The latest in street art activism is confronting sexism in an unconventional, but wonderful, way.
Street artist, Elonë, from Karlsruhe, Germany, is paving her city with messages against sexism, street harassment and sexual abuse — all printed on menstrual pads.
In 2013, a group of ten women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut, calling themselves “Women of York,” created this work of art inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. The installation includes six entry banners and ten place settings arranged on a triangular table, each dedicated to a woman of personal significance to the artist.
The International Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS) is the largest traveling African Diasporic art show in the United States. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, HFAS provides a platform for African Diasporic visionaries and American visual artists to exhibit and sell their artwork. The show also aims to create economic empowerment, educational opportunities and professional recognition within the multicultural community.
A young and beautiful girl posted a piece of paper selfie every day on Instagram, the most popular social network at the moment. In just over 4 months, with 184 selfies, her fans quickly rose to 90,000. In the photo, she is sometimes sweet and lovely, sometimes sexy and attractive, and sometimes turned into a healthy and positive "organic girl"... Now there are nearly 150,000 people around the world who follow her every day.
Something Terrible is the story of Trippe’s childhood sexual abuse and painful struggle with its psychological aftermath. Though the comic itself is sparsely scripted and free of gory details, Trippe provides an afterword that relates the hard facts: he was raped as a child by a teenager, and for three days. The older boy, who took advantage of the trust of someone much too young, threatened Trippe’s family and used a gun as persuasion.
In order to raise awareness about the global issue of arranged child marriages, 21-year-old YouTube star Coby Persin decided to push the envelope by asking a 12-year-old 'bride' to pose with a 65-year-old 'groom' in the middle of Times Square. Child marriage is not only legal in 91 countries around the world, but even continues to be legal in the United States - with some having a cut off as low as 12 years of age.
I Will What I Want is a campaign launched by Under Armour which speaks to women who do not wait for permission or affirmation in order to go after what they want. The campaign highlights various models and athletes who encourage women to tune out society's standards and pursue their dreams. The campaign began by highlighting Misty Copeland, a soloist at the American Ballet Theater.
From Public Delivery:
"The art piece, which was showcased at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington D.C. from February 1 to 17, 2019, allowed visitors to interact with it. The audience had a pile of crumbs placed right in front of the three-walled setup, which they would through and watch as ‘Ivanka’ vacuumed them all up.
Elisa and Lily chose to create StyleLikeU as an alternative to this disempowering status quo. In 2009, the duo picked up a home video camera and launched their "Closet" series, documenting diverse individuals who were challenging fashion industry norms in their style.
"What the Skirt Lifts", created by a student in France, is a day long protest against gender discrimination where male and female students were encouraged to wear skirts to school.
Ultra-Red is a collective founded by two AIDS activists in 1994 to explore the intersection of the political and aesthetic through "militant sound investigations".
By Latoya Peterson, Racialicious
Looking for a way to celebrate the folks who raised you–but from a slightly different perspective than you would get down at Hallmark? The good people over at Strong Families (a project of Forward Together/Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice) present Mama’s Day, a multicultural, queer-friendly celebration of the folks who do some of the most significant (and unpaid) work in our society.
This has been a racially-charged year. How one challenges the status quo is an individual choice and many opt for artistic expression. Artistic expression can personified most visually on the body and while black pride tees are big, nail art is just as big and just as communicative.
As the female gaze comes to the fore, artists are beginning to examine and explore the possibilities of what exists, what it is to be a woman looking at the world outside of her self. For American artist Dani Lessnau, the gaze opened the door into uncharted realms in search of the things that a camera can capture that the human eye might otherwise miss.
Drama Queens Ghana's “MoonGirls” is an Afrofuturistic graphic novel series. Through an Afrofuturistic lens, “MoonGirls follows the adventures of 4 African "supersheroes" with varying superpowers to save the world from a diverse range of forces; from patriarchy, rape culture to pollution and global warming.
A hundred days. That’s how long it took Xiao Meili to walk from Beijing, in the arid north, to the humid, central city of Changsha. Since September, the 24-year-old has been trekking south and west across the Chinese heartland, along rumbling highways, around construction sites, down dusty streets. She stops along the way to send letters to local officials. Her plea: China must change the way it handles sex abuse.
Last September, Fusion commissioned artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, 29, to travel to Mexico City and create an installation of her highly-acclaimed art project protesting street harassment, “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” Fazlalizadeh’s visit to Mexico was her first to the country; it was also the first time the STWTS project — for which Fazlalizadeh papers city streets with hand-drawn portraits of women pushing back against their street harassers — had eve
At TED2009, audience member Cindy Gallop gave a 4-minute presentation that became one of the event’s most talked about. Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex, and talked about how she was fighting back with the launch of a website to correct the myths being propagated.
"Stand Up, Sisters" tells the story of a rural girl who journeys to Beijing for a family visit, only to be deceived and forced into prostitution, suffering unthinkable hardships. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, these women are rehabilitated. The narrative reaches its peak with her and her younger sisters' victorious achievement of self-reliance.
Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah is a photographic series exploring the complex identities of Muslim women in post-revolutionary Iran. Combining black-and-white portraits, Persian calligraphy, and symbolic elements such as guns and veils, Neshat interrogates themes of martyrdom, violence, femininity, and resistance.
The Violence Against Women (VAW) Art Map was conceptualized in the fall of 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement by Dr. Lauren Stetz, as part of her doctoral research in Art Education with a minor in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.
Man is a thirsty beast, and nowhere is that thirst more acutely exemplified than on Tinder, the matchmaking app that lets users swipe right in their quest to find love, lust, bots, or viral marketers. Now a California-based programmer has tweaked the app’s API, creating a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women — when in fact they’re talking with each other.
The Monument Quilt is an on-going collection of stories of survivors of rape and abuse. By stitching our stories together, we are creating and demanding public space to heal. We are building a new culture where survivors are publicly supported rather than publicly shamed. From 2013-2016, more and more stories will be added to The Monument Quilt as participants make their own squares, host workshops, and organize local displays of the quilt.
Force: Upsetting Rape Culture is a group of creative activists who seek to raise awareness about rape culture and promote consensual sex. They "create art actions to generate attention and get millions of people talking," in hopes that sex can become an empowering act rather than one of violence.