El Rey de la Ruina, aka The King of Ruin, is a local artist based in Madrid, Spain, who creates artistic activist pieces that range from the impact Covid-19 had on the social life of people in Spain, to the impact gentrification has taken on various groups of people. He tends to utilize (at least in his more recent pieces) bright colors and fun, geometric shapes in his art.
The project involved creating portraits of garbage pickers from the Jardim Gramacho landfill near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using materials found in the landfill itself.
Muniz worked with the garbage pickers to create the portraits, which were then photographed and exhibited in galleries around the world. The project aimed to raise awareness of the plight of the garbage pickers and the environmental issues associated with landfill waste.
As the death toll from Israel’s attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip continues to rise, a guerrilla projection on May 13, 2021 illuminated a building in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood with messages of solidarity with Palestinians.
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.
The internet has reshaped the ways we learn and communicate. Information becomes heuristic, concomitantly - knowledge becomes protean. If you dedicate enough time to any particular platform, you are likely to acquire a community with congenial individuals. Social media’s proliferation has obfuscated the lines between reality and fiction. Embraced as a tool for many, these digital spaces typically have no monitoring process.
The two Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have worked together to make captivating artworks. Allora and Calzadilla are known for their interactive art pieces in public, often addressing social and political issues and engaging questions of history, geopolitics, and culture.
Birds Watching I, 2018 was created for Storm King Art Center's Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, in partnership with NRDC, which ran from May–Nov 2018, and featured 100 U.S. climate-threatened species derived from Audubon's first report. That work was reinstalled as a public sculpture in Chicago on the elevated 606 Bloomingdale Trail between St. Louis Ave. and Kimball Ave. and is fully-accessible via the Spaulding Ave. ramp.
CENTRO San Antonio's Art Everywhere Project will celebrate its 5th anniversary in May.
As of May 2024, the project had seen numerous artists from the city's urbancore decorate areas of the city with elaborate murals reflecting the city's history and the diversity of cultures in the city.
In Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.”
On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.
Last month, Birds Aren’t Real adherents even protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.
Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was born into the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico, and when his family moved to Chicago in 1967, he became interested in activism. After leaving high school early, he worked in various industries and began to use art as part of his activism work.
This wonderful campaign of Earth Action Network against mountaintop removal coal mining focused not on the invulnerable mining companies, but on the banks that financed them - and especially PNC, which based its growth model on recruiting university students. It stopped both PNC and then, because of that, ALL banks from financing mountaintop removal coal mining.
In 1930, the Indian National Congress adopted satyagraha (essentially, nonviolent protest) as their main tactic in their campaign for independence. Mahatma Gandhi was appointed to develop a plan of action; he proposed marching to the sea to make salt in defiance of the Salt Act of 1882.
Fashion designers from L.A. to Milan are picking up their shears in solidarity to do their part to prevent the spread of COVID-19 to at-risk patients and primary care providers.
The Scheherazade Project is a Performing Arts Non-profit based in Washington DC. Co-founders Lisa Leibow and Julia Alvarez were inspired by Scheherazade in the Arab classic 1001 Nights and created The Scheherazade Project.
For more information, our website is https://thescheherazadeproject.org/The-Scheherazade-Project
Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions.
From Public Delivery:
"The art piece, which was showcased at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington D.C. from February 1 to 17, 2019, allowed visitors to interact with it. The audience had a pile of crumbs placed right in front of the three-walled setup, which they would through and watch as ‘Ivanka’ vacuumed them all up.
Originally a project of San Francisco-based art and design studio Rebar, Park(ing) Day participants from Tucson to Tehran set up temporary installations ranging from simple unrolled sod to art galleries and even free health clinics.
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.
The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments and blocked major intersections in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform — a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military.
In August 2015, Weston-Super-Mare - a sleepy seaside town in Somerset, England - suddenly became the top destination for the metropolitan elite, welcoming celebrity guests like Brad Pitt, Jack Black and Mark Ronson. Overnight this quaint town, just 18 miles from Bristol, was transformed by anonymous street artist Banksy when he opened his very own dystopian Disneyland style theme park called ‘Dismaland’.
Kurokawa Cup is a protest against former head Tokyo prosecutor Hiromu Kurokawa's de facto immunity after he had played mahjong for money, which is an illegal act in Japan.
The Violence Against Women (VAW) Art Map was conceptualized in the fall of 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement by Dr. Lauren Stetz, as part of her doctoral research in Art Education with a minor in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.
On June 26, contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang released the daytime firework display ‘When the Sky Blooms with Sakura’ at Yotsukura Beach in Iwaki City, as commissioned by Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello.
"To that end, in the Spring of 2014 we launched the Chasing Ice Ohio Tour in an attempt to use the film to shift the political conversation around climate change. As a society, for us to address climate change properly, we need our leaders in Washington to stop debating about whether or not it is actually happening and start taking action.