Projects tagged "Activates (people)"

Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Benjamin Lay spills blood at 1738 Quaker Meeting
Practitioner:
Benjamin Lay
Date:
Sep 1 1738
It was September 1738, and Benjamin Lay had walked 20 miles, subsisting on “acorns and peaches,” to reach the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Beneath his overcoat he wore a military uniform and a sword — both anathema to Quaker teachings. He also carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice.
Hundreds Gather at Utah Capitol in Protest of New Transgender Rights Related Bills
Practitioner:
House Health and Human Services Committee, Equality Utah, Human Rights Commission, American Civil Liberties Union
Date:
Jan 25 2022
Lawmakers in a Utah House committee soundly rejected a bill that would have penalized doctors for giving gender-affirming health care to minors, then moments later approved legislation that included similar restrictions on transgender health care — minus the punishment — on party line during a lengthy committee meeting Tuesday.
Artists Tried to Activate Voters With Billboard Art. Did It Work?
Practitioner:
Hank Willis Thomas
Date:
Jan 13 2025
On Nov. 6, the day after the presidential election, the artist Hank Willis Thomas was at his studio in Brooklyn. His production assistants were poring over tables strewed with blobby red white and blue silk-screen prints of the words “Fragile/ Democracy / Handle With Care” in capital letters.
Feminists in France change Paris street names to celebrate inspirational women
Practitioner:
Osez le Féminisme!
Date:
Aug 27 2015
A feminist group in France has been transforming the streets of Paris after noting that just 2.6 per cent are named after notable women. Tourists on the Ile de la Cité got a surprise when they found that almost all of the street signs in central Paris had been changed overnight.
Disability Rights In The Woods
Practitioner:
Guerilla Crip
Date:
Mar 26 2026
Guerilla Crip performs disability rights poetry in her local woods to protest about the persecution, discrimination and oppression that disabled people in the UK have endured since 2010 in the UK. We are being impoverished, demonised and targeted in society and by successive governments. Enough is enough!
Women are Heroes Project
Practitioner:
JR
Date:
Jan 1 2008
In Women Are Heroes, JR introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future.
NFL-Indigenous activists to protest Kansas City Chiefs name, 'tomahawk chop'
Practitioner:
Native American groups (not specified)
Date:
Feb 11 2023
Native American groups are expected to protest the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, calling for the AFC champions to drop their name and logo as they take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl 57. The Chiefs wear the arrowhead logo on their helmet and use a large drum to kick of their home games, as fans routinely engage in what’s known as the “tomahawk chop” chant, all of which critics say draw on offensive and racist stereotypes.
Organization for the Democratization of the Visual Arts
Practitioner:
DHAdmann
Date:
Jun 10 2026
ODBK is an activist organization that aims to create a more equal, diverse, inclusive, transparent and democratic art world. ODBK seeks to do this by diversify and increase the number of people who understand and engage with contemporary art.
Trump 'played' by K-pop fans and TikTok users who disrupted Tulsa rally
Practitioner:
K-Pop Fans
Date:
Jun 21 2000
K-pop fans and users of TikTok claimed tickets to Donald Trump’s Saturday night rally in Tulsa then did not use them, as part of a coordinated effort which helped to leave hundreds of seats empty in a 19,000-capacity venue.
La Fiera en Sevilla
Practitioner:
Isaías Griñolo
Date:
Jan 1 2016
During the economic crisis of 2008, bankers in Spain took advantage of the economically disadvantaged, and the artwork La Fiera en Sevilla, or the Wild Animal in Sevilla in English, brings attention to this money-centric act from the bankers. La Fiera refers to the bankers at the time that used predatory methods in their actions to forcibly evict poor people from their houses.
Standing Man at Gezi Park
Practitioner:
Erdem Gunduz
Date:
Jun 17 2013
The 2013 protests in Turkey started on 28 May 2013, initially to contest the urban development plan for Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park. The protests were sparked by outrage at the violent eviction of a sit-in at the park protesting the plan.
