By COREY KILGANNON
There was something odd about the ice cream truck that pulled up to the curb on Park Avenue near 67th Street on Friday, with its proletarian color scheme and its overdressed driver with the subversive grin.
In Citizen, Claudia Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time.
Note before the post: This article is great in highlighting a specific case of creative activism in the streets of New York City, but also gives some contextual background to how this project manifested.
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
"Amid a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes around the world, Singapore-based dancewear company Cloud & Victory posted a video on March 18 calling for a stop to the hate against the Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. It features prominent Asian dancers and allies, including former professional dancer Miko Fogarty, The Joffrey Ballet's Jeraldine Mendoza and Boston Ballet's Lia Cirio and Paulina Waski.
The Voice of Dissent
“I am not here to entertain you; I am here to disturb you. Those who are here for entertainment, I request them, please go.” It’s unusual, if not rare, for a live performer to begin by saying that to the audience. The compact of patronage that’s implicit is what Sambhaji Bhagat smashes right at the onset of his performance. For him, this art is a quest for the truth that will liberate the people he represents.
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.
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 Protest Mask Project was co-organized by Maggie Thompson and Jaida Grey Eagle. During the George Floyd protests, the artists' studio, Makwa Studio, created hundreds of masks to give to protestors in the city of Minneapolis where the demonstrations began.
The Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine displays a neon sign that spells the words ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ in Arabic. Since this sign was installed strategically above the gallery’s wall-length window – facing in the street – in the edition of the show I saw, at Parsons in New York, it interacted not only with Parsons’ exhibition site but also with the urban environment beyond it.
Filling Stomachs to Open Minds on Immigration
In Sweden, Dinners Melt Cultural Barriers
STOCKHOLM — Last year, when Ebba Akerman, 31, was teaching Swedish to immigrants in the suburbs of this city, she ran into one of her students on the train and asked him whether he enjoyed living in her country.
A juried exhibition of fiber art created by the Artist Circle Alliance to protest the Trump administration’s actions and policies.
This is a traveling exhibition to 13 venues across the U.S. All work in the exhibition, as well as the nearly 560 pieces submitted for jurying, are shown on our website.
Early Sunday morning, the Dallas Police Department's Twitter account tweeted for followers to download its iWatch Dallas app and share videos "of illegal activity from the protests." The police are looking to arrest lawbreakers at weekend demonstrations decrying police violence against black people. The benefit of the app, according to the tweet, was the ability for informants to stay anonymous.
Injustice is an interactive VR experience themed around racially motivated police brutality. Guests witness an act of racial discrimination in front of them, forcing them to make moral and ethical decisions on the spot. Injustice is an experience aimed at exploring the emotional impact of VR space vs. traditional film.
Last November, when you Googled the phrase “ugly Black woman,” Vanessa Rochelle Lewis’s photograph was the second to come up.
“Which I’m offended by,” says Lewis, a Bay Area–based artist and writer, “since I’m an Aries and I like to be number one in everything.”
Acción #CronicaDaMorteAnunciada que consistió en la creación de 9 estandartes con informaciones sobre asesinatos a “País do Santo” para denunciar sus muertes por motivos de racismo afroreligioso en la ciudad de Belém, Brasil.
It’s time to deport the Statue of Liberty.
That’s the latest mission for Legals for the Preservation of American Culture, an organization which has begun the “Deport the Statue” campaign for the removal of Lady Liberty through four Twitter accounts and a video that hopes to prove the iconic statue is not only an undocumented French immigrant but is “taking a job away from a qualified American statue.”
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.
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
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.
“Mapping skin deep” is an audiovisual public installation consisting of portraits with testimonies from refugee/undocumented immigrants currently residing in Montreal and elsewhere. Their bodies have been scarred in post-production tracing the route they took from their homeland to Montreal, hence mapping them skin deep.
Lil Baby, a popular American rapper, released a song titled "The Bigger Picture" in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that took place following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
Earlier this week, Republican group Our Principles PAC used presidential candidate Donald Trump's own words against him in an ad featuring women reading his offensive quotes about the opposite sex. (http://creativity-online.com/work/our-principles-pac-real-quotes-from-do...)
Play Safe is a documentary film series created and directed by NYU alum Eddie Einbinder. The film, much of which now appears for free on YouTube, was originally released in 2013 after being filmed between 2011 and 2012. It debuted at the International Harm Reduction conference in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2013.