With more than 48,000 panels and 94,000 names, the AIDS quilt is a constantly growing testament to the deadly toll the disease has taken on the world. At roughly 1.3 million square feet, it is so large that it can’t be displayed in its entirety in one place. Parts of it are currently on display at the National Mall, with volunteers constantly switching sections in and out.
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?
“Piano Stairs” is an interactive playful musical stairway installation created into the Odenplan underground station of Stockholm to make people use stairs more often than elevator. The project was part of a Wolkswagen initiative called “The fun theory” whose main objective and mission is to “change people’s behaviour for the better by making it fun to do.”
In 2023, it is impossible to be an apolitical artist in Eastern Europe. As war rages on in Ukraine, art serves as a powerful and necessary tool, according the members of the Sunflower Solidary Community Center in Warsaw: Maria Beburia, Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Taras Gembik, Yulia Krivich, Kaja Kusztra, Natalia Sielewicz, and Bogna Stefańska.
Museums and art galleries are not usually the sites of feminist political protest. Yet over the past couple of years, before the lockdown, gallery visitors all over the UK had noticed a small, determined activist whose modus operandi is “Small signs, big questions, fabulous wardrobe”.
FEMEN is an organization that is revolutionizing the feminist movement. Founded in Ukraine in 2008 and adopted in Spain in 2013, FEMEN protests gender-based issues such as inequalities, violence, patriarchy, etc. Since its creation, it has spread to several other countries, and there have been hundreds of organized protests.
Cosmic Generator presents a network of characters working in nonsensical, and at times absurd, economies. Artist Mika Rottenberg uses footage from actual discount dollar stores in Calexico, CA; Mexicali, Mexico; and Yiwu, China to recreate the imaginary “life” of a product, from its production in the factory to the moment it is sold.
Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer and activist. Through painting, printmaking, writing and other forms of political and artistic engagement her work intervenes with dominant historical narratives of disability and animal oppression. Taylor's artworks have been exhibited at venues across the country, including the CUE Art Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Now What? project has just finished a series of interactive workshops, where global citizens came together to reflect on the global sustainability issues, got inspired and empowered to imagine the world anew through poetry and imagery.
With the focus on the community and climate action, the project is live on social platforms and soon to be a collective street art too.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.
CENTRO San Antonio's Art Everywhere Project will celebrate its 5th anniversary in May.
As of May 2024, the project had seen numerous artists from the city's urbancore decorate areas of the city with elaborate murals reflecting the city's history and the diversity of cultures in the city.
Following on from Ruben Shanchez's mural on the Syrain boader, we head back to the same subject with Awareness & Prevention Through Art (AptART) is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to give vulnerable children an artistic experience with an opportunity to express themselves as well as an outlet to build awareness and promote prevention about the issues that affect their lives.
The prints exhibited June 2013 at Firestorm in Asheville NC, will comprise two separate bodies of work; Chelsea Ragan’s combination screen print / woodblock print / painting / drawings graphically detail police shootings of young black males from across the country, and Adam Void’s hand-painted screen prints state the facts of important national news stories that have been swept under the rug of mainstream corporate media.
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.
The “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef,” a unique exhibition and thought-provoking fusion of science, conservation, mathematics, and art, is on display in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. By engaging local communities to crochet coral reefs, the exhibition celebrates the reefs' beautiful diversity and speaks to the urgent need to protect these vanishing ecosystems.
Play Safe is a documentary film series created and directed by NYU alum Eddie Einbinder. The film, much of which now appears for free on YouTube, was originally released in 2013 after being filmed between 2011 and 2012. It debuted at the International Harm Reduction conference in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2013.
The upcoming year of fashion shows look set to be charged with climate change and environmental themes.
This year, more than ever before, we have seen that the business of fashion, at the highest levels, is responding to the push to take the very pressing issue of climate change and environmental damage seriously.
French street artist Roti installed a 4-ton marble sculpture in Independence Square in Kiev Ukraine, as an expression of solidarity with government resistors and protestors. The sculpture depicts a woman's body emerging from water.
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.
“The Grace Period” is a live blogging platform with seven anonymous contributing bloggers called: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Through, videos, writings, and visuals they present multiple perspectives of landing/creating a meaningful job after school in a country where personal and national debt is high and jobs are few. In this environment, will our creative spirits be resilient?
In 1989, playwright, actor, and activist Safdar Hashmi was fatally attacked by political thugs while performing a street play outside of Delhi. His death led to the founding of Sahmat, an influential artist collective that has taken a consistent stance against the threats of religious fundamentalism and sectarianism in India through a vibrant mix of high art and street culture.
Priya’s Shakti is an augmented reality comic blending Indian mythology with modern storytelling. It follows Priya, a rape survivor turned superhero, challenging cultural taboos around sexual violence and empowering women through art and technology.