In the Fall of 2011, after the Occupy Movement was in full swing, and meetings, actions and info sharing had expanded beyond Zuccotti Park, meaningful messaging and outreach tactics were were activated on a near daily basis.
Xu Bing, the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist, has brought his “Phoenix” installation to the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two phoenixes, both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors of the Cathedral, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night.
Occupy Wall Street's art offshoot, Occupy Museum, has a new initiative: deconstructing the commercial art fair model. They are calling this art fair antithesis the DebtFair. Last May at the Frieze Art Fair, Occupy Museum distributed flyers and protest literature for an Un-Frieze event.
Real estate agents and investors with plans to visit an open house in San Francisco Tuesday were greeted with a somewhat unexpected scene – a motley crew of Mission activists and neighborhood characters holding signs and singing, “If you buy this house, you will have bad karma.” A small brass band played along.
Mayday is a neighborhood resource and a citywide destination for engaging programming, a home for radical thought and debate, and a welcoming gathering place for people to work, learn, drink, dance and build together.
The project consists of a website for data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective formed to document and make visible the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents and to facilitate and organized collective resistance. The project studies the displacement of people and the way in which evictions and gentrification target specific communities in the Bay Area.
I went on a graffiti tour that went through NOHO, SOHO and the Lower East Side last weekend. We saw works by street artists - Space Invader and Roa - that were remarkable. Roa had created a commissioned mural of a bird on the side of a building, and the former artist derived his work from the unforgettable arcade game, Space Invader.
On Tuesday evening, at the end of an action staged by Occupy Museums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza, three members of The Illuminator were arrested. Earlier in the evening, police had moved protestors to a cordoned area on the opposite side of the street from the museum; a substantial police presence remained throughout the evening, but no other arrests took place.
Last Friday, on May 2nd of 2014, a group called The Student Debt Resistance @NYU hosted its first public engagement at Washington Square Park. The co-creators coined this event Chalk Day. The goal of this special day was to raise student awareness to the massive amounts of debt that they undertake as NYU students.
In her curatorial project Making Way, Ruth Simbao brought together works that complicated the idea of globalization’s effect on African nations, especially the idea that the new phase would usher in an almost frictionless movement of labor and capital across borders. Works by artists like Athi-Patra Ruga reflected on questions of how bodies moved through settler colonialist spaces.
Graffiti art is particularly viewed as a powerful form of social protest, and the (illegal) act of defacing can be as important as the message itself. Artist Void One has been arrested on numerous occasions for his politically-charged interventions.
“I didn’t set out to make political art but art is a platform where I can vent my frustrations” – Void One.
A is for Activism is a children's book developed by Innosanto Nagara, an author illustrator and founding member of the Design Action Collective, a worker owned cooperative design studio in Oakland that is dedicated to “serving the Movement.” The book includes playful rhymes for each letter stressing the importance of civic engagement and a participatory democracy.
A thirty-nine-foot banner was unfurled in the rotunda of a sparsely-attended Guggenheim Museum this evening, the latest action carried out by the Gulf Ultra Luxury Front (G.U.L.F.) activist group. Decrying labor abuse at the museum’s planned Abu Dhabi outpost, the banner announced the forthcoming “Countdown” campaign by Gulf Labor, the larger collective of artists and activists of which G.U.L.F. is an offshoot.
"Brazilian artist Mundano is used to spending his time on the road and in the streets, making art as an act of protest. Known for leaving his colorful works of graffiti on walls around the world, Mundano is especially dedicated to issues of environmental and social justice and spotlighting the overlooked work of Brazil’s trash collectors through his Pimp My Carroça campaign.
Between the late 1960s and 1970s numerous alternative printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left.
Jay-Z rapped alongside side Bono, the Edge and Rihanna; Coldplay's Chris Martin moonlighted as Beyoncé's piano player; Justin Timberlake covered Leonard Cohen — and those performances, from January 22nd's multinetwork, $66 million-grossing telethon for Haitian earthquake victims, were just the most visible of musicians' efforts to raise funds.
Will Work for Empty Wallets is a community outreach project dedicated to the millions of unemployed United States Citizens. Over 3,000 empty wallets were collected nationwide with the help of the Georgia Department of Labor to construct an 11'x21' American flag. Over 1200 wallets were used in the construction; each containing a unique empty wallet story about economic hardships.
The ZAD (zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) in Western France is 4000 acres of wetland, farmland and forest that was originally intended to be built into an airport in 1965 but is now an autonomous territory occupied by 40 different collectives looking to reclaim the land. There are around 200 people living permanently on the zone, in addition to some 2,000 people coming and going.
Fundacion Voces and Festival Mulafest got together to promote creative ideas for social change. They started a campaign in social media to ask people to donate their Vespa motorcycles. After they collected the Vespas donated by the people, they put them together again and invited known artists to intervene them.
Low-income tenants at a public housing project in Rhode Island — many of them working mothers with young children — wanted an affordable day care center in their building. With petitions, pickets, and letters to the city council, they built up a steady drumbeat of pressure on the key decision maker, the local Housing and Urban Development (HUD) director. At a certain point they decided to escalate with direct action.
By Adam Owens
Seventeen people were arrested Monday evening during what the state chapter of the NAACP called a nonviolent "pray in" protest at the General Assembly.
The protest was directed at Republican action on health care, unemployment benefits, education and voting rights.
Eleven students have locked themselves in the Peter Cooper Suite of the eighth floor of the Cooper Union building to protest the institution's decision to charge graduate students tuition.
This installation of 13 photographic self-portraits explores European-American heritage, my family and their role in the history of racism, colonization, genocide, and classism. The ancestors, real and imagined, span over 2000 years from the Celtic Iron Age to the present day. The life size portraits are accompanied by audio diaries from the perspective of each character.