After winning the TED Prize on March 2, 2011, the French-artist JR launched the Inside Out Project, in his first TED Talk. Using his own artistic practice as inspiration, this participatory platform helps individuals and communities to make a statement by displaying large-scale black and white portraits in public spaces. Through their “Actions,” communities around the world have sparked collaborations and conversations.
A mixture of a social cause with a creative vision, this visual art exhibit is dedicated to the millions of unemployed citizens and veteran’s in the United States. Constructed out of 1284 used empty wallets from over 2,000 donated nation wide; this project aims to have a voice about the economic problems our country is facing and show the potential of art to awaken our social consciousness.
During a cold January morning in 2020, Animanaturalis, a nonprofit group focused on ending the suffering of animals across Spain and Latin America gathered to protest the use, production, and sale of fur in Spain. In a blog post on their website, the group discusses the horrid living conditions on fur farms as well as statistics and alternatives related to fur sales (Animanaturalis, n.d.).
Beginning in February 2014, the New Museum will present the first US museum exhibition devoted to the work of Polish artist Paweł Althamer. The exhibition “The Neighbors” will include a new presentation of the artist’s work, Draftsmen’s Congress, originally presented at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012).
Zanele Muholi, the self-proclaimed visual activist and photographer, investigates the fraught relationship between post-apartheid South Africa and its queer community, who, despite being constitutionally protected since 1996, remain a constant target of abuse and discrimination.
The Balloon Project, is a three-year-in-the-making Art Installation by Yan Kong in support of world refugees and migrants. It pays tribute to human spirit, courage and survival. The Balloon Project is a multimedia work incorporating mechanical engineering and visuals to fuse art and politics. 32 balloons inflate and deflate to simulate refugee and migrants' breathing while fleeing their countries to seek safety and freedom in the world.
Artist and activist Niki Lopez is a survivor. From age 11 to 25, she was trapped in a religious cult in Georgia, where she was separated from the rest of her family. The cult's leader sexually abused her. But in 2000, Lopez escaped and worked with the FBI to put him in prison. She was later given a humanitarian award from the FBI for her help in putting her abuser behind bars.
Artist Maya Lin first burst onto the scene in 1981, when her design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while she was still a senior at Yale. Since then, Lin has turned her focus to environmental issues, with her most recent show at Pace Gallery investigating Manhattan’s landscape and environmental history.
MEXICO CITY — Of the half-dozen pieces that form Tania Bruguera’s series “Tatlin’s Whisper,” the one that the Cuban government silenced may have resounded most.
Inspired by the ecological disaster unfolding across the planet and driven by empowering underrepresented people, Moule, a painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, creates art that makes a statement.
Dressed in a magenta blazer and wearing bright pink lipstick, she is as colourful and spirited as one of her illustrations.
Several nights of Halloween celebration in Shanghai provided a vivid, if indirect, commentary this week on the malaise gripping the world’s second-largest economy.
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.
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.
A young man melting into a puddle of himself is something you don’t see everyday, much less in a busy public square. Yet this humourous but surprisingly effective spectacle is the latest effort by the Red Cross of Argentina to raise awareness about climate change.
Daniel Arzola, a digital artist and activist originally from Maracay, Venezuela, began his series, 'No Soy Tu Chiste' ('I Am Not A Joke') in 2013 intent on combating the stereotypes and cruelty so often facing LGBT identifiers; youth in particular. The project went viral in 2014, around the same time it teamed up with the It Gets Better Project based in the United States.
Open Call for Artist:
"Hear for All | Activism through Prints" Exhibition
The Art Gallery
Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon
hearforall.wordpress.com
Empathy may be the cornerstone of any Global Justice movement, but how do we cultivate the conditions for empathy to thrive?
The wheelbarrow symbolises something universally useful, practical and pleasingly straightforward. A space to deliver things in an efficient and direct manner - no packaging and completely people powered.
In May 2020, a team of artists, activists, folklorists, and people who lost loved ones to Covid-19 came together to make monthly memorial sites in New York City to remember victims of the Covid-19 pandemic. They continued installing memorials around New York City every month during the summer of 2020.
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?
Jacques-Louis David was an active member of the French Revolution, and his works often depicted his political affiliations. David’s painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons portrays the scene of Brutus, an important figure of the Roman Republic, reacting to the death of his sons. Since they wanted to overthrow the government and restore the monarchy, Brutus ordered their death.
"Myanmar has been engulfed in protest since February 1, when Burmese army general Min Aung Hlaing seized control of the government in a military coup, refusing to accept to the landslide election victory of the National League for Democracy and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Song Byeok is one of the most acclaimed Korean artists living today. He is from North Korea, where he was a propaganda artist for the North Korean government for two decades. After defecting in 2002, Byeok has turned his prolific creativity into powerful, satirical art using North Korea’s ruling culture as motifs.