In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.
Haiti is a conservative society where Roman Catholicism shapes many of its social norms. Patriarchal norms, says Haitian feminist Pascale Solages, co-founder and general coordinator of feminist organization Nègès Mawon, have informed its strict views on abortion. In Haiti, women can’t legally access voluntary abortions. Doctors can’t perform them unless the woman’s life is in danger.
Environmental activist Ella Daish has created a giant tampon applicator as part of a protest against single-use plastic. The piece is made out of period plastic found polluting beaches, waterways, and local ecosystems in the UK. Daish sourced 1,200 applicators from 15 different locations across the United Kingdom. Of the plastic applicators collected for the project, 87.5 percent came from one brand, Tampax.
“I really wanted to highlight the strength of the human condition. When we work together we’re stronger,” Meredith Stern says of her exhibition “Cooperation Cats: 10 years, 20 prints” at AS220’s Project Space, 93 Mathewson St., Providence, from Feb. 1 to 29.
“As an educator, I want people to have a sense of empowerment. I want them to have ownership of their own creative experience. It’s a very humane thing knowing we are inherently creative.”
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.
On the occasion of the European Cultural Capital Graz 2003, WochenKlausur developed a year-long program of activities for older people with severe mental disabilities. The object was to offer them opportunities for a change of their daily routine inside the home.
The Mirror Casket project is a sculpture, performance, and visual call to action designed and orchestrated by a collaborative of St. Louis community artists in response to the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO.
FloodNet was a conceptual artwork and a tool for online collective action.
Developed by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), it took the form of a Java applet that allowed users to send useless requests or personalized messages to a remote web server in a coordinated fashion, thereby slowing it down and filling its error logs with words of protest and gibberish—a kind of virtual sit-in.
from "Laugh, O Revolution: Humor in the Egyptian Uprising" by Anna Louie Sussman, in 2011.
Revolutions can be messy. They can be tragic. As long as the Internet is working, they can be tweeted. And, as Egyptians demonstrated during their 18 days of protest, they can also be funny.
“Potholes!” That’s what Nikola Pisarev, a co-founder of the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in North Macedoniona responded with when asked what sort of impact creative activism can have. Nikola went on to explain what he meant, describing a series of actions that they had staged in small towns and municipalities across the nation. As is the case in many countries, Macedonia is plagued with official corruption.
In a video uploaded on Sunday, YouTuber MrBeast announced that he was going to help “1000 blind people see for the first time” by sponsoring their cataract surgeries. “It’s gonna be crazy,” MrBeast says, in front of an audience of applauding patients. Throughout the video, MrBeast—real name Jimmy Donaldson—talks to people about their blurred eyesight before their surgery.
During the current COVID-19 outbreak in New York, many transgender people are experiencing a loss of income that, over the next few days, may increase dramatically.
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.
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.
A start-up has launched a line of clothing that confuses artificial intelligence (AI) cameras and stops them from recognizing the wearer.
Italian start-up Cap_able is offering its first collection of knitted garments that shields the wearer from the facial recognition software in AI cameras without the need to cover their face.
Called the Manifesto Collection, the clothing line includes hoodies, pants, t-shirts, and dresses.
If you’ve spent a decent amount of time on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with the concept of K-pop fancams. The short clips of live performances, primarily by South Korean acts, often dominate replies on the app and are hated by many. This week, however, the social phenomenon has taken over in a different way: to fight for the rights of Black Lives Matter protesters seeking justice after the death of George Floyd.
Denes's project "Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule" in Finland is a monumental earthwork involving the planting of 11,000 trees by 11,000 people on a reclaimed gravel pit. It's designed to grow over the next 400 years, serving as a testament to environmental stewardship and the potential for regeneration.
The Free Breakfast for School Children Program was initiated at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland by the Black Panther Party. The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area.
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.
For one artist, the ugly and the beautiful are equivalent concepts. In 2018, designer and artist Choi Jeong Hwa featured an exhibition titled 'Alchemy' at The Artling where he uses recycled and non-biodegradable materials in his work that he has been collecting for 30 years, such as household trash, glass, and steel. 'Dandelion' is one of his masterpieces installed in the outdoors in Seoul, South Korea.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
Godfrey Mwampembwa, popularly known as Gado, has been holding politicians accountable for nearly 30 years. Now, his concern has shifted to the coronavirus.
In a quiet office on the third floor of a building in Nairobi’s central business district, the cartoonist known by his pen name, Gado, was sketching a satire about the coronavirus.
The play celebrates the life and legacy of the Mexican-American labor activist César Chávez. His early life as well as his partnership with Dolores Huerta, activism with the National Farm Workers Association, the 1968 grape boycott, and his ongoing commitment to nonviolent civil rights work.
The Dannenröder Forest in central Germany, is known, affectionately, by those who are trying to protect it, as “Danni”. Danni is an old growth forest – whole sections of it have grown and evolved without direct human influence – but for the last four decades it has been threatened by the building of a new motorway which, if built, would cut this showpiece of sustainable forestry in half.