In 2020 Noname, a Chicago rapper, activist, and poet, released the single titled "Song 33" to address racism in America and the Black Lives Matter movement. She specifically raps about the killings of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin Salau, singing, "A baby just 19/I know I dream all black/I seen her everything immortalized in tweets, all caps/They say they found her dead," she raps.
2020 was the year of when protest music blared everywhere. For a long period, Black people struggled against police brutality and in the uproar of George Floyd's murder, BLM protests instantly swept over the country. Of the many protest music that was released that year, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire wrote a song that would spearhead raging sentiments towards racial injustice beyond just jazz.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of this country’s most beloved theater companies. Founded in New York City in 1963, the Bread and Puppet Theater’s first productions ranged from puppet shows for children to pieces opposing poor housing conditions. The group’s processions, involving monstrous puppets, some about 20 feet high, became a fixture of protests against the Vietnam War. "We don’t have playwrights in the theater.
Immersing in the art is what they are known for. As they slowly reopen, so is their annual public art and performance festival. Their mission statement says:“AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.” The title of NORMAL is to push the boundary of what is.
The long-awaited New Museum retrospective of conceptual art pioneer Hans Haacke fell victim to internet hackers over the weekend trying to make a political point. The intervention drastically skewed the results of an iPad-based artwork that was meant to record real-time visitor responses.
Replete with an unmistakable look, intense silence, and mime-like moves, the Red Rebels are, quite intentionally, riveting. In the words of artist and activist Doug Francisco, founder of the Red Rebels Brigade: "We divert, distract, delight, and inspire the people who watch us."
BBB are a network of militant bakers armed with pies that are ready to change the world. They stand for ecology, bioregionalism, human-scale economies, and proper gastronomics, and their method is inspired by Noël Godin, who has been pieing public figures since the '70s at the head of the International Patisserie Brigade.
A Well Within" is a collaborative art and education project that inspires people - young and old - to confront the global water crisis in a personal way. This interactive experience tells the story of Alile, a young East African girl affected by drought, who struggles to give her grandmother a precious drink of water.
The snapshots are thrust at us urgently, as if they were passports being shown at a border crossing, official proofs of national identity. Mostly, they are prosaic pictures of family members or houses. Sometimes a diploma will be offered up instead, or theater reviews clipped from newspapers or a membership card to a duck-hunting club. Later, other, more frightening, pictures will be shown, but they all serve the same function.
There were still bloodstains outside the Midwood Mobil gas station on Friday night; a fresh sign taped to a lamppost read “A Hate Crime Happened Here.” This is the place where, less than a week prior, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley, a gay Black dancer and choreographer, made a pit stop with friends after a Jersey beach day.
The Story of Stuff Project launches a new video. What is instructional, educational, and inspirational is a call for all the people in America to exercise their citizenship rather than their right to consume.
Here is what Annie Leonard (co-founder and spokes person for the project) has to say about this new film:
In a twist on the Broken Windows Theory, street artists are using their skills to combat urban blight in Baltimore with "The Slumlord Project". By drawing the attention of neighbors to abandoned and vacant properties and giving pertinent ownership information to take action on, 17 artists are spray painting and wheat-pasting in a D.I.Y.
"Eight-year-old Christian Bucks from Roundtown Elementary School noticed that some of his classmates did not have any friends to play with during recess.
His solution was to introduce a “Buddy Bench”, where lonely classmates could choose to sit if they wanted a playmate. If two children were seated there, they could ask each other if they wanted to play or talk.
Internet spreads word as networks shun adverts for Buy Nothing Day
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian, Friday 24 November 2000
Today is America's Buy Nothing Day. An event that was started to poke pointed fun at consumerism is now being celebrated in more than 40 countries, embarrassing television networks and demonstrating the power of the internet as a political organising tool.
Shake Girl is a massive collaborative effort between fifteen students and two instructors over the course of one quarter (Winter 2008). These students comprise the first edition of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project -- a group dedicated to acheiving this monumental task on an annual basis.
The inspiration for the creation was the Common Snapping Turtle. A big shout-out to local member, Kristin Rubin and local college students, Sarah Lockhart and Alanis Gonzalez, for their assistance in the construction of the artwork.
Philadelphia poet laureate Trapeta B. Mayson launched the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line (1-855-763-6792), a toll-free telephone line that offers callers a 90-second poem by a Philadelphia-connected poet. A new poem will be featured each Monday throughout 2021.
On Saturday, October 19, 2013, Creative Time and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented Between the Door and the Street, a major work by the internationally celebrated artist Suzanne Lacy, perhaps the most important socially-engaged artist working today.
This wonderful campaign of Earth Action Network against mountaintop removal coal mining focused not on the invulnerable mining companies, but on the banks that financed them - and especially PNC, which based its growth model on recruiting university students. It stopped both PNC and then, because of that, ALL banks from financing mountaintop removal coal mining.
“The Washington Post” asked the Guerrilla Girls to create a full page for their section on feminism and art, which was published on April 22, 2007. The Guerrilla Girls’ page contains an image of a fake tabloid, called “NOT OK! The Guerrilla Girls’ Scandal Rag,”. The tabloid’s cover features a sensational headline and some statistics, which highlight the fact that national museums rarely feature female artists and artists of color.
During Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the Equifax data breach, a protester dressed as the “Monopoly Man” from the board game photobombed Equifax CEO Richard Smith’s testimony.
While the CEO discussed his company’s breach that affected 145.5 million people, the protester gazed skeptically through a monocle at the back of his head.
The Dreamland Artist Club project was named after one of the famous amusement parks in Coney Island. The project consisted of more than 25 artists coming together to repaint rides and make custom signs, murals and scenic backdrops for the legendary neighborhood. Most of the artists that participated in this project were from New York City and therefore had a particular interest in the visual culture of the city.