Main Gallery

Artistic Activism at the NYC iSchool
Practitioner:
NYC iSchool
Date:
Nov 12 2013
Students at the NYC iSchool, a high school in Manhattan, worked for 9 weeks to create works of activist art with art teacher Gretel Smith. We were lucky enough to have Stephen Duncomb and Steve Lambert from the Center for Artistic Activism come to our class to teach a lesson inspiring students to think like activists; they came back later to critique students’ works-in-progress.
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Free Hugs Campaign
Practitioner:
Juan Mann
Date:
Dec 1 2004
The Free Hugs Campaign is a social movement involving individuals who offer hugs to strangers in public places.The hugs are meant to be random acts of kindness - selfless acts performed just to make others feel better. International Free Hugs Month is celebrated on the first Saturday of July and continues until August first.
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Visions From The Inside - Art project inspired by letters by detained migrants
Practitioner:
Visions From The Inside
Date:
Aug 3 2015
CultureStrike in partnership with Mariposas Sin Fronteras , End Family Detention and 15 artists from across the country, brings you Visions From The Inside, a visual art project inspired by letters penned by detained migrants.
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Future Vote
Practitioner:
Action Office
Date:
Jan 13 2024
This project is a participatory art action initiated by the Action Office in 2024.
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Depression Quest
Practitioner:
Zoe Quinn
Date:
Aug 11 2014
Earlier this month, an anonymous message was posted to the discussion-board Web site 4chan. In it, the author threatened to hurt the video-game developer Zoe Quinn: “Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.”
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Silent Strikes in Venezuelan Universities
Practitioner:
Autonomous universities in Venezuela
Date:
Mar 5 2014
In Venezuela, the far right opposition has protested against the leftist regime of Maduro. Violence has swept through the capital, Caracas, and other cities throughout the country. Meanwhile, the Western world has had its eye on Ukraine, and received relatively little news coverage of what is actually going on in Venezuela. An epidemic of misinformation has spread as a result.
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呼吸之痛 The Pain of Breath
Practitioner:
Date:
Sep 11 2018
Pneumoconiosis has become the most serious occupational disease in China, and the vast majority of sufferers, nearly 6 million, are migrant workers. Because of the long-term inhalation of dust caused by pulmonary fibrosis, they usually breathing if not oxygen machine help, easy to suffocate.
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Male students walk a mile in red high heels to help stop sexual violence against women
Practitioner:
University of Miami students
Date:
Apr 20 2019
"University of Miami students, mostly male, walked a mile in red high heeled shoes. They are walking a mile in her shoes. The mile long walk was in support of Walk a Mile in Her Shoes®, an international men’s march to stop rape, sexual assault and gender violence. The organization, which says on Facebook that they were founded in 2001, has walks around the world.
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White paper protest
Practitioner:
Nanjing Media College Student; People in China
Date:
Nov 26 2022
The White Paper Movement was a large-scale, decentralized protest movement that erupted across China in late November 2022, initially sparked by a student demonstration at the Communication University of China, Nanjing.
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Sluts Across America
Practitioner:
Roopa Vasudevan
Date:
May 11 2012
In 2012, Sandra Fluke stood up in front of Democratic members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to advocate for the mandatory inclusion of birth control coverage in health insurance. Republicans on the committee refused to allow her to speak.
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Semiotics of the Kitchen
Practitioner:
Martha Rosler
Date:
Dec 31 1975
“Semiotics of the Kitchen” is a feminist video art that examines the symbolism of women's confinement within domestic spaces, utilizing the framework of a televised cooking show. In this piece, Rosler assumes the role of an "anti-Julia Child," wielding a series of kitchen utensils in alphabetical order, some archaic and peculiar, assigning them arbitrary names before forcefully miming their use.
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"Trading With The Enemy": Duke Riley's Pigeon Cuban Cigar Smugglers
Practitioner:
Duke Riley
Date:
Aug 1 2013
The smuggling of illicit cargo and people has played a significant role in shaping the culture as well as the economy of the southernmost american city of Key West since its foundation in 1821.
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Wait Watchers
Practitioner:
Haley Morris-Cafiero
Date:
Feb 11 2013
From the photographer's website:
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Chinese Artist Xu Bing’s Phoenix takes flight at New York
Practitioner:
Xu Bing
Date:
Mar 1 2014
Xu Bing, the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist, has brought his “Phoenix” installation to the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two phoenixes, both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors of the Cathedral, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night.
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#IAmMySong
Practitioner:
Ahmad Sarmast, Afghan girls
Date:
Mar 11 2021
In response to a memo from Afghanistan's education ministry, Ahmad Sarmast, the founder of Afghanistan's Institute of Music, began a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #IAmMySong. In response to the hashtag, Afghan girls have taken to Twitter with videos of themselves singing tagged with Sarmast's hashtag and spreading petitions against the ban. The ministry memo banned girls 12 years old and older from singing at school functions.
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TRANSummer Camp and the Ethical Clinic for Gender and Sex Characteristics
Practitioner:
Arian Kajtezovic & Trans Mreža Balkan
Date:
Oct 29 2017
The TRANSummer Camp on the Croatian coast inspired members of the Croation trans community to become creative activists, and led to a public media campaign, video series and event advertising the “opening” of a (fake) clinic for trans health. The project included an ambitious survey on the healthcare experiences and needs of trans and gender variant people in the Balkans in multiple languages.
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The Gate
Practitioner:
Igor Toshevski
Date:
Jan 1 2016
A site specific intervention аs part of the group exhibition Sculptural, organized and partly financed by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje. The text INVEST IN FUTURISM is a quotation of a gaffe uttered by the Macedonian PM on public TV stating his plans to incorporate contemporary art in their right wing populist programme and the infamous project Skopje 2014.
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Adrian Piper, Mythic Being, 1973 - 1975
Practitioner:
Adrian Piper
Date:
Jan 1 1973
Adrian Piper disguised her identity, changing her race, sex, and social class in order to experiment in public situations and gauge people’s reactions. She investigated how outwardly visible identity markers (like skin color) impacted others’ perceptions of her character. By manipulating her (apparent) identity to produce reactions, she demonstrated the power and influence of stereotypes (Piper, 1996).
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Flower People
Practitioner:
Dakotah Aiyanna
Date:
Dec 11 2020
“As a Black woman, I can grow absolutely anywhere," Aiyanna explains. "I can adapt to any storm, any weather, any changes. In the Black community, that's something that we're really good at.” So when Aiyanna, 25, was asked to contribute the first L in a Black Lives Matter mural made by a group of artists in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, she knew her letter would include a flower person.
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Spec Ops: The Line
Practitioner:
Walt Williams; Richard Pearsey
Date:
Jun 26 2012
Often in military style video games we kill without much regard for the enemy. They are faceless or stereotypical, the Nazi or evil Cold War–era Russian. They are enemies that were fought on the battlefields of great wars, or they are aliens that have no resemblance to humans save for a general humanoid form.
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