Faith Ringgold is a successful painter, sculptor, mixed-media artist, author, feminist, and political activist. She is particularly known for her narrative quilts, as she explores identity, race, family ties, as well as cultural and political topics through her many different forms of storytelling.
“I have always wanted to tell my story or, more to the point, my side of the story” - Faith Ringgold
A nearly six-week strike that started with 48,000 student workers walking off the job across California ended in December with historic gains for workers.
Almost all of Rivera's art told a story, many of which depicted Mexican society, the Mexican Revolution, or reflected his own personal social and political beliefs, and In the Arsenal is no different. The woman on the right side of this painting in Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and revolutionary political activist, who is holding ammunition for Julio Antonio Mella, a founder of the internationalized Cuban communist party.
When dancer Sheen Jamaal saw a video of protestors doing the Cupid Shuffle in New Jersey, inspiration struck to do something similar in New York. He immediately called his friend and collaborator Allison “Buttons” Bedell, and the seed for the Dance For George protest was planted.
Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic” features six dances written inside a prison, a 35-minute dance film, and 11 artists (seven choreographic interpreters and four formerly incarcerated narrators) conversing on dancing in carceral spaces.
Media artist Joseph DeLappe announces the completion of “The Drone Project: A Participatory Memorial” on the campus of Fresno State University in California.
"To that end, in the Spring of 2014 we launched the Chasing Ice Ohio Tour in an attempt to use the film to shift the political conversation around climate change. As a society, for us to address climate change properly, we need our leaders in Washington to stop debating about whether or not it is actually happening and start taking action.
Seven undocumented immigrants working with the #Not1More campaign, chained themselves and blocked the entrance to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama for several hours today.
Etowah has long been considered one of the worst immigrant detention centers in the country. In a phone call recorded by Detention Watch Network, one detainee named Oscar Quintero describes the facility as “a concentration camp for immigrants:”
Restore the Fourth is a privacy movement started in the summer of 2013, in reaction to Edward Snowden's revealing of the National Security Administration's extensive spying on American and foreign citizens. The movement seeks to uphold the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects American citizens against unfounded search and seizure of their property or identity.
From an article in BoredPanda:
"If you’ve ever felt like your voice and opinion doesn’t matter in the vast world, then Seth is here to prove you wrong. This New Yorker runs the ‘Dude With Sign’ Instagram account where he uploads photos of himself protesting the strangest, weirdest, most random things. And the best thing is, we can relate to most of what he’s written on his signs.
WEST MIAMI-DADE, FLA. (WSVN) - A seminarian and faculty member at a South Florida school is taking a creative approach to engaging with students about challenging issues during this time of uncertainty, including the coronavirus pandemic. He made a rap video.
STONY CREEK, Conn. — Last year we saw images of farmland underwater everywhere. And, according to the USDA statistics, median farm income earned by farm households was forecast to be in the red, i.e., underwater. Bren Smith’s operation started out underwater and will remain there for the foreseeable future, because he farms the sea.
Matika Willbur was given a grant by Kickstarter (the worlds largest funding platform for creative projects) to travel around the U.S. for a year and photograph Native America. The goal of the 562 project is to change the way we think of the Native American race, by shifting our collective consciousness and creating a positive lasting legacy of Native America.
A group of clergy members wanted to change the conversation when they heard that a Florida police department was using mug shots of young black men as targets for shooting practice.
“#UseMeInstead,” the religious leaders said, tweeting photos of themselves in hopes that their solidarity would cause cops to “think twice” before pulling the trigger.
But the well-intentioned hashtag is provoking mixed responses.
"In 2006 members from a coalition of environmental groups posed as a government agency—the Oil Enforcement Agency—that should have existed, but didn’t. Complete with SWAT-team-like caps and badges, agents ticketed SUVs, impounded fuel-inefficient vehicles at auto shows, and generally modeled a future in which government takes climate change seriously."
The VOV campaign was launched to help young people identify and counteract the root causes of violence in their lives. It is for anyone who believes that the world should be less violent.
Organized in large part by Project Laundry List, in 2007 a four-hundred foot clothesline was strung in front of Hydro-Quebec headquarters to protest their destruction of the Rupert River and the traditional hunting grounds of the Cree and Innu so that people in the US and along the border can dry their clothes in a tumble dryer. Project Laundry List promotes clotheslines as a simple way for America to save 10% on its residential energy bill!
Mending Baghdad is a four-and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot quilt memorializing Baghdad as it looked during the American bombing on the first nights of the Iraq war. The purpose of the project is to bring people together to do something symbolically curative for Iraq. The artist, Clare Wainwright, worked up the image in about two days, but left it deliberately unfinished.
Art Works Projects’ mission is to use design and the arts to raise
awareness of and educate the public about significant human rights and
environmental issues. AWP provides visual advocacy tools which produce
action on human rights crises at the grassroots, media, and policy
levels. Conceptualized and created in conjunction with established
humanitarian and human rights advocacy organizations, AWP’s art and
A New York blogger impersonating David Koch successfully prank called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. David Koch is one of the two wealthy brothers who were big donors to his political campaign and GOP efforts generally.
New York City Food Not Bombs
Food Not Bombs--NYC is now working out of a kitchen provided by the Catholic Worker: 36 East First Street, between First and Second Avenues.
Every Sunday they start cooking around 1:00pm and are in Tompkins Square Park to serve around 3:30pm.
American artist Bob Partington created a wax sculpture of a Florida panther and her cub to display at a nonprofit zoo in Tampa, Florida this September.
When it debuted, the sculpture looked like nothing special. But as the wax began to melt under the heat of the sun, the bodies of the endangered species started to disintegrate. Within a couple days, the mother panther’s melting body revealed a simple message: “More heat, less wildlife.”