When Fred Wilson did an installation at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, he shook up the museum world. Co-sponsored by the historical society and the Contemporary Museum, Mining the Museum did not involve artwork made by the artist; rather, it involved reinstalling items from the historical society's collection in such a way as to make us reconsider them.
The group known as Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which practices Mexican Nahua dance, song and drumming, is a frequent presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its dancers first took to the streets in solidarity with the movement after the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police in 2015.
Malteros are the porters who transport luggage and goods between the border of the US and Mexico. Working with a group of maleteros in 2005, artist Mark Bradford collaborated on a system of maps and signs that placed the marginalized work of the unofficial maleteros alongside that of the sanctioned labor of policemen and taxi drivers.
Six months before Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc in the Caribbean, a group of Puerto Rican artists were invited to participate in a residency program in Miami by local art organizations. The artists were offered abandoned storefronts-turned-studios at a historic downtown mall, where they’d exhibit their work during Miami Art Week in December to engage an art world that often overlooks the island territory.
This piece is about multiple layered “creative activism”. There is art, activism, and community building.
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a zine is a “noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.”
During this time rent prices in the Lower East Side/ East Village were rising due to the presence of many community gardens. In response to this, then Mayor Giuliani decided to sell the 198 gardens in question. Streets into Gardens was an effective project that engaged the neighborhood into a collective of change.
The nativity scene at Fellowship Congregational Church in Tulsa, Okla., looks a little different this year: There is a chain-link fence surrounding Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.
The display has been up since the beginning of December, but it drew news coverage this week after the church changed the message on its marquee to read, “The holy family was a migrant family,” and posted photos of the nativity on Facebook.
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.
The Whitney Museum of American Art’s pay-what-you-wish Fridays are typically busy. For two-and-a-half hours out of the 53 the museum is open each week, visitors can enter without paying the usual $25 admission fee, a brief and temporary, but recurrent, leveling of the playing field for art lovers.
Rohan Zhou-Lee pens a power letter to Asian women, reminding us of our brilliance, heroism, and inherited centuries of Asian woman power.
To any Asian Woman, cis or trans, who might read this:
By Catherine Porter
I spent an hour Wednesday morning talking pigs and Leo Tolstoy on a traffic island outside the Princes' Gates.
Anita Krajnc and her group call this “Pig Island.” They come here most weeks to watch and photograph the pigs en route to their death at nearby Quality Meat Packers.
Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono’s instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: ‘Just blue like the ocean.’ You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white.
Following the controversy around Rick Ross's date rape lyrics in his rap on Rocko’s song U.O.E.N.O, the rapper lost his contract with Reebok and was the target of the media, anti-rape activists Ultraviolet, hip hop activists, and even his fans.
Bit Rosie showcases female music producers in high quality performance videos and short documentaries. Our videos and digital archive project with the New York University library document the work of women using music technology to make sounds across genres and locales.
Bit Rosie is directed and produced by Adele Fournet.
http://www.adelefournet.com/
Transfixed by racial, political, and socioeconomic tensions saturating the news, movement artists Jon Boogz and Lil Buck, enveloped by the art of Alexa Meade, switch off the TV and release their emotion into a stirring dance that is both a lament and a spirited call to action.
In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
At first, you don’t know what you’re looking at. A gray expanse of uneven geometry surrounded by undulating brown. Shift your perspective a bit and it might be a close-up of a distressed textile, with subtle hues and textures surfacing as your eyes adjust.
And then the horizon comes into focus. Now you know where you are. In the distance are the classic jutting buttes of Monument Valley, familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a John Ford Western.
"Fallen Fruit invites the public to bring homegrown or street-picked fruit and collaborate with us in making a collective fruit jams. Working without recipes, we ask people to sit with others they do not already know and negotiate what kind of jam to make: if I have lemons and you have figs, we’d make lemon fig jam (with lavender). Each jam is a social experiment.
On Friday night, as U.S. television screens burned with images of peaceful protests turning violent, Nike released a new socially conscious ad calling on Americans to do something quite different than the brand’s usual call to “Just Do It.” Instead, one of the nation’s leading athletic apparel companies called on individuals to not turn their back on the painful issue of racism in the United States.
A group of protesters calling themselves the "Gmuni dancers" block a Google Bus from moving on 24th Street at Valencia Street on Tuesday April 1, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif.
Typical mediums of street art include spray paint, stickers and stencils. But mobilized digital media projection has become the latest tool in some activist's artilleries. Vanguards of this innovative technique include members of The Illuminator project. Created in March 2012, The Illuminator is a cargo van equipped with audio and video projection capabilities.