‘‘HAMILTON,’’ the new musical biography of Alexander Hamilton created by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, kicks off with a doozy of a question. The houselights rise on Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States and, infamously, the killer of Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Burr steps to center stage and reels off several lines of verse:
On Monday, a grassroots, anti–corporate tax-dodging coalition called Flip the Debt crashed a "Fix the Debt" party at St. Anselm's College in New Hampshire hosted by Honeywell CEO David Cote to tell the gathered deficit hawk disciples that paying their "damn taxes" would be a better solution than crippling the nation with fiscal austerity measures.
For one day, a group of artists known as the INDECLINE Artist Collective turned a hotel room in New York City's Trump International Hotel into a single jail cell for Donald Trump without the hotel's knowledge. The inside the jail cell was a Donald Trump impersonator in a suit and a "Make America Great Again" hat and at his feet were McDonald's food wrappers and live rats.
In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres lost his partner Ross to AIDS (the artist would face the same fate in 1996). In a tragic and highly personal tribute to Ross, Gonzalez-Torres took a picture of his still-indented empty bed - an image of universal intimacy and loss - and placed it on two dozen commercial billboard spaces throughout New York.
"This project took aim at a public relations campaign produced by The Union Square Partnership, a local Business Improvement District (BID) attempting to privatize the north end of NYC’s Union Square park and install a high-end celebrity chef restaurant. They hosted historical walking tours of the park for decision-makers, as a means of getting buy-in for their development initiative.
#SaveNYC is a grassroots, crowd-sourced, DIY movement
to protect and preserve the diversity and uniqueness
of the urban fabric in New York City.
As our vibrant streetscapes and neighborhoods are turned into bland, suburban-style shopping malls, filled with chain stores and glossy luxury retail, #SaveNYC is fighting for small businesses and cultural institutions to remain in place.
Tina Piña, better known as Mother Pigeon (@motherpigeonbrooklyn), is an artist and self-described “high priestess of the pigeon religion,” whose passion for New York City’s often-overlooked bird has helped her carve out a unique creative niche centered around pigeons—as well as a lifestyle geared towards helping New Yorkers appreciate the misunderstood creatures.
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.
Circus Amok is a New York City based circus-theater company whose mission is to provide free public art addressing contemporary issues of social justice to the people of New York City.
Restore the Fourth is a privacy movement started in the summer of 2013, in reaction to Edward Snowden's revealing of the National Security Administration's extensive spying on American and foreign citizens. The movement seeks to uphold the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects American citizens against unfounded search and seizure of their property or identity.
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.
Part telethon, part variety show, and part party, the People’s Bailout Telethon kicked off the Rolling Jubilee, a project by the Occupy-offshoot Strike Debt. The Rolling Jubilee raises funds through grassroots donations, buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it. The project works within the system of the secondary debt market in order to undermine it.
Over the course of a semester, fashion hactivist and fashion social justice scholar, Otto Von Busch, facilitated a course on "Critical Fashion and Social Justice," where graduate fashion students at Parsons design school researched, contextualized and at times critiqued case studies on various examples of "fashion social justice." Case studies included traditional fair trade companies and non profit organizations that have used fashi