A grey minivan rattled through São Paulo’s hilly suburbs, loaded with spray cans, paint rollers, buckets and a ladder as five street artists drove to the Atibainha river, rap lyrics blaring from their speakers.
On the sweltering afternoon of 26 February, they painted colourful protest murals on the legs of a bridge that crosses one of São Paulo’s most important water sources, nestled in the Serra da Cantareira mountain range.
DIWO (Do It With Others) is a distributed campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices instigated by arts and activist network Furtherfield in 2006.
On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson slashed Velasquez's "Rokeby Venus" with a small axe during public hours at the National Gallery in London. A militant suffragette protesting the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes in prison (and the Cat and Mouse Act which released the starving women only until they were slightly healthier only to imprison them again), Richardson released this statement after her arrest:
The Last Billboard is a 36-foot art installation located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Created in 2013, it features a steel frame and removable wooden letters that must be arranged by hand. Each month a different artist, activist or individual is invited by creator and curator, Jon Rubin, to come and utilize the billboard space. The participants share messages over this medium in the form of thoughtful questions, esoteric musings, or other visual means.
El acoso sexual a las mujeres en México, no es novedad. Desde un chiflido o grito de “mamacita” en la calle hasta una alarmante cifra de seis feminicidios diarios, la violencia machista es un asunto cotidiano.
Lo que sí es novedad es que este año las mujeres no se estén quedando calladas, y que salgan a las calles, ya no con miedo, sino con determinación de defender su derecho a ser respetadas.
"He's been running all his life, running for freedom, running for peace.It started when he ran away from home at the age of eight. Later he ran away from his homeland, Iran, and spent seven years on a bicycle, pedaling 49,700 miles across 55 countries. In 2002, he reached America. He now lives in a tent in Death Valley. It's been nearly 10 years since Reza Baluchi escaped from Iran.
In 2012, visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman started Fearless in response to the powerful protests that shook the country in response to the “Nirbhaya” tragedy in Delhi, India.
For centuries, (male) artists have perpetuated a relatively consistent image of the female nude: She’s soft, willowy, and docile. Sensual but not sexually aggressive. Flirtatious but not confrontational. She’s not quite a human but, mediated through the lens of a camera and the eyes of a man, an object of desire in the flesh.
An Israeli member of the Taiji Dolphin Action Group, with a red body painting to evoke blood, is curled up on a sheet depicting the Japanese flag, during a January 30, 2014 protest against the killing of dolphins, notably in the Japanese city of Taiji, held outside the building housing the Japanese Embassy, Tel Aviv. Similar rallies outside Japanese consulates and embassies were expected to take place worldwide.
Artist Zoran Naskovski continued his project "Mandala and Cross / farewell to arms” with analysis of media representations of social processes in 2015, that resulted with a new installation: “Mandala and Cross / blackness, refugees and economic gamble”.
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.
This action, to be released to the wider public this Friday, March 15th, was the design of t-shirts in support of British Charity, Comic Relief, an organization dedicated to bringing positive and lasting change to vulnerable youth communities in Europe (specifically in the U.K.) and various countries in Africa and, most critically, addressing the root causes of their poverty.
McDonald’s wanted children in Hong Kong to spend more time with their imagination after a study showed that children spend an average of 5 hours studying per day.
In its new ‘I’m Amazing’ campaign, the fast food chain challenges these children to draw and create their ideal McDonald’s environment.
Even though Spain is constitutionally defined as a non-confessional nation, the Catholic Church still holds great power. For example, the Catholic Church is exempt from paying certain taxes, and can reclaim certain buildings as their property. This often creates frictions and conflicts with the activist groups and organizations that would prefer a more secular political environment.
Oakland-based artist-activists Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza teamed up to form Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration working for social change. They believe that art can be an empowering reflection of
community struggles, dreams and visions, and following principles of
Xicanisma and Zapatismo, create work that translates people’s stories
When Behnaz Babazadeh was young, her family moved from Afghanistan to the US. She loved almost everything about her new home — especially America’s amazing selection of candy — but she also loved wearing her familiar pink-flowered headscarf, which she’d grown used to wearing as part of her school uniform in her old home.
In May of 2009 lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was murdered in Guatemla City. A video was released of Rosenberg directed to the Guatemalan public. If you are watching this, he said, I have been murdered by the president Alvaro Colom. The video caused an uproar and sparked protests throughout the city.
Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year fairs draw thousands of visitors who stroll past stalls of potted narcissus, snack on fish balls and snap up the latest plush toys. In recent years, the largest of the fairs, at Victoria Park, has also become a prime site for political expression.