Coal for the rich
Practitioner:
The Yes Men, Greenpeace, Colombia College
Date:
Apr 4 2011
Students from Colombia College teamed up with Greenpeace and The Yes Men to take on the Chicago coal industry in an elaborate, multi-layered hoax. The group created a scheme to announce that a new coal plant was planned—but instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist), this one would be built in a rich one.
Protest Outside UK Asylum-Seeker Hotel Ends in 15 Arrests
Practitioner:
civilians
Date:
Feb 11 2023
LONDON (AP) — An anti-migration protest outside a hotel housing asylum-seekers in northwest England turned violent and resulted in the arrests of 15 people, local police said Saturday. The Merseyside Police department said a police officer and two civilians sustained minor injuries during the disturbance on Friday night in Knowsley, a village located 13.5 kilometers (8.4 miles) from the city of Liverpool.
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.
Former NRA president tricked into gun violence prevention video
Practitioner:
Change The Ref
Date:
Jun 4 2021
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.
Strange Fruit: The First Great Protest Song
Practitioner:
Billie Holiday
Date:
Apr 20 1939
It is a clear, fresh New York night in March 1939. You're on a date and you've decided to investigate a new club in a former speakeasy on West 4th Street: Cafe Society, which calls itself "The Wrong Place for the Right People".
Tamms Year Ten
Practitioner:
Indecline Artist Collective
Date:
Jan 4 2013
Tamms Year Ten is an all-volunteer grassroots coalition of artists, prisoners, men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, family members and other people of conscience. In 2008, at the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Tamms supermax prison, the group launched a legislative campaign to call for its reform or closure. Men were originally supposed to be there for one year—but at that point 1/3 of them had been in solitary confinement the entire decade.
Balls Across America
Practitioner:
The Yes Men
Date:
Jan 1 2008
The Survivaball made its first appearance in 2006, when "Halliburton representatives" attended a conference on catastrophic climate change and demonstrated the functionality of the large inflatable suits ("a gated community for one"), which keep corporate managers safe from global warming. Not long afterward, in Berlin, the Yes Men learned they also work as disruptive, arrest-resistant tools.
Lil Baby “The Bigger Picture”
Practitioner:
Lil Baby
Date:
Jun 12 2020
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.
P.A.I.N.
Practitioner:
Nan Goldin
Date:
Mar 10 2017
Anti-opioid activists unfurled banners and scattered pill bottles on Saturday inside the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is named for a family connected to the powerful painkilling drug OxyContin. The protest, which was organized by a group started by the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin, started just after 4 p.m., when several dozen people converged at the Temple of Dendur inside the wing.
Why Is Iran’s Regime So Afraid of This Song?
Practitioner:
Shervin Hajipour
Date:
Sep 27 2022
“Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement—a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests—continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first released online.
Kind of Blue
Practitioner:
Jenny Holzer
Date:
Mar 2 2012
Jenny Holzer is known for her art relating to truisms. Her work has revolved around truisms and finding an artistic way to display them. Kind of Blue is another work comprising different aphorisms and truisms. It combines digital technology, reflections, and a very blue theme. Text-based art is Holzer’s specialty, and she works with it along with LED, Parking meters, and billboards .
Mind Over Media
Practitioner:
Media Education Lab
Date:
Nov 1 2017
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.
Designers launch ‘Bolsocaro’ campaign to criticize price increase in Brazil
Practitioner:
Designers in Brazil
Date:
Mar 20 2021
From a distance they look like supermarket promotion ads, but up close, the text says the reverse: it details the skyrocketing food prices. This is the proposal of the action “Bolsocaro”, which spread posters (those known as lambe-lambes) by walls in different regions of the São Paulo capital accompanied by phrases such as “It’s very expensive”, “It’s in Bolsonaro’s account” and “This account it is not ours.
Subway Therapy
Practitioner:
Matthew Chavez
Date:
Oct 8 2016
Matthew “Levee” Chavez sits at a table in New York City’s Union Square, sporting a thrift store suit and tie, holding a sign that reads “Subway Therapy.” This act of social practice, which started as an invitation for conversation, went viral after he set up shop at the subway the day after the 2016 presidential election. He wrote “Express Yourself” on a Post-It and stuck it to the tiled wall.

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