Yesterday, I procrastinated my way to watching the Savage X Fenty Show, and I was left in complete awe of Rihanna. She truly is a powerhouse, but on top of that, all her brands; Fenty Beauty, Savage X Fenty and Fenty have intentionally left no one behind.
My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd.
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.
2020 was the year of when protest music blared everywhere. For a long period, Black people struggled against police brutality and in the uproar of George Floyd's murder, BLM protests instantly swept over the country. Of the many protest music that was released that year, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire wrote a song that would spearhead raging sentiments towards racial injustice beyond just jazz.
Fashion designer and former head designer of Dior, John Galliano, in the past few years has failed to rise to his former glory in fashion. In 2011, a videotape of John Galliano shouting anti-semitic statements went viral, thus leading to his dismissal at Dior and the irreparable defamation of his fashion career.
This piece is about multiple layered “creative activism”. There is art, activism, and community building.
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a zine is a “noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.”
When Behnaz Babazadeh was young, her family moved from Afghanistan to the US. She loved almost everything about her new home — especially America’s amazing selection of candy — but she also loved wearing her familiar pink-flowered headscarf, which she’d grown used to wearing as part of her school uniform in her old home.
In El Paso more than 100 murals have been painted since the mid-1960s. The murals, located throughout the city's various corridors, often depict themes common to Chicano muralism, such as mestizo heritage or social problems, but they also tell unique stories about the "merging of ideas, cultures, and dreams" along the United States-Mexico border.
The Haitian Creole word "konbit" denotes the idea of similar talents joining together to work towards a common goal. The founders — a group of photographers, educators, and artists — came up with the idea for Fotokonbit a few years ago to "empower Haitians to tell their own stories and document their community", but it was the 2010 earthquake that gave the group new urgency.
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.
In 2015, Walter Scott fled for his life, stalked by a policeman who then cold bloodedly shot him in the back. We all saw the video and in response to this murder I made the artwork, “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday.” This simple banner, printed with the eponymous words, is an update of an iconic flag that the NAACP flew from their national headquarters window in New York in the nineteen-twenties and thirties the day after someone was lynched.
Stephanie H. Shih is a Brooklyn-based ceramist who explores Asian American identity through clay interpretations of grocery items. The ceramicist has created life-size painted clay Sriracha bottles, Pocky cartons, soy sauce gallons, and instant ramen as part of a series Shih conceived in 2018 called Oriental Grocery, to explore nostalgic foods of the Chinese American diaspora.
Thousands of ethnic Mongolians have protested across northern China in opposition to Beijing plans to replace the Mongolian language with Chinese in some school subjects.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in Richmond, VA, the two fourteen-year-olds posed in a powerful photo in front of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue. Ava had originally arranged an appointment with photographer Marcus Ingram, but as she and Kennedy posed in front of the graffiti-covered monument with their fists firmly jutted in the air, several photographers began snapping pictures.
The prints exhibited June 2013 at Firestorm in Asheville NC, will comprise two separate bodies of work; Chelsea Ragan’s combination screen print / woodblock print / painting / drawings graphically detail police shootings of young black males from across the country, and Adam Void’s hand-painted screen prints state the facts of important national news stories that have been swept under the rug of mainstream corporate media.
Howardena Pindell presented her solo exhibition, “Rope/Fire/Water”, her first video in 25 years and a project utilized by the artist since the 1970s that The Shed commissioned and displayed in late 2020 and into early 2021. “Rope/Fire/Water” mines the history of violence against African-Americans and features Pindell’s personal anecdotes and anthropological and historical data related to lynchings and racist attacks in the United States.
Frank Waln, a 25 year old Native American hip hop artist, tours the country and Canada performing and teaching motivational workshops to students across the country. He took to rap at a young age when he found a cd (Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP) on the side of the road. Growing up on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, he realized that the hip hop music genre was an outlet for expressing pain and frustration.
Stickers imitating the Land O Lakes Butter packaging are being placed in grocery stores over the original packaging. The packaging has been altered to say "Land O Rape - Culture" by street artist Recycled Propaganda.
In early 2016, I began paying attention to reports about the incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police. The posts on social media deeply disturbed me, but one in particular brought me to tears: the killing of Alton Sterling in my hometown Baton Rouge, La. This could have happened to any of my family members who still live in the area. I felt furious, hurt and hopeless.
The Yes Men join Reclaim the City in their fight against unjust housing policy. On September 30, 2019, a horde of zombies attended a "#natsneverdie rally" at the Cape Town Civic Centre in order to celebrate Mayor Dan Plato and the Mayoral Committee and to support their policies, which are increasingly similar to those of the National Party under Apartheid.
Brick x Brick is a public art performance that builds human “walls” against misogyny. It is organized by the Public Displays of Affection, a collective of artists, designers, educators and organizers that engages in nonviolent direct art action. During the wall performances, participants wear brick-patterned jumpsuits adorned with colorful brick patches bearing statements of misogynistic violence made by US President Donald Trump.
This series of protests began on the UCT campus in an effort to remove the bronze statute of Cecil Rhodes in the center of campus due to the belief that Rhodes represents the oppressive colonization of South Africa that eventually led to apartheid.
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.
Daniel Hewson describes the use of protest posters and the work of collective, Burning Museum, and artist, Faith47, in the Fees Must Fall movement taking place in South Africa: