Greg Jobin-Leeds, a long-time social activist, collaborated with AgitArte, a collective of artists and organizers, to capture the stories of today’s social movements and the activists behind their success with the release of When We Fight, We Win: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World.
It’s women’s history month, and your favorite radical feminist avengers want you to go ape. The Guerrilla Girls have been making noise about gender and racial inequality in the art world since 1985. Fighting discrimination with a sense of humor and their signature faux fur, these masked feminists continue to challenge major museums to spotlight more women and artists of color.
You enter a narrow corridor where backlit Plexiglas panels offer three compelling narratives about whiteness and blindness: Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and hard labor in Robben Island’s limestone quarry under a blinding sun; Bill Gates’ purchase of the Bettmann and United Press International archives, consisting of 17 million images, and their subsequent burial deep underground in a limestone vault for the sake of preservation, after Gates’s company C
Stream of Conscience is a site-specific, literary sculpture made out of torn pieces of cover-weight paper upon which people of all ages write their thoughts, feelings, and reflections about water. Prior to writing, participants engage in a dialogue about local water issues within a global context. The conversation is further distilled to include our personal relationship to water. Thousands of people have participated in this traveling exhibition.
Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”
Students at the NYC iSchool, a high school in Manhattan, worked for 9 weeks to create works of activist art with art teacher Gretel Smith. We were lucky enough to have Stephen Duncomb and Steve Lambert from the Center for Artistic Activism come to our class to teach a lesson inspiring students to think like activists; they came back later to critique students’ works-in-progress.
William Banks is a comedian and artist who, prior to his viral prison saga in 2025, was best known for a community that he led called Call World, which he describes on the website as “a planet in an alternate universe ruled by human-headed Worms sexually obsessed with William Banks.” The story goes that Banks was first visited by a worm from Car World after getting stuck in an industrial freezer and coming to terms with his death before eventually being
Sam Durant is an LA based artist who engages in social, cultural and political issues through his interactive public sculptures. Durant is interested in investigating historical narratives and their contemporary communities. From 2005-2010 Durant was part of the collective Transforma Projects, a grassroots cultural rebuilding initiative in New Orleans. One of his most recent interactive public sculptures Scaffold is on view at the Hague.
Tania Bruguera, in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, began a long term art project in form of an artist initiated socio-political movement. Immigrant Movement International is an organization headquartered in the multinational neighborhood of Corona, Queens. The organization engages local, national and international audiences and focuses on the issues of immigration reform.
Heroin sold in the northeast, specifically in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey tends to come in little glassine baggies. The art comes from the individual and unique "stamp" on said baggie sold to a user.
Jessica Williams talks about women's experiences with street harassment in New York with a satirical approach on how to avoid this unwanted attention.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/5ndnit/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jes...
"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:
Rooted in Native American and indigenous practices,[11] restorative justice is a set of principles and practices that aims to help communities heal from conflict and harm by developing a common understanding of the root causes and effects.[12] Restorative justice can occur in a variety of different contexts: in the workplace, at schools and within, or instead of, the criminal justice system.
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.
Thrive Collective mobilizes students, parents, artists, and community stakeholders to partner with public schools for transformational change. They function both as a matchmaker and direct service provider of arts and mentoring programs that cultivate the character and competencies necessary for students to thrive in today’s world.
WITH HER 2003 PROJECT UNTITLED, Andrea Fraser throws us an archetype of sexual and cultural identity. More than in her other performances, Fraser here works without the protection of a research-based script, a surrogate actor, or the remove that often characterizes analytical thinking. The central action in Untitled has Fraser and a male client of her US gallery meet for a session of sex and video recording in a New York hotel room.
Carolee Schneemann is largely associated with her performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, in which she boldly addressed feminist and political issues in ways that shocked and engaged viewers. But she has always maintained that she is a painter, a fact often overlooked in discussions of her larger body of work. At the heart of her approach is her ongoing exploration of the boundaries of painting and drawing, as in Up to and Including Her Limits.
Adrian Piper disguised her identity, changing her race, sex, and social class in order to experiment in public situations and gauge people’s reactions. She investigated how outwardly visible identity markers (like skin color) impacted others’ perceptions of her character. By manipulating her (apparent) identity to produce reactions, she demonstrated the power and influence of stereotypes (Piper, 1996).
"WILD: Act I" is a film demonstrating the power of creativity in constraint. Using moving choreography performed by Elijah Lancaster and vivid imagery displayed on three walls in a mock cell, Jeremy McQueen gives voice to young Black and Brown men caught in the criminal 'justice' system.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU) is an unaccredited, free collaborative school founded by the eponymous artist collective and presented by Creative Time.
Ghostbikes.org is intended to be a site for the worldwide cycling
community where those lost on dangerous streets can
be remembered by their loved ones, members of their local communities,
and others from around the world. They also hope to inspire more people to
start installing ghost bikes in their communities and to initiate
changes that will make us all safer on the streets.
"Intrabody Wireless Network" is a show of eighteen drawings and collages by Dmitry Borshch, in which he shows the architecture of such networks, their components referred to as nanomachines (biological, physical, chemical sensors, routers, antennas, interface devices), options for communicating (molecular, electromagnetic – in the terahertz band, acoustic, nanomechanical), and this type of network's applications (human, plant, industrial)
One interesting thing about this stunt is that there is no record of it other than the Yippies' wonderful testimony. We believe that it actually happened, but it shows that storytelling is the most important part of any action of this sort.
I went on a graffiti tour that went through NOHO, SOHO and the Lower East Side last weekend. We saw works by street artists - Space Invader and Roa - that were remarkable. Roa had created a commissioned mural of a bird on the side of a building, and the former artist derived his work from the unforgettable arcade game, Space Invader.
Four days before the U.S. presidential election, three Ukrainian activists gathered at a stranded fence in New York City’s East Village to hang an expansive information poster. “19546+ Ukrainian Children Abducted by Russia,” reads its headline in bold. From a black canvas, white letters jump out at the passersby, a haunting reminder of the toll the Russian invasion continues to inflict on Ukrainian families.