Last month, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, dozens of women gathered outside the supreme court building in Santiago, Chile—a country now beset by popular uprisings against inequality—for a feminist flash mob.
Beyoncé delivered an intensely, unapologetic celebration of Black and HBCU culture at the Coachella Festival 2 weekends in a row. Not only were her performances some of the best live performances to date but they sent a pretty significant message to the world.
Here are some assessments of this beautiful demonstration of Blackness and Black Girl Magic:
From BBC News:
Under the moniker BomBaebs, Pankhuri Awasthi and Uppekha Jain rap about rape, cultural stereotypes, religious biases, and hypocrisy surrounding sexism and gender biases in India. They open the video with a disclaimer, warning that “This video doesn’t have any explicit or bannable content. It is just that the reality for women in India is Explicit.”
Zubair Magray, who goes by the stage name Haze Kay, raps about the conflict in Indian-administered Kashmir. The 23-year-old, one of the first rappers to emerge from the valley, blames the Indian military for "ruining" his homeland.
A This flash mob was designed to deliver a message to raise awareness and deepen understanding about the immediacy of the climate change problem. By subverting the lyrics of the Rattlin’ Bog, we appealed through music to the hearts of participants.
The Irish song, the Rattlin’ Bog, is a well-loved traditional cumulative song, with a short chorus, and is easily learned. The word Rattlin’ means ‘splendid’.
In an endeavor to raise awareness at the local and international level, Razia organized the Mifohaza Masoala (Wake Up Masoala) music and environmental festival, which took place at the edge of the Masoala Rainforest in October 2011. The concert featured some of Madagascar’s most thrilling performers, and the festival was a tremendous success, with over 10,000 people in attendance.
The following is a description of the action that Huffington post published online on 6/25/2011:
"Student demonstrators took to the streets of Santiago dressed as goblins and ghouls from Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' video in their latest spirited pursuit of higher education reforms."
At ‘Arcadia Earth,’ Dazzle Illuminates Danger
Using augmented reality, virtual reality and installations of light and art, the creators of this pop-up exhibition hope to inspire action on climate change.
By Laurel Graeber
Oct. 23, 2019
The creators of “Arcadia Earth” want to awaken your conscience. But they also plan to make that guilt trip extraordinarily fun.
For artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a "ghost." The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.
Kids Helping Kids is a youth hip-hop program run by two NGOs, Hip Hip Saves Lives and Negusworld. Together, these organizations work with middle school and high school students to make conscious hip hop influenced by activist work happening worldwide.
The duo Libia Castro (b. 1970) & Ólafur Ólafsson (b. 1973) are the recipients of the Art Prize 2021 for their collective performance with the Magic Team In Search of Magic - A Proposal for a New Constitution for The Republic of Iceland.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has teamed up with UK band The 1975 to record a song in she calls for mass civil disobedience to force action on greenhouse gas emissions.
In the track, titled “The 1975,” Thunberg recites an essay over ambient music, urging listeners to join a popular rebellion against climate change.
“Everything needs to change. And it has to start today,” she says in the song, released July 24.
Veteran Industrial band Skinny Puppy have objected to their disturbingly dark music being played to discombobulate inmates at Guantanamo, and plan to “charge” the government for doing so. They are not the first band to express such objections.
A change in the programmed entertainment at last night's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gala left a few world leaders slack-jawed, though most seemed not to notice that anything was amiss.
Orquesta Solfónica de Madrid
The Orquesta Solfónica de Madrid (Solphonic Orchestra of Madrid) is a self-organized orchestra that was formed in the context of the social movement 15M and that has gained popularity for playing classical music in demonstrations and acts of social protest.
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."
“He describes it as a “family theme park unsuitable for small children” – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why.
Banksy’s new show, Dismaland, which opened on Thursday on the Weston-super-Mare seafront, is sometimes hilarious, sometimes eye-opening and occasionally breathtakingly shocking.
The average crow takes less than two hours to travel from Sing Sing maximum-security prison to the Whitney Museum of American Art, institutions separated by just 32 miles of land along New York’s Hudson river. Yet few humans journey between them – museums and prison are at opposite ends of our society’s self-imaginings, and their populations tend not to intersect.
Brian Larney is an AI.tivist or American Indian artist. He is also an Artivist where he performs Artivism, a concept that includes art as a form of activism.
The aim of the action is to create a fractal network of poets, where their poems will be recited, recorded, set to music, will be activistically acted as performance material in order to resist the censorship of art.
The field of action is the poets who will be born and the network that will be created by the restless artists.
Julius Eastman was a Black and Queer avant garde, minimalist composer and performer from the 1960s-1980s. He used his platform to advocate for the rights and livelihoods of Black and queer people through his unique musical aesthetic and the controversial naming of his pieces, including "Gay Guerrilla," "Evil N-word" and "Crazy N-Word"
Happy Hippie Foundation was created by American singer Miley Cyrus in 2014. The organization based out of Los Angeles is an initiative geared toward ending abuse, intolerance, and discrimination facing LGBTQ youth - often leading to homelessness. By using her visual and vocal artistry to raise awareness concerning homelessness and AIDS prevention, Cyrus is able to set an example and create lasting influence.