Projects tagged "Amplifies (issue or campaign)"

Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.

Horrible bosses: masked activists publicly shame businesses in Bologna
Practitioner:
Il Padrone di Merda
Date:
Oct 1 2019
On a warm summer afternoon in the Italian city of Bologna, a group of around 15 young people march through the crowded city centre to a high-end pastry shop in Strada Maggiore.
1-800-273-8255
Practitioner:
Alessia Cara, Khalid
Date:
Apr 27 2017
Rapper Logic's song "1-800-273-8255" may have helped prevent a significant number of suicides around the time of its release, according to a study published Monday.
Climate Comedy: Inspiring Climate Action Through Comedy
Practitioner:
Generation180
Date:
Jan 1 2024
The Climate Comedy Cohort is an unprecedented network of comedians who are coming together to learn, collaborate, and create hilarious new comedy informed by the hottest climate science. The Climate Comedy Cohort functions as a 9-month fellowship.
Welcome to Chechnya
Practitioner:
David France
Date:
Feb 20 2020
In February 2017, authorities in Chechnya -- a republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus -- arrested a man they suspected to be under the influence of a controlled substance. As is procedure, they searched his phone. According to a report from the Human Rights Watch, they found “explicit material” (most likely shared nude photos and gay pornography), and the contact details of dozens of gay men.
[EXPOSED] INTERACTIVE PHOTO EXHIBITION
Practitioner:
TRANSART GLOBAL, STOLEN FUTURE PROJECT
Date:
Dec 11 2021
The interactive photo exhibition is part of a creative activism project held in Ghana and Serbia to highlight the corruption around data and privacy.
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic”
Practitioner:
Dancing Through Prison Walls
Date:
Mar 24 2021
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic” features six dances written inside a prison, a 35-minute dance film, and 11 artists (seven choreographic interpreters and four formerly incarcerated narrators) conversing on dancing in carceral spaces.
Protest in Inner Mongolia against CCP's Mandarin-only Education
Practitioner:
Ethnic Mongolians in China
Date:
Sep 1 2020
Thousands of ethnic Mongolians have protested across northern China in opposition to Beijing plans to replace the Mongolian language with Chinese in some school subjects.
BLM MURAL PROJECT - TACOMA
Practitioner:
Brian Neal Sr, Danielle Jordan, Breyahna Monet, Kenya Adams, Chuck Taylor, Gwen Jones, Chloe Pargmann, Michelle Mack, Dionne Bonner
Date:
Aug 5 2020
Artists Dionne Bonner, Kenya Adams, Gwen Jones, and Charles Taylor planned the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Additional artists Breyahna Monet and Danielle Jordan joined the project in the second phase and helped complete the mural painting project.
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".
In ‘Faith Ringgold: American People’ at the MCA, an African American artist’s decades of work get their due
Practitioner:
Faith Ringgold
Date:
Dec 20 2023
Faith Ringgold, the 93-year-old doyenne of African American art, a trailblazing master who foreshadowed the recent rise of art activism and Black figuration, is having her first solo museum show in Chicago.
The Fight Against AIDS, La Radical Gai in 1994
Practitioner:
La Radical Gai
Date:
Dec 1 1994
This act of art and activism displayed in the photograph was created in 1994 by the group La Radical Gai at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic that decimated many communities in Madrid. The first case of AIDS in Spain was documented in 1982. Since that time, 85,000 people in Spain have been diagnosed with AIDS and 60,000 people have died from the deadly virus (Soriano, Ramos, Barreiro, Fernandez-Montero, 2018).
Heritage loss and the Importance of the Past
Practitioner:
Ai Weiwei
Date:
Jan 1 1995
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) by Ai Weiwei is a highly provocative work of art. This series of three black and white photographs portray the artist holding a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn that, frame by frame, he drops, it falls, and shatters. As much a work of photography as a work of performance art, in each still an unaffected Ai looks directly at the camera aware of his destructiveness.
Turtle Island
Practitioner:
Sierra Club, Sarah Younger
Date:
Apr 22 2022
The inspiration for the creation was the Common Snapping Turtle. A big shout-out to local member, Kristin Rubin and local college students, Sarah Lockhart and Alanis Gonzalez, for their assistance in the construction of the artwork.
Dismaland
Practitioner:
Banksy
Date:
Aug 22 2015
