By Andrea Long-Chavez
The recognizable figure of a Latino gardener is a common sight for most Southern California locals. But if you happen to see the cardboard painting of a gardener propped up against a chain link fence or hedge, chances are you’ve just seen the public art of Los Angeles-based artist Rarmio Gomez, Jr.
Media artist Joseph DeLappe announces the completion of “The Drone Project: A Participatory Memorial” on the campus of Fresno State University in California.
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.
Courage Scores grade California state legislators on their political courage, revealing how well they stand up for their constituents over corporations or interest groups that exploit Californians, particularly the poor, disadvantaged, or communities of color.
The pink "pussy hats" in The Women's March were created by a group of activists and knitters, including Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman. The hats were designed as a form of protest and a symbol of resistance to the new administration and its policies.
Has the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, long a bastion of high-priced fun-in-the-sun escapism, finally sharpened its political teeth? A few of this year's art installations would say yes, as Coachella during this election year doesn't seem to be going quietly into the cultural void.
Hewlett-Packard pledged to stop using dangerous plastics in its computers by 2009. It broke that promise. Will a company-wide voicemail from William Shatner make it change its mind?
Gregg Segal -- a California-based artist who is known for using the medium of photography to explore culture with the "sensibility of a sociologist" -- asked family, friends, neighbors and other acquaintances to save their trash and recyclables for a week and then lie down and be photographed in it:
"Medicine Man," a mobile sculpture that MAKE ART/STOP AIDS commissioned from San Francisco-based artists Daniel Goldstein and John Kapellas. The piece is constructed of pill bottles that Goldstein and Kapellas, and their partners, saved up from treatment regimens dating as far back as 1985. The artists assembled the bottles in the shape of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with an aureole of syringes arrayed around her body in a halo.
Featuring photographs that represent a unique collaboration between men held in supermax prisons and the photographers who fulfilled their requests.
Curated by Laurie Jo Reynolds, Tamms Year Ten, Jeanine Oleson, Parsons The New School for Design, and Jean Casella, Solitary Watch.
Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles.
"By yesterday afternoon, news of Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s lifetime NBA ban had already settled in. But there was still plenty of anger among the protesters who gathered outside the Staples Center Tuesday.
In this article, author Caroline Choi highlights different grafiti artists and their stories. These artists use their talent to tell their stories, ones that might not get to be told otherwise. She goes into the history of grafiti, and how it ties into how rich and white the art world has become.
"I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie. We see people being shot on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it's like. So I did it." - Chris Burden
In light of his recent death, I wanted to bring one of Chris Burden's pieces, Shoot, to Actipedia.org. Not just to honor the artist, but to also remind us of our country's insane fascination with guns and violence.
“Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic” features six dances written inside a prison, a 35-minute dance film, and 11 artists (seven choreographic interpreters and four formerly incarcerated narrators) conversing on dancing in carceral spaces.
Khushboo Kataria Gulati lights an off-white candle and passes the flame to a switch of sage, casting a spell around the purple-lit room as she places paintbrush to canvas. The herbaceous smoke billows around her, time suspends and her paint strokes create a scene of three multicolored faces surrounded by plants.
In this solo work, Gómez-Peña tests brand new material dealing with radical citizenship and what he terms “imaginary activism,” combining live art, literature, theory, and pedagogy in a wonderfully strange mix. Not one solo performance is ever the same.
There is a large Filipino community in the Bay Area that organizes and fights for better workers’ rights and educating youth of color. There are groups within this community that address these issues through hip-hop.
Kiwi Illafonte, 40, is a Bay Area political rapper who talks about social issues in his music.
“Social change is at the center of my universe,” Illafonte said.
Rescue workers have swung into action to board, feed and treat displaced animals – and find those who may be trapped.
As the wildfires besieged Los Angeles, marauding through hillside suburbs at an impossibly fast and ferocious pace, 500 miles away Garrett Needles and the volunteers with the North Valley Animal Disaster Group started making plans.
Adrian Piper's "Funk Lessons" (1982-84) was a series of performances and collaborative events in which the artist taught white participants about black funk music, its culture, and its history, aiming to deconstruct stereotypical ideas about Black culture.
Upon the release of the 1996 Maxis Inc. computer game SimCopter, the company discovered programmer Jacques Servin had secretly added scantily clad male CPUs to appear in the game and make out with the player character.