‘‘HAMILTON,’’ the new musical biography of Alexander Hamilton created by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, kicks off with a doozy of a question. The houselights rise on Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States and, infamously, the killer of Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Burr steps to center stage and reels off several lines of verse:
In Hong Kong in 2014 the song Raise Your Umbrella by Denise Ho and Anthong Wong became an anthem for the pro-democracy movement known as the Umbrella Revolution. The song was written after police fired tear gas into the crowds when protestors filled the streets.
Tate Modern considers activists' wind turbine for art collection: Liberate Tate, an art collective who object to BP sponsorship, have offered the 16 metre turbine blade to the gallery
A 1.5 tonne, 16.5 metre-long wind turbine blade carried last month to the Tate Modern by artists objecting to the gallery's sponsorship by oil company BP is being considered for the national art collection.
We Animals is an ambitious project which documents, through photography, animals in the human environment. Humans are as much animal as the sentient beings we use for food, clothing, research, experimentation, work, entertainment, slavery and companionship. With this as its premise, We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat nonhuman animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance.
A gun violence prevention group has released videos in which they trick famous pro-gun figures into addressing a sea of empty chairs, representing children and teenagers who were shot and killed before they could graduate from high school.
Change the Ref, a gun safety organization founded by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was murdered in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, released the videos Wednesday.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.
On Tuesday evening, at the end of an action staged by Occupy Museums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza, three members of The Illuminator were arrested. Earlier in the evening, police had moved protestors to a cordoned area on the opposite side of the street from the museum; a substantial police presence remained throughout the evening, but no other arrests took place.
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.
Bea Camacho is a visual and performance artist from the Philippines, the provocation of whose work is described as exciting and strikingly into identity, intimacy, and isolation. Her art is known to delve into the human complex of experiences and offer a layered narrative within its visual and performance medium.
Sewing and textiles have always been a part of the artist Aram Han Sifuentes’ life. Her South Korean immigrant parents operated a dry cleaning business, and she mended her own clothing from a young age.
What seemed to be a cruel and bizarre PR campaign took over Amsterdam yesterday as a barge with an apparently drugged polar bear, a Russian child superstar, and a colorful marching band wound through Amsterdam's canals to the city zoo. There, visitors and staff watched Gazprom and Shell reps officiously give the bear to Amsterdam—before being forcibly removed by zoo security and city police.
In the early 1980s Keith Haring created hundreds of drawings in the New York subway system. He used chalk to paint on unused advertising space, which was covered with black sheets of paper. Haring was caught and fined numerous times.
WACENA, was established in the year 2008 by a number of concerned mothers together with women students from Makerere University Kampala with a purpose of addressing and alleviating the acute and long-term consequences of violence against the women and children of Uganda.
A protest on June 18, 2022 took place in the Guadalquivir River in Seville, where fifty Greenpeace activists used their bodies and environment to stage a demonstrative performance, highlighting the water crisis that the Andalusian region is predicted to face as a result of anthropogenic climate change. The area is at extreme risk of increased temperatures and pervasive droughts, which will impact the river that is the subject of the demonstration.
On Thursday 18th December 2014, dozens of leading international health activists staged a colorful protest in front of Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, Spain - highlighting the high prices of Gilead's new hepatitis C treatment, Sovaldi. The medicine costs approximately 40,000 euros in Spain, and $84,000 in the United States, leading to the exclusion from treatment of the majority of patients.
Without water, life would not exist. And yet, those of us in developed countries take it for granted; our shelves are stocked with hundreds of branded bottles, and it is freely given at restaurants, at schools, and even in parks. We seem to have an unslakable thirst for it; attained in excess, we throw it away like dirt—just as many developing countries liken its value to gold.
Cartoons Against Corruption is a cartoon based campaign by political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi to support anti corruption movement in India, best known for sharp hard hitting anti corruption cartoons. Using national emblems and current political news, Trivedi creates cartoons that don't attempt to skirt the issues at hand, but portrays his political stance straightforwardly.
Something Terrible is the story of Trippe’s childhood sexual abuse and painful struggle with its psychological aftermath. Though the comic itself is sparsely scripted and free of gory details, Trippe provides an afterword that relates the hard facts: he was raped as a child by a teenager, and for three days. The older boy, who took advantage of the trust of someone much too young, threatened Trippe’s family and used a gun as persuasion.
Mind Over Media is a crowdsourced educational platform that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics.
Since 2020, university students across China have launched a grassroots initiative to combat menstrual stigma by placing “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in campus restrooms. These boxes, often accompanied by signs reading “Take one if you need it, donate if you can,” provide free sanitary pads to anyone caught off guard by their period—offering both practical relief and a symbolic challenge to the cultural silence surrounding menstruation.