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’.
See Saws installed on Border Wall
Practitioner:
Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello
Date:
Jul 29 2019
"ALBUQUERQUE — For a brief moment — just a half-hour over the weekend — a simple piece of playground equipment served as a bridge between the United States and Mexico." “Actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side,” Ronald Rael
Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” Ignored Society’s Expectations of Women
Practitioner:
Tracey Emin
Date:
Jan 1 1999
When Tracey Emin aired her dirty laundry in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, she set a new standard for confessional art. She conceived of the installation, titled My Bed (1998), after a long, bedridden bender following a bad break-up. When Emin finally left her sheets, she examined the mess she’d created.
James Luna’s “The Artifact Piece” (1987)
Practitioner:
James Luna
Date:
Jan 1 1987
The performance artist James Luna, who died in 2018 at age 68, had a wicked sense of humor, which made his explorations of the way that Indigenous people have long been objectified, especially in museums, painfully piquant.
State Names
Practitioner:
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Date:
Jan 1 2000
"State Names" is a painting by Jaune Quick-To-See Smith. You immediately recognize the outline of the United States, but at the same time, that map is obscured and made difficult to read. It’s at once recognizable and not recognizable. She describes her use of icons as a ploy, as something that brings the viewer closer, and they think they know what they’re going to see.
Climate Protestor Smears Pink Paint on Tom Thomson Painting at National Gallery of Canada
Practitioner:
On2Ottawa
Date:
Aug 29 2023
A climate activist smeared pink paint on a Tom Thomson artwork at the National Gallery of Canada as part of activities this week drawing attention to demands for a national firefighting service. A video uploaded to Facebook by the group On2Ottawa appears to show Kaleb Suedfeld, 28, splashing paint onto Thomson’s 1915 landscape Northern River, kneeling and gluing his hand onto the floor before pulling a written speech from his pocket.
Thousands of Shoes Honor Hurricane Maria’s Victims in San Juan
Practitioner:
Rafael Acevedo, Puerto Rican citizens
Date:
Jun 1 2018
Walking the rows of shoes—favorite slippers, old Army boots, gold stilettos—it’s the baby shoes that stop you cold. Shoes began to fill a plaza opposite Puerto Rico’s Capitol building, and by Sunday morning, there were more than 3,000 pairs, a growing memorial to the roughly 4,645 people estimated to have died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)
Practitioner:
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Date:
Oct 1 1983
“It could have been me,” Jean-Michel Basquiat would say at the mere mention of the untimely death of Michael Stewart. Stewart, a 25-year-old artist, was allegedly drawing on the walls of the subway on 15 September 1983 when he was approached by transit cops who then placed him under arrest.
Penis seats for men
Practitioner:
Mexico City Government
Date:
Mar 30 2017
In a conceptually odd but undeniably memorable PSA campaign, the Mexico City Metro has installed a “penis seat” in one of its subway cars, featuring a molded likeness of a man’s torso and penis, to get male riders thinking about the sexual harassment that women endure every day. The seat is labeled “For men only.”
STICK IT TO 'EM!
Practitioner:
@stickerit2em
Date:
Feb 7 2021
#stickit2em is an all-inclusive, anti-capitalist, & pro-planet justice movement, using the clever medium of stickers!
Zou Yaqi, a Chinese woman who spent 21 days living in Beijing for free by taking advantage of inherent classism issues in China
Practitioner:
Zou Yaqi
Date:
May 1 2021
BEIJING — Like many art students, Zou Yaqi often worried she’d be unable to afford to live in Beijing after graduation. So, earlier this year, she decided to set herself a daunting challenge: Survive in the city for three weeks without spending a single yuan. It turned out to be a piece of cake. 
Black Dandyism, the 2025 Met Gala’s Theme, Has Its Roots in 18th-Century Painting
Practitioner:
The Costume Institute
Date:
May 10 2025
A young Black boy, wearing deep red livery with gold trimming, a gold earring, and red-and-white turban secured with a jeweled brooch, stares out at the viewer. Standing before a ship at sea, he hands a letter, addressed to “Monsieur le chevalier de Rohan, captain of the King’s ships at Rochefort,” to an older white man, dressed in regal-looking steel armor.

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