Text by Jessica Stewart
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In Virginia, one artist is helping his community reclaim a controversial monument in the name of Black Lives Matter. The Robert E. Lee Monument now stands as the only remaining Confederate statue on Richmond's historic Monument Avenue. While litigation ties up the statue's removal, light projection artist Dustin Klein is using his art to change the meaning of this contentious monument.
The exhibition Law of the Journey is Ai Weiwei’s multi-layered, epic statement on the human condition: an artist’s expression of empathy and moral concern in the face of continuous, uncontrolled destruction and carnage.
It was a quick turnaround for federal employers to recognize Juneteenth as a new federal holiday. But some cities were ready with new statues honoring George Floyd, whose killing by police in Minneapolis last year sparked a nationwide racial justice movement.
Filmmaker Michael Moore has called for a nationwide boycott of Walgreens after the pharmacy chain announced it would not sell abortion pills in 20 states.
n February, 20 Republican state attorneys general wrote to Walgreens Corp. threatening legal action if Walgreens provides the abortion pill, mifepristone, to consumers in their pharmacies across the U.S.
A coalition of more than twenty national arts funders has launched an emergency relief fund that will provide millions of dollars to artists struggling financially in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, which has more than 400,000 confirmed cases of the virus. The Andrew W.
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.
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Five years after first appearing on the cobblestones of Wall Street, the “Fearless Girl” statue – a petite but controversial symbol for gender equality – is taking on a new digital form.
Our project aims to show people that joy can be an act of resistance and resilience in the face of global justice issues when harnessed in the right way. The sharing of joy can also act as a connector in a society that continues to grow more polarised through the division of social media and mainstream media.
To state or chant ‘BLACK LIFE’S MATTER’ is not to say other lives don’t matter, it’s a reminder that four hundred years and counting, black lives didn’t matter enough. Not during the dark era of slave trade and its horrors on the African, not after slavery ended and blacks were left holding the short end of the stick.
In December – as many around the globe were preparing for the holidays – Sama, a former attorney, remained hunkered down in her house in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to comprehend how her world had changed.
After the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, misogynistic sentiments were amplified due to Trump's policy positions and rhetoric. One position Trump made clear was against Planned Parenthood, which largely threatened women's reproductive rights and access to healthcare.
This week, I got to make history. At 18 years of age, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of London for my work in climate justice, making me the current youngest holder of the award globally.
Lil Baby, a popular American rapper, released a song titled "The Bigger Picture" in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that took place following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
In the 1970s, Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, transformed six blocks of the main downtown shopping street into a pedestrian zone in 1972, despite fierce objections from the merchants. He quickly accomplished this change in just three days by installing paving, lighting, planters, and furniture. The once-resistant merchants were impressed by the increase in their business and soon demanded an expansion of the traffic-free district.
In March 1939, a 23-year-old Billie Holiday walked up to the mic at West 4th's Cafe Society in New York City to sing her final song of the night. Per her request, the waiters stopped serving and the room went completely black, save for a spotlight on her face.
On September 16, 1932, in his cell at Yerwada Jail in Pune, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi begins a hunger strike in protest of the British government’s decision to separate India’s electoral system by caste.
In recent years, a fashion for painting the human figure has preoccupied the art world, with an emphasis on race, gender and other urgent social issues. Yet another pressing topic in America has been curiously absent from art: abortion, which became all the more timely when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
Melissa is a down-to-earth, friendly woman in her 50s, and it seems that she has always met life with a certain amount of courage. She grew up on another continent, and after early motherhood, then divorce and a first career in business, she moved to the UK with her second husband. She then built another career working with survivors of domestic violence, before setting up a climate emergency centre in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
When we think about the protectors of our oceans, our mind is instantly drawn to the image of the lifeguard. Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff in bright red swimsuits, their enviable bodies on show, as they run along the coastline. As a result our concept of the role has an elitism about it.
For some, October 14, 1968, was a clarion call to the future.
On that day, a group of 12 black students at UC Santa Barbara, tired of the unequal treatment and passive-aggressive racism they received as Black athletes — and as members of the campus community at large — barricaded themselves in the university’s North Hall.
Many girls in China may have seen the advertisements of egg donation as a surrogate, in hospitals, schools, public toilets, shared bikes, ATMs...... They are everywhere and the number of this kind of advertisements is large. Though there are lots of girls who have never seen such advertisements or would never believe in them, there would still be some girls who would dial the numbers on the advertisements.
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.
Asian Americans standing up for themselves, the Black Lives Matter movement, and their home: New York City
In 2020, as COVID-19 flared through New York City and NYC hospitals saw a spike of nearly 200,000 patients, Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) faced an added threat: blame, racism, and xenophobia.
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.