El Sistema, also known as The National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestra and Choir, was established in Venezuela in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan educator, musician and activist. The music education program operates within the voluntary sector and is funded publicly.
"Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted it. They are compiled with found audio that evidences their final moments.
Claudio Abbado was an Italian orchestra director (1933 - 2014) who served as chief director at La Scala Theater in Milan from 1968 - 1985. After 18 years of absence, in 2009, he was invited to conduct a concert there. He accepted upon condition that, instead of paying him a monetary honorarium, the city would commit to the planing of 90.000 trees in the city of Milan.
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.
Two members of the Yes Lab brought a dozen thrift-store suits to Zuccotti Park and asked for volunteers. Then, within earshot of the police, the group made a human microphone announcement about a "highly risky, very arrestable" action. Then, together with a brand-new police escort, the group headed towards the Wall Street Bull chanting "Castrate the bull!" and other angry slogans. More police joined.
Vem Pra Rua is a nonpartisan, democratic, and pluralist movement that emerged in response to society’s fight for a better Brazil. Brazilians of all regions, social classes, and ages began mobilizing at the end of 2014—building on the 2013 marches that protested corruption, inequality, and other socio-economic and political problems.
In a collaboration with fellow artist @vyalone on Instagram, Lucinda Hinojos or La Morena as the artist is known recently completed this mural in Phoenix which showcases the Native American culture of the people indigenous to the area. La Morena said in a post about the project on Facebook, "This mural is about reclaiming space, reclaiming our roots, our identity and finding our truth.
The signature angst of our time was profoundly expressed in the poems submitted for WOMAWORDS Literary Press June 2020 edition, Imaging Life After COVID-19, offering women poets an opportunity to write about their experience of the pandemic and their vision of or for the future. The universal trauma wrought by this virus, invisible and silent and pouncing with madness and mendacity, brings us to a place we’d like to forget but never will.
Being a Kuwaiti citizen makes you feel like you belong to Kuwait, as nationality is a legal relationship between a person and a state. But what if you are a “halfie” and are finding it hard to answer the question “Where are you from?” Those whose fathers are Kuwaiti are automatically considered Kuwaitis but those whose moms are Kuwaiti and fathers are not, they are not granted the nationality, even if they are born here.
It all started a few months ago, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art got a phone call from Valerie Castile.
Castile is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016. Valerie Castile has since founded the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which helps victims of gun violence.
Philadelphia poet laureate Trapeta B. Mayson launched the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line (1-855-763-6792), a toll-free telephone line that offers callers a 90-second poem by a Philadelphia-connected poet. A new poem will be featured each Monday throughout 2021.
President of Taiwan, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party(DDP), Tsai Ing-wen, at a press conference with no early forecast on August 28, 2020, announcing that from January 1, 2021, American pigs containing ractopamine (Ractopamine) will be opened for those over 30 months old U.S. cattle are imported. Furthermore, the administrative order has only a 7-day notice period.
The veteran Malian master puppeteer Yaya Coulibali, born in 1959 in the village of Koula, around 100 kilometres north-east of Bamako, has more than half a century of experience in puppetry and has toured the world to perform his art.
“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.
In her curatorial project Making Way, Ruth Simbao brought together works that complicated the idea of globalization’s effect on African nations, especially the idea that the new phase would usher in an almost frictionless movement of labor and capital across borders. Works by artists like Athi-Patra Ruga reflected on questions of how bodies moved through settler colonialist spaces.
On Friday night, as U.S. television screens burned with images of peaceful protests turning violent, Nike released a new socially conscious ad calling on Americans to do something quite different than the brand’s usual call to “Just Do It.” Instead, one of the nation’s leading athletic apparel companies called on individuals to not turn their back on the painful issue of racism in the United States.
Museums and art galleries are not usually the sites of feminist political protest. Yet over the past couple of years, before the lockdown, gallery visitors all over the UK had noticed a small, determined activist whose modus operandi is “Small signs, big questions, fabulous wardrobe”.
Two children stand back-to-back, but they are facing two very different Chicagos. One child blows bubbles in a park under blue skies. The other wears a gas mask against a backdrop of scrap metal and billowing smokestacks.
The Wisdom of the Universe was painted in 2014 by Métis artist, author, and activist Christi Belcourt. Based in Northeastern Ontario, Belcourt is best known for her large-scale acrylic paintings — like this one — that use hundreds of thousands of tiny dots to simulate Métis beadwork. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, where The Wisdom of the Universe lives, the painting has become a popular sight.
The Hong Kong 1 July protests are a surprising sight on the often chaotic stress. This day marks the transfer of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China (PRC) and is a public holiday it was originally thought to be a day of celebration. However, now it is mostly known for hundreds of thousands of people flooding the streets who protest for democracy, universal suffrage, and other political concerns.
In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently.
"Built from the ground up by Black trans coders and developers, The Black Trans Archive takes the form of a video game, allowing visitors to interact with its content in real-time, making their own contributions in the process. It’s also specifically designed to ensure that this work can never be deleted, allowing everything contained within it to persist long beyond anyone who was involved in its creation.
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."