In Cape Town, South Africa the design firms Design Indaba Trust and Thinking have teamed up with artist Faith47 to help raise funds to bring more light to their urban city. Their goal is to raise funds to light up 700 meters of Manwabisi Park, which will ultimately reduce the crime rate in the area through more light. In order to get the community involved in the project, they have combined street art with community engagement.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
Artist Luke Jerram created a genderless sleeping figure made of glass lying on a piece of cardboard and exhibited in the streets of London. The artist said in an interview "For every person you see sleeping on the streets, there are many others sleeping in hostels, squats and other forms of unsatisfactory and insecure accommodation.
There are no whistles, no loud speakers, and no placards held up high in this quiet act of subversion. Pimsiri Petchnamrob stands silently in a mass of sharply dressed Bangkok commuters, her hands clutched around a copy of George Orwell's 1984.
Next to her a small group of young men and women, their faces sombre and their heads bowed low, also read books about fictional and real totalitarian worlds in silence.
A troupe of approximately thirty women and men of various ages, sizes, ethnicities and performance backgrounds marched through the performance art space of SESC-Vila Mariana in Sao Paulo and then through the streets of downtown Sao Paulo, silent, blind folded, dressed in business attire, and covered completely with a gray mud. The performances walked slowly in unison at turtle's pace.
"Improving
the livability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street,
block, or building scale. While larger scale efforts do have their
place, incremental, smallscale improvement efforts are increasingly seen
as a way to stage more substantial investments. This approach allows a
host of local actors to test new concepts before making substantial
It was October 31st, 2012, when a new artist appeared on social media. In a series of video clips, she proposed with a soft and slow speech that Peru hide its poverty. Her project consisted of installing vinyl pieces to avoid what she called "the visual pollution." She titled the project Don't be poor, be fashion(able).
Imagine affecting the global cultural Landscape through art and technology use. Imagine one-mile long installation in 100 city locations worldwide, each mile-long install is of 250 bronze plaques of different Peacemakers. Then imagine its own App that when any smartphone is pointed at one of the plaques an entire timeline biographical history of that peacemaker becomes available.
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.
Mayor Gilberto Kassab passed a Clean City Law that banned all public advertising in Sao Paulo, one of the world's most populous cities. The mayor gained the support of the city's elites in pressing the law as an anti-pollution measure targeting "visual pollution". The city was quickly stripped of its ubiquitous billboards, signs, graffiti and other public ads.
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.
by Natalie Pompilio
Natalie Jeremijenko wants you to feed the animals. She encourages you to text the fish—and makes sure they'll text you back. She turns moths into movie stars and believes the next big thing in urban transportation is human flight.
"Once the New York City Marathon was cancelled, a group of New York City marathon runners decided to turn their personal loss of not being able to compete into a much bigger win by organizing volunteers to help the storm-ravaged communities on Staten Island, the race’s starting point. “Let’s put these legs and healthy spirit to good use,” says the group’s Facebook page.
Students at art colleges across China are taking a strong stance in the midst of the largest wave of protests to have gripped the country since 1989. As demonstrations against the government’s strict Covid-19 policies erupted across the country over the weekend, students rallied on campuses to create protest art and graffiti.
The Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf opens “The Gardener” with the declaration: “I am an agnostic filmmaker.” From anyone else, this might seem like a simple statement, but not from the complex Mr. Makhmalbaf. In 1974, when he was 17, religious and involved in a guerrilla group, he stabbed a policeman, for which he received a bullet to the stomach and a prison sentence.
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.
#NYTIMES Why are there no U.S. anti-slavery monuments? http://antislaverymonument.org project is an answer.
Standing 60 feet tall, corten steel of two hollow chain links the upper one broken.
"This project took aim at a public relations campaign produced by The Union Square Partnership, a local Business Improvement District (BID) attempting to privatize the north end of NYC’s Union Square park and install a high-end celebrity chef restaurant. They hosted historical walking tours of the park for decision-makers, as a means of getting buy-in for their development initiative.
In November 2016, citizens of Flint, MI filed a historic class action law suit against both city and state for the damages wrought by lead contaminants in the water supply. The city's 100 thousand inhabitants have faced damages not only to their homes for the corrosive qualities of the water, but in myriad physical ailments; skin lesions, hair loss, high lead blood levels, vision loss, depression and anxiety are all reported symptoms.
As the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, hundreds of people gathered inside the Museum of Modern Art and outside of the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday for protests.
During the economic crisis of 2008, bankers in Spain took advantage of the economically disadvantaged, and the artwork La Fiera en Sevilla, or the Wild Animal in Sevilla in English, brings attention to this money-centric act from the bankers. La Fiera refers to the bankers at the time that used predatory methods in their actions to forcibly evict poor people from their houses.
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
In 2005, Rebar, a design studio in San Francisco, transformed a single metered parking space into a temporary public park. The area where this two-hour park took place was one that lacked public open space. This was the first Park(ing) Day project.