Troy, Michigan couldn't afford to keep its library open, so it scheduled a vote for a tax increase. A strong anti-tax group waged a dominating campaign against it. Posing as a political group, an outside advertising agency posted signs around town that said, "Vote to close Troy library Aug 2, book burning party Aug 5." We invited everyone to our Facebook page, adding Twitter, Foursquare, want ads, flyers and more to drive engagement.
What is looping? Somewhere in between art, activism, and wackiness is this liberating experience. Matthew Silver and Fritz Donnelley, two New York City based performance artists got lonely acting silly in their underwear in public. Knowing that there were enough free spirits to join them, they started "Looping" and invited everyone to join them.
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.
The Folded Map Project is a project by Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist from Chicago. The project aims to investigate and change the racial and economic segregation that affects the city and its residents.
The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.
Wallhunter's Slumlord Project is an innovative project in Baltimore, Maryland that will use street art to expose and publicize vacant and dilapidated housing and the responsible parties for those conditions. The project will use different street art forms to display art that will attract community interest and support community identity.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.
In July and August 2013, O Teatrão, a Coimbra based theatre company, presented the project Arruinados, comprising three theatre performances in three abandoned spaces (‘ruins’), one in each of three cities in the Centre region of Portugal located along the Mondego River:Coimbra, Montemoro Velho, and Figueira da Foz.
Originally a project of San Francisco-based art and design studio Rebar, Park(ing) Day participants from Tucson to Tehran set up temporary installations ranging from simple unrolled sod to art galleries and even free health clinics.
A public art exhibition designed to raise awareness of solutions to climate change. Cool Globes grew out of a commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, and was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2006. Since that time, Cool Globes premiered in Chicago and went on tour across the country from Washington DC to San Francisco, San Diego, Sundance, Los Angeles, Houston and Cleveland.
In the south-western city of Chengdu, by all accounts a city on the edge coping with heavy pollution but also with authorities scrambling to put a lid on simmering discontent. That night police detained a number of artists who managed to stage a silent demonstration, while wearing face masks.
In São Paulo, just like in many other metropolitan regions, public transport is not as effective as it could be. Buses and trains usually run overcrowded, late and on limited hours, so that owning a car increases a lot one’s comfort. But not everybody can afford to have one, so a clear and recurrent class distinction occurs: public transport is mostly used by poor people.
Just weeks after activists staged an alternative tour of the American Museum of Natural History to call for its removal, among other things, the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was vandalized early Thursday morning.
#SaveNYC is a grassroots, crowd-sourced, DIY movement
to protect and preserve the diversity and uniqueness
of the urban fabric in New York City.
As our vibrant streetscapes and neighborhoods are turned into bland, suburban-style shopping malls, filled with chain stores and glossy luxury retail, #SaveNYC is fighting for small businesses and cultural institutions to remain in place.
The U.S./Iraq War Memorial is an augmented reality public art project and memorial, dedicated to the thousands of individuals who have died on both sides of the conflict.
The Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network is a grassroots movement and campaign to prevent the displacement of low-to-middle income people, elders, families and mom-and-pop businesses from Brooklyn. They say, “Not 1 more person displaced! Not 1 more luxury development, until we have affordable housing for all!”
It has been a long and exhausting battle for the bike activists in Puebla one of the cities in Mexico. Collectives and activist groups have long pushed for including bike infrastructure around the city, in a horizontal, democratic way.
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations.
So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
The starting point of this artistic project, carried out by MAPA within its Laboratory of Artists in Colombia, is the disappearance of one of the oldest "barrios" downtown Bogotá: El Cartucho.
Cheril Linett is a female artist from Chile, with a background in performance art and stage performance, who primarily focuses her artwork on feminist issues in Chile, especially ones involving violence, murder, hate crime and different kinds of oppression and assault, but also creates artwork reflecting issues in other parts of Latin America.
A technological feat has emerged amid the Chilean protests. A video of protestors bringing down a police drone has gone viral on social media sites. These protestors didn't use any physical or gun force to bring the drone down. Instead, they used another form of technology: lasers. A lot of bright green laser beams were pointed in unison at the drone, which can be seen moving erratically, before quickly falling down to Earth.
Room13Delmar is a tricycle-based mobile studio conceived as a sculpture: a cross between a vending tricycle and a ‘Mary Poppins’ bag that unfolds to create a space for creativity on the sidewalk, at a senior center and at a veterans medical center, north of Delmar in the city of St. Louis, Missouri.
It was a long time coming - but it was worth the wait.
Nearly two years ago, more than a dozen of Mexico’s biggest performing artists came together in a mega-event aimed at saving Wirikuta, one of the country’s most sacred sites, from devastation at the hands of Canadian gold and silver mining operations.