On the eve of Wells Fargo’s annual shareholders meeting in San Antonio, TX on Tuesday, home defenders, students, community groups, and activists in ten cities took peaceful action against the bank. Petitions signed by thousands of people were delivered to Wells Fargo branches and offices across the country calling on CEO John Stumpf to change the bank’s predatory practices.
In 2008, Iceland was in turmoil. There was a systematic failure of its three main commercial banks. The Economist called the collapse the largest suffered by any country in history, relative to Iceland’s population size. In response to what was seen as government inertia, protests began to take place from around October of that year. However, the real fun began in January 2009.
In February , two leaders of a guerrilla movement here traveled to the financial district carrying a wooden container that contained three pigs, each painted yellow from snout to tail.
Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”
At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open
smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night,
Walsh was fighting.
“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh.
“He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently,
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
In a twist on the Broken Windows Theory, street artists are using their skills to combat urban blight in Baltimore with "The Slumlord Project". By drawing the attention of neighbors to abandoned and vacant properties and giving pertinent ownership information to take action on, 17 artists are spray painting and wheat-pasting in a D.I.Y.
Honolulu - A change in the programmed entertainment at last night's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gala left a few world leaders slack-jawed, though most seemed not to notice that anything was amiss.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
This action, to be released to the wider public this Friday, March 15th, was the design of t-shirts in support of British Charity, Comic Relief, an organization dedicated to bringing positive and lasting change to vulnerable youth communities in Europe (specifically in the U.K.) and various countries in Africa and, most critically, addressing the root causes of their poverty.
Olafur Eliasson's latest project Little Sun was first debuted at the World Economic Forum on Africa in 2012. The global initiative is bringing tiny, sunburst shaped, plastic solar powered LED lights to the most marginalized regions of the world. Elliasson calls Little Sun, "A work of art that works in life."The lights are also capable of self renewable energy, which makes them practical and portable to those without proper electricity.
“So dramatic, so strong, so visual,” artist Stéphan Gladieu said of his first encounter with the revival of an ancestral folk art movement in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Kinshasa is the capital of Congo but also one of the many places American and European countries send their waste.
In 2012, visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman started Fearless in response to the powerful protests that shook the country in response to the “Nirbhaya” tragedy in Delhi, India.
Paris inaugurates its first fresco, on the Human Rights Wall, in tribute to six contemporary activists. To be discovered in the capital's 12th arrondissement, this XXL work of committed street art is by Mahn Kloix.
A crew of occupiers makes a home of a Bank of Americalobby with a couch, a coffee table, a rug and a pottedplant. "Bank of America took our homes so we though we'dmove in here!"
After collecting street art and memorabilia from "Occupy Wall Street" since the fall of 2011, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has lent its collection of Occupy Wall Street posters to Wesleyan's Davison Art Center. The posters will make up an exhibition entitled “Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today,” which is on display in the University's gallery from April 5 to May 26.
LEGOVC is a fictional, made up, 100% fake, plastic, 'pantomime villain' Vice Chancellor of a fake British University struggling as his utter managerial brilliance crumbles in the face of sustained strike action by his staff after their pension scheme is slashed.
Initially organized to respond to holes in service provision following Hurricane Katrina, Burners Without Borders has since 2005 "emerged as a community led, grassroots group that encourages innovative, civic participation that creates positive change locally." One ongoing project headed by BWB's Will Ruddick is a complementary currency program in Mombasa, Kenya.
Develop an interactive poster that revolutionises the act of giving. It calls on people to donate, accepts credit cards and shows every donor what their donation does.
Hostile architecture—urban design features like ground spikes that deter the homeless from lying down or slanted benches that prevent lingering—inscribes exclusion into our streets. In response, a Chinese artist will launch the Free Butt Plug Catalogue, an art-activism project that documents fifteen such spikes and anti–loitering benches across London and pairs each with a commercially available butt plug of the same shape.
When award-winning architect David Rockwell started spending time in playgrounds with his young children, he was disturbed by the lack of imagination and variation in the way kids interact with standardized playground equipment. He spent five years developing the Imagination Playground, seeking private-public partnerships to see it realized.
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.
A site-specific art intervention intended as a call to action in response to Brazil's water crisis. Strategically planned to coincide with UN World Water Day, Gota D'Agua gathered onlookers around an abandoned Olympic size swimming pool at the foot of Edificio Raposo Lopes, a towering luxury condominium building situated on a steep incline overlooking Rio de Janeiro.