ATHENS — The young man climbed a 30-foot scaffold on a building in central Athens and dipped a brush into a tray of gray paint. With rapid flicks of his wrist, he outlined a haunting image: a baby with two faces, looking simultaneously into an abyss and toward the sky, its vacant eyes searching for a future that was not there.
The Nahmads have been dealers in Modern art since Giuseppe Nahmad set up in Milan in 1957. But they have been the Warren Buffetts of the business, sticking to the tried and true. Now Joseph Nahmad, one of Giuseppe’s grandsons, is plunging into the shark pool of Contemporary art.
How did a pineapple become a postmodern masterpiece?
The aesthetic merits of tropical fruit inadvertently entered Britain’s national cultural conversation after two students jokingly placed a store-bought pineapple on an empty table at an art exhibition this month at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, a port city in northeastern Scotland.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
Se sacuden la desconfianza y entran al camión. En él no hay frutas, ni verduras, ni carnes. El piso, igual que el techo y las paredes están inmaculadas y pintadas de blanco. Solo ellos y algunos compañeros inmortalizados en fotos llenan el espacio.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
Two pairs of dusty, pastel-orange roller skates. A ram's skull. Several meters of tangled, bright red rope. They aren't the sort of items you'd find in the great fashion houses of Europe or on North American catwalks.
But, for unconventional Chinese designer and performance artist Wan Yunfeng, they are perfect.
From his small apartment in eastern Beijing, Wan makes fashion that only he wears.
Love is in the Air is a quintessential Banksy painting. The image of a masked militant poised to hurl a bouquet of flowers has become synonymous with the artist's indelible graphic style. One of Banksy’s most coveted works on canvas, it is an archetypal example of the artist’s use of dark humour, satire, and his perceptive, stimulating commentaries on contemporary political and social events.
“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.
This month, the art of Chinese dissident Badiucao has finally seen the light of day in Melbourne — more than a year after the Australian artist's Hong Kong exhibition was cancelled due to threats reportedly made by Chinese authorities.
In this black-and-white image, there are no strands of hair or remnants of makeup to be found, except a shaved head belonging to a South Korean. Jeon photographed this image in 2019 for her exhibition that aimed to "destroy the socially defined idea of a woman” (Kuhn 1). The visuals in this image is a brazen response to the conventional beauty standards that has been gripping South Korean women.
Just over a decade ago on May 15, 2011, a wave of social outrage began as the Spanish people collectively decided that they had had enough of the corruption, cuts, and inequalities affecting their country.
(Honoring our Origins, Ourselves and our Dreams) is an all-womyn and womyn-identified crew from the northeast San Fernando Valley dedicated to creating awareness through public art.
Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, corporations jumped on the opportunity to commodify the Black Lives Matter movement. In June of 2020, Netflix launched a Black Lives Matter collection, and by December, they had released Cops and Robbers, an animated short about racial injustice.
This project served as an educational tool to demystify the female body and bring awareness to the issues of reproductive rights and the ignorance that sometimes plagues common misconceptions about the reproductive system. I think this campaign is very successful in its approach. It exhibits paintings and displays of uterus and the female form in a non-sexual way.
Ghostbikes.org is intended to be a site for the worldwide cycling
community where those lost on dangerous streets can
be remembered by their loved ones, members of their local communities,
and others from around the world. They also hope to inspire more people to
start installing ghost bikes in their communities and to initiate
changes that will make us all safer on the streets.
The People’s Bank of Govanhill uses social and activist art practices to involve people in re-imagining the local economy, looking at how we can put feminist economics into practice in the local community.
The image is stark. And shocking.
A black man, his ankles shackled, his head hanging away from the viewer, stands in relief on a field of white. Chains stretching to the image's borders on the left and right pull his arms taut. Fourteen crimson marks crosshatch his back. Within the dark fabric that frames "86 Lashes to Go," a small rectangle is labeled simply "salt."
ODBK is an activist organization that aims to create a more equal, diverse, inclusive, transparent and democratic art world. ODBK seeks to do this by diversify and increase the number of people who understand and engage with contemporary art.
Following her sensational first ablum dedicated to the Black queer community via house and dance music, act i: RENAISSANCE, Beyonce released act ii: COWBOY CARTER in late March . The album is speculated to have come from her 2017/2018 performance of "Daddy Issues" at the Country Music Awards with the Dixie Chicks where the artist felt "unwelcomed".
By Joe Laur
Members of the creative collective Neozoon, a group of artists based in Paris and Berlin, are staging a protest against using animal furs as fashion by turning fur coats into street art graffiti.
Apparently, they are taking furs and fur garments and reshaping them into animals in action on streets, along alleyways, against walls and even on trees in parks.
"Many people have criticized Barbie dolls for their unrealistic proportions, claiming that they give young girls a warped idea of what beauty should be. To tackle this problem, Nikolay Lamm created digital visualizations of a regular-sized “Barbie” doll, hoping to promote realistic beauty standards.
Through her work, South African art activist Athenkosi Kwinana aspires to deepen the understanding of Albinism in her native country, where she has faced discrimination in most aspects of her life from childhood days on. Working with both drawing and printmaking, Kwinana creates large self-portraits that aim to constructively reimagine the representation of Albinism in the country’s black communities and African contemporary art as whole.
The collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle, a group of Kinshasa street performers turn their bodies into living sculptures, and use them to political ends. Among the artists is Jared, who regularly takes to the streets dressed as Robot Annonce. The costume, made from broken radio parts, is designed to raise awareness of fake news. “People receive so much incorrect information and many inaccuracies are spread. I want to fight this,” says Jared.