly used to critique another of humanity’s oldest practices, violence and war. In the world of art activism, the power of creativity and innovation has been used to create commentary about war since the beginning of time. Art that speaks out against the atrocities of violent conflict embodies empathy, care, and a plethora of other human emotions.
In 2012, visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman started Fearless in response to the powerful protests that shook the country in response to the “Nirbhaya” tragedy in Delhi, India.
After eight days of fall/winter New York Fashion Week, the most prominent trend—pervading both the runways and streets—has been social and political activism. To outsiders, New York Fashion Week may seem trivial in a time of more pressing news, but beyond being an escape, it’s a representation of how art can comment on social and political issues.
The Stanford Daily:
There is no word short of “spectacular” that better describes the experience of examining “Pan American Unity,” Diego Rivera’s 1940 mural, housed since 2021 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The piece is the crux of SFMOMA’s soon-closing exhibition, “Diego Rivera’s America,” curated by James Oles and Maria Castro.
Yu Hong’s Female Writer, a painted and photographic portrait of the writer Zhao Bo 趙波 (b. 1971), recalls courtly images of idealized beauties. Yu, however, deliberately complicates the perspective in her composition: she asked the sitters for her She series to select photographs of themselves that could be paired with her paintings, meaning that the images together convey dual female perspectives, both the artist’s and the subject’s.
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.
El Rey de la Ruina, aka The King of Ruin, is a local artist based in Madrid, Spain, who creates artistic activist pieces that range from the impact Covid-19 had on the social life of people in Spain, to the impact gentrification has taken on various groups of people. He tends to utilize (at least in his more recent pieces) bright colors and fun, geometric shapes in his art.
Colony collapse disorder is a colossal issue – and artist Louis Masai wants you take notice. His street art project “Save the Bees” aims to catch your attention by covering the walls of London with bees. Bees are extremely important to agriculture as they pollinate plants - yet entire colonies are disappearing without a solid reasons (there are theories, mostly about pesticide ingredients).
Christine Sun Kim's series Degrees of My Deaf Rage is a series of charcoal drawings of charts that depict the artist's varying degrees of what she calls "deaf rage." These frustrations are categorized by situations: deaf rage in the art world. institutional deaf rage, deaf rage concerning interpreters, deaf rage while traveling, deaf rage within educational settings, deaf rage in everyday situations.
"The Scream: 21st Century Edition" was created by New York-based artist Jim Costanzo in response to the Iraq War. The piece is directly inspired by Edward Munch's painting, "The Scream." Costanzo expresses anger and frustration at the illegal American war and the attack on our civil liberties.
While meditating in front of a Nepalese Sarasvati statue on New Year's Day in 1991 at her California home, Mayumi received a calling that brought a sudden halt to painting. Having witnessed the horrors of atomic bombings as a child and later, watching her beloved Japan become a leader in nuclear-energy, and seeing the effects of depleted uranium, Mayumi had to pursue a global cause greater than her art or feminism.
The Arte Útil archive presents a growing archive of over two hundred case studies that imagine, create and implement beneficial outcomes by producing tactics that change how we act in society.
Almost all of Rivera's art told a story, many of which depicted Mexican society, the Mexican Revolution, or reflected his own personal social and political beliefs, and In the Arsenal is no different. The woman on the right side of this painting in Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and revolutionary political activist, who is holding ammunition for Julio Antonio Mella, a founder of the internationalized Cuban communist party.