"This project was launched in the wake of the police shooting of 16-year old Brooklyn resident Kimani Gray. Blue NYPD barricades left in piles around the city were spray-painted with the names of people killed by police, then re-deployed in public space."
From an article in BoredPanda:
"If you’ve ever felt like your voice and opinion doesn’t matter in the vast world, then Seth is here to prove you wrong. This New Yorker runs the ‘Dude With Sign’ Instagram account where he uploads photos of himself protesting the strangest, weirdest, most random things. And the best thing is, we can relate to most of what he’s written on his signs.
In 1932, Bennett Cerf, cofounder of Random House Publishing, acquired the rights to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States, believing that the book would be as successful as it had been throughout Europe. But Cerf had a problem. The book was banned in the United States and would be seized as soon as it came off the printing press, which would lose Cerf millions of dollars.
People with disabilities often suffer a ‘civil death’ due to exclusion primarily related to physical barriers of the built environment. AXS Map is building a social movement around inclusion for people with physical disabilities. AXS Map is a crowd-sourced platform for mapping wheelchair accessibility of buildings and places, and sharing that information across a network.
Beyoncé’s album Renaissance is grounded in black queer ballroom culture. It debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200 and had the third highest album debut of 2022.
Inspired by the Laughing Farmers of Karnataka, protesters in New York make Carlos Slim's visit to New York uncomfortable while he appears on a "Live From NYPL" program. This excellent video summarizes the action.
Just weeks after activists staged an alternative tour of the American Museum of Natural History to call for its removal, among other things, the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was vandalized early Thursday morning.
For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.
Sirens of the Lambs is created by the enigmatic street artist, Banksy. This piece was first spotted on the streets of New York City on October 10, 2013, it went viral on social media and people are posting and reposting about it. Sirens of the Lambs is a truck full of stuffed animals – plush cows, chickens, pigs, lambs, bears – that first appeared in the Meatpacking neighborhood of NYC.
For third world artists who are forced into exile, the creativity process could be greatly challenged due to displacement in language, community and history. Many filmmakers in exile tend to look at their connection to the homeland in strictly political terms, or give up making films overall.
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.
A call for users to post photos with officers and the hashtag #myNYPD is met with images of police brutality after Occupy Wall Street mocks the request.
For artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a "ghost." The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.
We all learn art in school. Every kid loves to draw at some point. People get fascinated with the details of their new camera, or spend free time writing poems. But eventually, there’s a not a teacher telling you how great your are, or the camera gets put away, or you just plain get busy and stop. Years could go by before you start again, if you ever do at all.
"The Uni Project aims to do one thing and do it well: temporarily
transform almost any available urban space into a public reading room
and venue for learning. We start with the conviction that books and
learning should be prominent, accessible, and part of what we expect at
street-level in our cities." (From site.)
Three months ago, when New York government officials ordered nonessential businesses closed to slow the spread of coronavirus, high-end retailers sheathed their stores in plywood barriers, as though readying for civil unrest.
Rage Against the Machine have always been rabble rousers, but the political statement that got them banned from Saturday Night Live sounds positively prosaic compared to other acts of protest they committed in their heyday, like shutting down the New York Stock Exchange or sporting a "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" shirt on live television.
The group of students from NYU took to the streets of Manhattan to shout back against sexual harassment and bring awareness to the Everyday Sexism project. Armed with business cards that said "#shoutingback" on one side, and "Real men don't catcall" on the other side, the group waited for men to yell at the women while they walked down the street.
On April 7, 1973, some 400 cyclists chanting “Bikes don’t pollute” rode through midtown Manhattan in a “Bike-In” that called for separate lanes to encourage bicycling and provide safety on city streets.
At the Eighth Avenue subway station, sewer alligators are not an urban legend.
Anyone who’s been through the 14th St./Eighth Ave. station has probably seen the bronze gator sculpture — and probably wondered what it means and why it’s there.
The underground gators — along with dozens of other whimsical creatures — are part of the permanent art installation housed at the intersection of the A,C,E, and L lines.
Now that the dust has settled from the Met Gala, with all the excitement over Kylie Jenner’s bathroom selfie and Rihanna’s body-swallowing Comme des Garçons florals, it is worth pausing to consider a red carpet moment most people missed: the entrance of Joe Gebbia, co-founder and chief product officer of Airbnb, with Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee and international refugee activist.
“Discovering Columbus,” by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi.
Nishi built a living room around the sculpture in Columbus Circle in New York City. The living room is mounted on scaffolding and turns the sculpture into a domestic center-piece.
On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of China, Tibet activists projected messages of support for human rights and freedom from inside and outside of the Empire State Building, countering China’s public relations stunt to bathe the building in red and yellow light. “NY [Hearts] Human Rights” was projected from inside the ESB onto a nearby building.