TYRE NICHOLS WAS a photographer with an eye for the natural world. He was especially drawn to landscape portraiture, its calm and innocence. It is said that Nichols liked to crane his lens skyward, capturing what sunlight he could before it dissolved into the horizon. As he drove home after taking photos on January 7, he was pulled over by the Memphis police and what happened next was as tragic as it is terribly commonplace. Tyre Nichols is dead at 29.
For some, October 14, 1968, was a clarion call to the future.
On that day, a group of 12 black students at UC Santa Barbara, tired of the unequal treatment and passive-aggressive racism they received as Black athletes — and as members of the campus community at large — barricaded themselves in the university’s North Hall.
Spectres of Liberty is an on-going public, hybrid media project about
the history of the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.
Through this project we explore the following questions: How do we make
visible histories of people and movements which resisted a status quo of
oppression? What are the best forms to manifest submerged and complex
The 14th day of June each year is celebrated as Flag Day, and in 2017 it was no different save for the fact that the project took center stage. The celebrations kicked off with hoisting the resist flag, a creation by Marilyn Minter on the rooftop of the 4th street headquarters of Creative Time.
The sneaker brand Converse has commissioned an indigenous artist in Australia to create a gigantic mural with a surprising twist. The Melbourne mural plays homage to indigenous urban identity and was painted with a special type of pollution-absorbing paint that “cleans the air,” according to the agency behind the project, Amplify.
From Black Power to Migrants’ Power
BY Robin Cembalest POSTED 01/22/13
As ’60s activist art enters museums, a new generation is creating an iconography of protest for today
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.
The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra is planning to immerse a British flag in blood donated by indigenous peoples from countries colonised by the British Empire.
The resulting artwork, titled Union Flag, is intended to be an “acknowledgement of the pain and destruction colonialism has caused First Nations peoples, devastating entire cultures and civilisations,” the artist said in a statement.
The signature angst of our time was profoundly expressed in the poems submitted for WOMAWORDS Literary Press June 2020 edition, Imaging Life After COVID-19, offering women poets an opportunity to write about their experience of the pandemic and their vision of or for the future. The universal trauma wrought by this virus, invisible and silent and pouncing with madness and mendacity, brings us to a place we’d like to forget but never will.
From 2005-2010 the Ngapartji Ngapartji project was based out of Alice Springs, working with Pitjantjatjara communities throughout Central Australia.
The project created an online Pitjantjatjara language site, two touring theatre works and a documentary Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji; http://www.nothingrhymeswithngapartji.com/
Jo’Artis Ratti is sure he looked intimidating to the police officers who were suddenly confronted by his agitated dancing at a California protest Sunday.
“I’m 210 pounds,” said Ratti, 35. “I have tattoos on my neck. I don’t have a passive energy; I’m very enthusiastic. And I know this looks unfamiliar.”
On the opening day of the Spring/Summer 2011's season of Mercedes Benz's New York Fashion Week, former fashion editor, speaker, and fashion activist Michaela Angela Davis led a protest of approximately 20 black women, dressed in black suits, carrying signs with the names of every fashion editor in the 40 year history of African American fashion and lifestyle magazine, Essence Magazine.
Brian Larney is an AI.tivist or American Indian artist. He is also an Artivist where he performs Artivism, a concept that includes art as a form of activism.
Asian Americans standing up for themselves, the Black Lives Matter movement, and their home: New York City
In 2020, as COVID-19 flared through New York City and NYC hospitals saw a spike of nearly 200,000 patients, Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) faced an added threat: blame, racism, and xenophobia.
In 1900, Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race, and conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites, and buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership.
Through her work, South African art activist Athenkosi Kwinana aspires to deepen the understanding of Albinism in her native country, where she has faced discrimination in most aspects of her life from childhood days on. Working with both drawing and printmaking, Kwinana creates large self-portraits that aim to constructively reimagine the representation of Albinism in the country’s black communities and African contemporary art as whole.
Debuting at Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, July 14 – September 30 for FRONTart 2018 is ‘The American Library’ by Yinka Shonibare MBE, a celebration of the diversity of the American population. It aims to be an instigator of discovery and debate. The thousands of books in this art installation are covered in the artist’s signature Dutch wax printed cotton textile.
A project as expansive as the Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover is a first for them. Kicking off on January 21, the festival will comprise a series of events by 30 different groups, which will take place until March 6 at more than 20 arts and cultural organizations in and around Minneapolis/St. Paul. A network of local art activists will be mobilized, and the Guerrilla Girls have been working in tandem with the area’s youth groups to prepare.
DAMN. Kendrick Lamar opened the 2018 GRAMMYs with a powerful and political performance of his hit, "XXX.'" The rapper featured an army of face-covered soldiers marching in the background of an American flag, that quickly turned into a "satire" taking a jab at the current political climate in the United States.
In keeping with his activist turn on 2016’s 4 Your Eyez Only, J. Cole’s new album, KOD, is an exploration of addiction. The title has three different meanings that all speak to this aim: Kids On Drugs, King OverDosed, and Kill Our Demons. Each feeds into the next in this narcotic odyssey.
Mayday is a neighborhood resource and a citywide destination for engaging programming, a home for radical thought and debate, and a welcoming gathering place for people to work, learn, drink, dance and build together.
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
Born to Heal, a documentary exploring the life of Native American healer, Russell FourEagles, and a handful of the lives he has touched.
Growing up in a tarpaper shack in the north woods, Russell FourEagles was born to be a healer. His grandmother chose him to learn the accumulated wisdom from over 200 generations of family healers.
In this series featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, artist Alexandra Bell edited headline pages from the New York Daily News in 1989 concerning the case of the Central Park 5. Through redaction, highlighting, and censoring, Bell shows how the teens accused of this crime were painted as a pack of animals by the media.