ArtistsActivists is a youth empowerment and advocacy organization started in 2011 by graduate students at Yale University. Through the various ArtistsActivists programs, artists and designers share their skills with young people around the world. Since more people are joining our team bringing with them certain skills and project ideas, the Artists Activists mission is constantly evolving.
Singaporean artist Lee Wen’s series Journey of a Yellow Man (1992–2012), one of his most famous and long-standing performances, was not simply a personal affront, it was a political affront. At the intersection of Asian art history, critical race theory, and migration and diasporic studies, one is never far (enough away) from the chromatic framing of race and ethnicity: yellow race, yellow peril, yellow face, the forever foreigner.
The Center for the Study of Political Graphics and the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation have combined forces to bring 75 powerful and engaging poster works on broad issues of health care to audiences traditionally excluded from the art world in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Both organizations have been in the forefront of social change for three decades.
For artists exploring themes of violence towards humans and animals, there is a fine line between thoughtfully engaging and needlessly shocking the viewer; being sensationally explicit can turn people away while being tacit or innocuous may fail to make an impact.
ARTS/CULTURE
FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
South Korean artist Do Ho Suh is internationally known for his ghostly, diaphanous architecture and fabric-made objects, which create imaginary spaces that are physically present yet impossible to inhabit. His large-scale, immersive, but impermanent installations serve as “acts of memorialization,” exploring themes of identity, home, and the tension between personal and public space.
Transfixed by racial, political, and socioeconomic tensions saturating the news, movement artists Jon Boogz and Lil Buck, enveloped by the art of Alexa Meade, switch off the TV and release their emotion into a stirring dance that is both a lament and a spirited call to action.
These graffiti artists were given carte blanche over an entire warehouse to do with what they wanted. The result? Everything from the soundtrack from the videography, editing and the painting is just absolute brilliance.
To state or chant ‘BLACK LIFE’S MATTER’ is not to say other lives don’t matter, it’s a reminder that four hundred years and counting, black lives didn’t matter enough. Not during the dark era of slave trade and its horrors on the African, not after slavery ended and blacks were left holding the short end of the stick.
Song Byeok is one of the most acclaimed Korean artists living today. He is from North Korea, where he was a propaganda artist for the North Korean government for two decades. After defecting in 2002, Byeok has turned his prolific creativity into powerful, satirical art using North Korea’s ruling culture as motifs.
Based in Minnesota, Morales creates prints and posters that address environmental and social justice issues. His art is used in grassroots movements, combining vivid imagery with messages of resistance and hope.
How would you describe Mixer?
Anis Bennaceur: It’s a professional network for creatives—people working in arts, fashion, film and media, and music. You can showcase your work, past projects to everyone else on the platform, and you can search, discover, connect, and collaborate with a lot of other incredible and talented people working in those industries. Also, every member is vetted by our team, so we ensure the quality of the userbase.
Two climate change activists targeted an Emily Carr painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Saturday.
In a social media post by the account Stop Fracking Around on Twitter, a video shows two activists dousing a painting with an unknown liquid that is said to be maple syrup per the tweet.
The two activists then apparently glued themselves to the wall underneath the painting.
After researching several potential sites as far afield as Baltimore, Eisenbach and Ruppert “became attracted to the library because the plaza has never been used,” Eisenbach says, citing the fact that the library’s second-level entrance onto the plaza is locked.
Iran is a nation with a fine art tradition that stretches back thousands of years; its reputation for contemporary fashion design less so. Writing that from an external, Western perspective may read unduly dismissive, but it’s a statement that holds up even from within the country’s borders, Shiva Vaqar assures us. “Being a designer has never really been considered a serious job here,” she says over the phone from Tehran.
Samaria Rice, left, and Terrence Spivey welcome the crowd at the Tamir Rice Sweet 16 event to raise funds for a new youth oriented cultural center Thursday, June 14th, 2018, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo by Tim Harrison/Special to The Plain Dealer
Inspired to carry on Tamir's legacy
Lynn Neuman, director of New York City–based Artichoke Dance, became preoccupied with single-use disposability after she started wondering about waste and who was responsible for it. For some of her performances, she has collected massive quantities of discarded plastics, like bags and six-pack rings, and invited community members to contribute their own. “There’s a real aha moment when people see how quickly plastic amasses,” she says.
The user muchachafanzine on instagram is an activist who writes a "decolonial native xicana feminist fanzine". They are an online activist and they spread their message through their page, the zine, and through merchandise. Daisy Salinas began Muchacha Fanzine as a feminist punk zine in 2011. Over the years, Muchacha has grown into a larger, submission-based compilation of work by marginalized voices from around the world.
Counterspace is an independent curatorial platform functioning as the first decolonial thinktank mapping cultural activism worldwide. It shapes collectively decolonial toolkits with common tools and resources, and a global directory browsable by continent, praxis, and social construct, as a Beuys-inspired ‘social sculpture’ revisited, and an alternative map of the universe.
Founded by Bobby Gordon and Nayeli Adorador Knudsen, The Melrose Poetry Bureau is a public intervention involving a whole lot of typewriters, a public space, and the chaos that ensues. Once a location is picked for an intervention, Bobby and Nayeli pack up their collection of old and new, sleek and saggy typewriters and transport them to that place. They set up tables, distribute the typewriters, and invite people to come write poetry.
"It appears that Banksy has struck again, this time painting the brick wall of the former Reading Prison in Berkshire, England, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years over his “indecent” affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.
When Europeans of the 18th and 19th centuries established their grandest museums, each building meant to unite the world’s cultural heritage under a single roof, they had no doubt as to who should explain it all: themselves. They took a Eurocentric view, categorizing the spoils of colonial enterprise by nation and region, splitting art from craft, and nature from culture.
The yarn bombing started with Louise Moerup’s school run in central Copenhagen. On the walk through the park each morning, she and her 10-year-old son would often discuss a naked statue of the goddess Venus there and wonder why there weren’t more statues of real women instead.