At Souvenir Stands, Selling Tourists on Ending Stop-and-Search
By COREY KILGANNON
New York Times, City Blog, August 27, 2012
Last week, a 37-year-old artist from Oakland, Calif., named Aaron Gach joined the crowds of tourists swarming the sidewalk souvenir stands set up around the perimeter of Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.
Following last week's powerful death-penalty spot with the melting wax figures, Amnesty International in France moves on to Russian dolls to symbolize the hidden political repression and social terror in that country. "We must not let Russia's charm hide its atrocities" is the tagline from ad agency La Chose.
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?
Bus Regulation: The Musical (2019 – 2023) is a Trilogy of roller-skating Musicals inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ performed in three of the UK’s biggest post-industrial city-regions – Greater Manchester, Strathclyde and Merseyside – in collaboration wi
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
"In preparation for tomorrow's election, members of artist-activist project Luminous Intervention beamed ballot-question themed slogans onto a bridge over Route 83 during rush hour traffic this evening. Today's action followed on the heels of an equality-themed luminous alteration of The Natty Boh/Utz Girl proposal billboard in Station North on Friday.
The Brooklyn Paper
March 26, 2012
BY ELI ROSENBERG
Occupy Wall Street wants to occupy your wall space.
A collective of poster printers in Gowanus is attempting to help reignite the social movement’s flames for a May 1 “General Strike,” with a handful of new pin-ups it hopes will be as arresting as the image of a ballerina atop a bull that kicked off the whole protest in September.
I am a visual activist. Most of what I have done over the years focuses on black LGBTQIA+ and gender-non-conforming individuals from South Africa and other neighbouring countries. It’s about making sure we exist in the visual archive. I call myself a visual activist — or, rather, a cultural activist, because this work is not only about the arts; I’m focusing on education, I’m dealing with culture in a way that confronts a number of issues.
There was once a time when Israeli songs like A Matter of
Habit were routinely written, aired and became hits. These
were songs of political commentary or protest, songs of hope
and idealism. They represented the aspirations of Israel's
secular liberal (generally Ashkenazi) elite. But that was
long ago.
While adult coloring books are hitting a high note right now in 2016, this isn't the first time this has happened. Back in the 1960s, coloring books were so popular that one of them even made it to the New York Times bestseller list.
However, while modern adult coloring books are very geometric and abstract, intended to help adults destress and relax, adult coloring books from the 1960s were much more political.
Mine is not Arts for the sake of Arts. It is a revolutionary INSGINA carved into the artistic plaque of my DNA to speak FREEDOM of expression and then freedom after EXPRESSION. The footprints of my revolutionary walk are dipped in the paths of RESISTANCE. My Ideological Swag -word is CREATIVITY. My spiritual birth mark is RESILIENCE. My revolutionary slogan is a nonviolent but a poetic fist of MASS INSTRUCTION. I am non-selfish believer.
Many citizens of the United States have spoken out against Trump by organizing, protesting, voting, writing and making art. Most of us have hoped for the impeachment of this inept, cruel, lying and corrupt con man who is a danger to our country and to the world. We the people of the United States will continue to speak out and fight against Trump.
The "Day of Disruption" kicked off earlier than planned early on Thursday morning when dozens of Israeli artists painted a red line on the road to Israel's High Court of Justice in Jerusalem.
Being a Kuwaiti citizen makes you feel like you belong to Kuwait, as nationality is a legal relationship between a person and a state. But what if you are a “halfie” and are finding it hard to answer the question “Where are you from?” Those whose fathers are Kuwaiti are automatically considered Kuwaitis but those whose moms are Kuwaiti and fathers are not, they are not granted the nationality, even if they are born here.
Thousands of ethnic Mongolians have protested across northern China in opposition to Beijing plans to replace the Mongolian language with Chinese in some school subjects.
FloodNet was a conceptual artwork and a tool for online collective action.
Developed by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), it took the form of a Java applet that allowed users to send useless requests or personalized messages to a remote web server in a coordinated fashion, thereby slowing it down and filling its error logs with words of protest and gibberish—a kind of virtual sit-in.
20-year-old Ilyssa, from New York, sees communism as the only viable alternative, one that will improve the societal issues we currently face. “From a young age, I was very aware of the stark class differences that existed,” she says. “I grew up with a single mother in a very poor family.
The current cultural and political context in Macedonia marginalizes lesbians and women in general, and the dominant political party forces the traditional role of the woman, where she is a mother, a housewife, and of course, heterosexual. Furthermore, the major TV stations are flooded with Turkish soap operas, where traditional values are the leitmotif of the show.
David Černý has been called "l'enfant terrible" of Czech art. Since 1991, Černý continues to produce some of Czech Republic’s most famous political sculptures. His grand sculptures are almost always mocking the system through humor. Many of his well-known pieces remain as public art and have sparked much conversation. Examples of these can be found littered around Prague.
A Richmond, VA.-based activist group called Indecline has recently installed a street art resistance installation of several hung clown figures dressed like the KKK from a tree in Richmond’s Bryan Park.
SEALDs, short for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (自由と民主主義のための学生緊急行動, Jiyū to minshu shugi no tame no gakusei kinkyū kōdō), was a student activist organisation in Japan that organised protests against the ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in 2015 and 2016. Its focus was on the security-related bills enacted in 2015 that allow the Japanese Self-Defense Force to be deployed overseas.
In Venezuela, the far right opposition has protested against the leftist regime of Maduro. Violence has swept through the capital, Caracas, and other cities throughout the country. Meanwhile, the Western world has had its eye on Ukraine, and received relatively little news coverage of what is actually going on in Venezuela. An epidemic of misinformation has spread as a result.
Colombian ad agency Lowe SSP3 is starting a Christmas-themed campaign to entice guerrilla fighters out of the jungle to turn themselves in. The agency may have created an advertising-to-guerrillas award category after winning a gold Cannes Lion in the outdoor category and half a dozen Grand Prix awards at other shows this year for its first holiday effort, last December.
Our campaign aims to abolish article 153 from Kuwait’s penal code, which effectively gives men regulatory, judicial and executive power over their female kin in blatant disregard of the constitution, international agreements on human and women’s rights and even the Islamic Sharia.
With delicate composition, striking details and strong emotion, five editorial posters drawn by Wuheqilin have attracted some half million followers to his account on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform. His political views expressed in his art have led to some netizens dubbing him the "Wolf Worrier artist."