The upcoming year of fashion shows look set to be charged with climate change and environmental themes.
This year, more than ever before, we have seen that the business of fashion, at the highest levels, is responding to the push to take the very pressing issue of climate change and environmental damage seriously.
In the past few years we have seen a growing awareness and concern with Internet freedom and privacy, fuelled by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast U.S.
A television report written, directed and produced by Enmedio members Leónidas Martín and Xavier Artigas. Collective projects that see art as a kind of social relationship. Artistic interventions that target consumption, media guerrilla tactics, creative mobilisations and protest, critical projects brimming with humour and disobedience, new narratives capable of changing the existing symbols and codes.
Mounica Tata launched Doodleodrama as an online journal to improve representation for her body type in mainstream media. “I’ve always been an overweight person and bullied and shamed for the same. Only fairly recently I’ve learned to make my peace with my body. My own journey with my body inspired/continues to inspire me to talk about it.”
Se sacuden la desconfianza y entran al camión. En él no hay frutas, ni verduras, ni carnes. El piso, igual que el techo y las paredes están inmaculadas y pintadas de blanco. Solo ellos y algunos compañeros inmortalizados en fotos llenan el espacio.
Mass media using propaganda to brainwash citizens. Confusion and ignorance causing a divide. People rising up against an oppressive government. Humans being torn between rage and love. These are the themes of Green Day’s widely successful 2004 album, “American Idiot.” These themes still sound familiar. Nearly two decades later, the world, especially the United States, faces these same issues.
Spread over three institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
Yesterday morning (23 February), Led by Donkeys staged a protest in front of the Russian embassy in London, creating a large-scale public artwork in solidarity with Ukraine. The group poured litres of yellow and blue paint on each side of the carriageway on Bayswater Road. Activists then used brushes to create a Ukrainian flag that would stretch the length of the embassy.
The Wuming Painting Collective, formed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), was a clandestine group of artists who defied the authoritarian control over art and expression. In a time when all art was harnessed as propaganda to glorify the state and Chairman Mao, Wuming artists turned their gaze toward everyday life, painting still lifes, street scenes, human figures, and most iconically, serene landscapes.
Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has drawn on the stool part of that French surrealist's pioneer work for his latest exhibition, the largest ever devoted to Ai, which opens in Berlin this Thursday. The show, entitled Evidence, is at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall, and consists of either entirely new works, or pieces never seen in Germany before. The exhibition is huge, taking up 3,000 square metres in total and running across 18 rooms.
Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls is a non-profit music and mentoring program that empowers girls and women through music education, volunteerism, and activities that foster self-respect, leadership skills, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.
Keith Haring is known to be one of the biggest artists raising awareness for HIV and AIDS, considering he had also passed away from HIV. Starting his career covering ads with spray paint and chalk in subway stations in New York City, his work started trending and he became an activist for this cause.
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.
Ge Yulu’s artistic practice playfully pulls at the strings of a social system that, although seemingly all-encompassing, is in fact a malleable structure consisting of individual human beings. For his 2016 project Eye Contact, Ge positioned himself in front of a surveillance camera and stared directly into the lens for hours, then negotiated with a security guard to buy the footage.
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.
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
El Estudiante Militante is a giant puppet built by the members of Papel Machete and students of the University of Puerto Rico during the first three days of the 2010 student strike at a cultural camp established by the theater group in solidarity with the striking students. The puppet was built with materials inside the campus of the University.
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.
Artists in Rio de Janeiro have staged a pop-up street show to protest against the closure by the new far-right state government of an exhibition because of a performance attacking dictatorship-era torture.
Note before the post: This article is great in highlighting a specific case of creative activism in the streets of New York City, but also gives some contextual background to how this project manifested.
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
In Halt, a new solo piece premiered at
NYU Gallatin, dancer and choreographer
Jamar Roberts examined the language of
the body in protest. The work focuses
on what it means for human beings-the
committed individual and the organized
collective- to be equally the subjects
of progressive change and the targets
of unjust corporeal punishment.
There’s some great news for supporters of The Sarkeesian Effect, the seemingly random collection of badly filmed interviews with assorted people who dislike Anita Sarkeesian that is allegedly being edited into a film of some kind!
From intimate portraits to urban performance art, the through line of photographer Carlota Guerrero’s work has always been her stripped back sense of feminine reverie: rumpled sheets and broken shells, translucent tights and long braids, dusty floors and bare chests.
Nestled on the banks of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, Santa Catarina Palopó is a small town brimming with vibrant colors and stunning natural views. Despite its natural beauty and cultural heritage, the community struggled with economic development and poverty for years until they had the opportunity to harness the power of art and transform the town.