In March this year, less than 100 days since he took office again, Luis Castañeda Lossio, Mayor of Lima, announced that the Municipality would remove the street art murals painted on the walls of downtown Lima’s historical city streets. “Lima has to recover all the architectural quality it has. They have chosen us and we will comply with the obligation that the population has consigned us,” said the mayor.
Many artists are inspired to bring climate change into their work after a direct experience with it. Catherine Sarah Young hopes her work helps people understand and talk about their experiences with climate change.
Acting on a tip from a disgruntled neighbor, two comedians dressed as drag queens confronted parking officers in broad daylight.
The pair wanted to know why the officers, who so ruthlessly enforced parking limits, had never so much as given a warning to the local fruit salesman, whose battered Ford Explorer sat illegally parked all day, every day, in the upper-class neighborhood of Polanco.
Prison inmates in Mexico have suffered from coronavirus infections at a higher rate than the country as a whole, and pandemic lockdowns have reduced their already limited contact with the outside world.
But one group of women inmates at a prison west of Mexico City have managed to benefit, as the lockdown spurred a wave of professionals with time on their hands to donate online classes.
The Haitian Creole word "konbit" denotes the idea of similar talents joining together to work towards a common goal. The founders — a group of photographers, educators, and artists — came up with the idea for Fotokonbit a few years ago to "empower Haitians to tell their own stories and document their community", but it was the 2010 earthquake that gave the group new urgency.
From Public Delivery:
"The Land Mark series was a civil disobedience campaign. Over 2001 and 2002, Allora and Calzadilla, together with a group of activists, encroached into one of the United States Navy Bombing range in a beach of Vieques, Puerto Rico. The U.S. Military and NATO have used this location for various military exercises for more than 60 years.
While governmental support for arts and culture is often meager, the Brazilian national government has recently demonstrated great interest in the industry. They've just introduced a "cultural stipend," which provides workers with 50 real (roughly $25) per month for arts and cultural expenses. The allowance covers personal spending on things like movies, concerts, books or museums.
Non-profit organizations and a multitude of Guatemalan girls protested together demanding justice and security from the government. Guatemala's insecurity and cases of girls' disappearances have increased over the years. The protest started outside the Government Ministery (Ministerio de Gobernación) early in the morning, where protestors gathered riding their bikes.
All those who practice surfing know firsthand the serious problem our beaches face: pollution. While some only complain, others do something about it. Two Brazilian surfers decided they could help raise public awareness of the need to protect nature of the proliferation of plastics used in the oceans through a novel idea: create surfboards plastic bottles.
“It might not seem that an act of public laundry could unsettle a president with a well-deserved reputation for inflexibility, corruption, and brutality. But mass washing ceremonies were a key element in getting rid of Peru’s unpopular president, Alberto Fujimori, after more than a decade in power.
The "I'm Not A Joke" campaign from Daniel Arzola is a series of images inscribed with compelling truths about human diversity that encourages individuals to live as their authentic selves. He wants the images to eventually appear on buses and subways, exposing audiences to the realities of queer experiences in an attempt to break down prejudice in a form of activism that he calls "Artivism."
Migratón México es un proyecto satírico que se creó colaborativamente en 2017 a partir de un Laboratorio de Artivismo y Humor que organizó el Hemi en San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México, con un un grupo de más de 30 artistas y activistas de México, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua y Estados Unidos.
Covenant House has started a ‘Sleep Out’ movement that shines light on the youth homelessness crisis and raises funds for young people who seek shelter. "Covenant House empowers young people to overcome homelessness and trafficking by providing them with safe housing, food and clothing, and relentless support. Sleep Out events are held for people who want to join the movement as they give up their bed for one night in NYC.
More than 20 years ago, a psychology student doing his training at one of Argentina's oldest psychiatric wards kept being asked by his family and friends what it was like to work in there. So he came up with an idea: to let the patients explain in their own words.
The first radio station to broadcast from inside a mental hospital was born.
Right before the presidential elections in Mexico, planned for July of 2012, a local software enterprise has developed a smart-phone game that shows how to commit fraud at the elections.
At Rio+20 we present a bread tank with a garden inside to underline the realistic possibility of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty by redirecting military spending.
São Paulo went through a process of privatization of the public spaces. The local government implemented several rules that beneficiated the real state speculation, the city is expensive, and it's not for the poor.
Besides that, in october the elections were a hard game for the progressive party, PT, since two conservative candidates had big shares.
To show the harmful effects of cocaine on a drug addict, Brazilian advertising agency Talent created ‘living’ poster ads that are consumed by live mealworms over time.
Printed on dough, the ads initially show the faces of drug addicts.
However, as time passes, the mealworms slowly eat away at the posters, causing holes to form on the printed faces—highlighting the harmful effects of the drug.
A CUBAN artist's controversial photographs of children being hung from crosses has landed him in hot water.
Erik Ravelo took a series of photos of children hung like Jesus from a cross, but in the place of the cross were soldiers, surgeons, priests and Ronald McDonald.
Haiti is a conservative society where Roman Catholicism shapes many of its social norms. Patriarchal norms, says Haitian feminist Pascale Solages, co-founder and general coordinator of feminist organization Nègès Mawon, have informed its strict views on abortion. In Haiti, women can’t legally access voluntary abortions. Doctors can’t perform them unless the woman’s life is in danger.
"A week-long party characterizes Brazil’s Carnival, the Mardi Gras of the southern hemisphere. Celebrations and parades are held throughout the country, most notably in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Carnival celebrations vary in length and content, depending on the area.
Sian Ka’an is an extraordinary UNESCO tropical nature reserve along Mexico’s Carribean coastline, but the currents that pass by this area bring garbage from all over the world to the shores of this paradise. Alejandro Duran, an artist working in Brooklyn, NY, collects this trash and arranges it into works of colorful landscape art to examine “the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one.”
Five hundred volunteers with shovels gathered at a huge sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and over the course of a day moved it by several inches. Alÿs developed the idea after first visiting Lima in October 2000. The political context was inescapable: “This was during the last months of the Fujimori dictatorship. Lima was in turmoil with clashes on the streets, obvious social tension and an emerging movement of resistance.