Artist and social activist Favianna Rodriguez collaborated with musician Pharrell Williams to create a documentary series focusing on migrants in America. The documentary consists of 3 episodes that focus on the role of artists in the political realm. The goal of the documentary is to change the perception of immigrant workers in America.
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.
"A Tanzanian-born, Preston-based artist, curator and cultural activist, Lubaina Himid aims to 'fill in the gaps of history', giving representation to marginalised histories and to what was previously invisible or silenced. Significantly, Himid's art reinserts black narratives into the forefront of cultural practice and conversation.
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:
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.
Faith Ringgold, the 93-year-old doyenne of African American art, a trailblazing master who foreshadowed the recent rise of art activism and Black figuration, is having her first solo museum show in Chicago.
National Public Radio (NPR):
There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
Maryland Hall, in partnership with the Banneker Douglass Museum and Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture, invited Maryland-based Black artists, whose work encapsulates activism and social justice and using the creative process to educate their audiences about diversity, equity and inclusion to send proposals to take one of six 5 ft.
You’ll find Johanna Toruno on the streets of NYC plastering pictures of her flower-filtered poetry, Kendrick Lamar, and Selena on blank walls, street lights and buildings. When I came across The Unapologetically Brown Series on Instagram I was intrigued not only by the name but by the concept of being unapologetic and brown as the premise for a body of street art.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
Moving Chains is a monumental 110-foot long kinetic sculpture that evokes the hull of a ship, built from steel and Sapele, a tree native to West Africa commonly referred to as African Mahogany. Inside of the sculpture, nine chains run overhead: rotating on a maritime sprocket system, eight of the chains represent the pace of the currents in New York Harbor, while a ninth central chain moves more quickly, mimicking the pace of a ship in transit.
Empathy may be the cornerstone of any Global Justice movement, but how do we cultivate the conditions for empathy to thrive?
The wheelbarrow symbolises something universally useful, practical and pleasingly straightforward. A space to deliver things in an efficient and direct manner - no packaging and completely people powered.
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.
Project Catalyst specializes in designing culturally rich entertainment experiences that re-imagine the empowering possibilities of cinema and media from a multicultural perspective. Project Catalyst exemplifies the efficacy and essential value of art and cinema at the intersections of social justice and the modern technologies of everyday life.
Digital art platform Kinfolk has launched its New York City-wide participatory exhibition Signature Series, the initiative’s largest public endeavour to date. The project places newly created augmented reality (AR) monuments by four New York artists—Pamela Council, Derrick Adams, Tourmaline and Hank Willis Thomas—into designated public spaces across the city.
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.
ODBK is an activist organization that aims to create a more equal, diverse, inclusive, transparent and democratic art world. ODBK seeks to do this by diversify and increase the number of people who understand and engage with contemporary art.
"Four theatrical spaces and the full inventory of of 3LD Art & Technology Center were enlisted in the transformation of the space into SupremacyLand, a dystopian theme park where white supremacy and racist carnage was raised and twisted into totally immersive, experiences.
"This Ain't a Eulogy" is both a staged performance and a durational, outdoor, public performance that reclaims and takes public space. The artist statement is as follows:
In response to white gentrifiers trying to silence go-go music on the corners of Florida Avenue and 7th Avenue, activists and D.C. residents poured into the streets by blasting go-go music and celebrating its rich history within the city. For those unfamiliar, go-go music is at the heart of D.C. culture and features live bands playing covers of, and sometimes original, music with all different types of drums and other percussion instruments.
The two sources linked in this post are separate reviews of the incident currently occurring in Baltimore. It illustrates the factor of hindsight.... what supposedly began as a peaceful protest, in one article, is portrayed as clearly intended to fight back for #blacklifesmatter... however, "(CNN)The arrest and death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore has stoked protests and accusations of police brutality.
Marcel Duchamp, father of the readymade, forced the world to consider mundane things as significant objects, worthy of greater-than-average contemplation — yet his bicycle wheel, shovel, and urinal didn’t come freighted with all that much history.