“Piano Stairs” is an interactive playful musical stairway installation created into the Odenplan underground station of Stockholm to make people use stairs more often than elevator. The project was part of a Wolkswagen initiative called “The fun theory” whose main objective and mission is to “change people’s behaviour for the better by making it fun to do.”
As massacres, civil wars, and violence permeated communities, people have searched for asylum in other countries. Due to its location and relative safety, Spain has become a common destination for immigrants seeking a better life. Female immigrants in particular tend to experience much more arduous journeys in that they frequently are subjugated to sexual abuse.
During a cold January morning in 2020, Animanaturalis, a nonprofit group focused on ending the suffering of animals across Spain and Latin America gathered to protest the use, production, and sale of fur in Spain. In a blog post on their website, the group discusses the horrid living conditions on fur farms as well as statistics and alternatives related to fur sales (Animanaturalis, n.d.).
Keith Haring was an American artist and activist in 1980s New York, whose artwork raised awareness on social issues at the time. One the main awareness campaigns Haring participated on was AIDS awareness and activism.
The new exhibit “MESH” at Portland Art Museum features Indigenous contemporary artists advocating for change
Visual artist, writer and activist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith says she considers herself a wartime artist.
She is a member of the Klamath tribes and lives in Modoc Point, Oregon. When asked about how history influences her work, the answer weaves through over 150 years of white colonization and Indigenous struggles in the West:
The Violence Against Women (VAW) Art Map was conceptualized in the fall of 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement by Dr. Lauren Stetz, as part of her doctoral research in Art Education with a minor in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.
Six months before Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc in the Caribbean, a group of Puerto Rican artists were invited to participate in a residency program in Miami by local art organizations. The artists were offered abandoned storefronts-turned-studios at a historic downtown mall, where they’d exhibit their work during Miami Art Week in December to engage an art world that often overlooks the island territory.
Today’s Bad Bitch Award goes to Karmenife Paulino, a 22-year-old graduate of Wesleyan University. Raped at a fraternity during her freshman year, she reasserted her sexual agency in a photoshoot entitled “Reclamation,” where she poses as a dominatrix on fraternity grounds.
ONGOING ORGANIZATION:
CALLED: Iranti [pronounced írantì] is the Yoruba word for ‘memory’. Largely found in South West Nigeria and parts of Benin Republic, the Yoruba people consider memory a prized form of intelligence which determines how often one remembers what they see and hear.
“My image was inspired by the #MeToo Revolution, my personal experiences with the male gaze and a healthy amount of frustration and repulsion. What I hope to convey in this image is the sense of verbal, physical and energetic male ownership that is placed on women in society.”
— Beata Kruszynski is a freelance illustrator and art teacher in Ontario, Canada.
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
Environmental activist Ella Daish has created a giant tampon applicator as part of a protest against single-use plastic. The piece is made out of period plastic found polluting beaches, waterways, and local ecosystems in the UK. Daish sourced 1,200 applicators from 15 different locations across the United Kingdom. Of the plastic applicators collected for the project, 87.5 percent came from one brand, Tampax.
Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, established their collaborative named Birdhead in 2004. Both natives of Shanghai, their work is deeply rooted in their hometown and its evolution amid China’s growth into a global power. The duo takes diaristic snapshots, highlighting their everyday lives in the quickly changing city.
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.
“It could have been me,” Jean-Michel Basquiat would say at the mere mention of the untimely death of Michael Stewart. Stewart, a 25-year-old artist, was allegedly drawing on the walls of the subway on 15 September 1983 when he was approached by transit cops who then placed him under arrest.
By NAZANIN LANKARANI
PARIS — Five years after his rise to the top of the Chinese contemporary art market, Yue Minjun has something new to smile about.
Best known for his large-scale paintings depicting his own smiling face, Mr. Yue, who is based in Beijing, has long been a star of the Chinese contemporary art scene, having achieved commercial success through a highly singular aesthetic.
Latin American Artist María María Acha-Kutscher takes photographs from social and feminist movements and turns them into stunning pop art illustrations.
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?
"Disasters of War in East Ukraine"
1235 Ocean Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11230
October 10, 11 am – November 11, 7 pm
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 7 pm
Please write to racc.ny@mail.ru or call (347) 662 1456
The artist is available for interviews.
Gregg Segal -- a California-based artist who is known for using the medium of photography to explore culture with the "sensibility of a sociologist" -- travelled around the world asking kids to keep a journal of everything they ate in a week. Once the week was up, Segal made a portrait of the child with the food arranged around them:
Last week, Tunisia's tallest minaret went under the brush of the country's hottest muralist. On the Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabes, 31-year-old eL Seed painted a verse from the Quran preaching tolerance, a message meant for Salafist Islamists who protested "provocative" pieces at an art exhibition earlier this summer.