The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space. In New York City, enforcement is heavily skewed to ignore illegal commercial advertising, while simultaneously aggressively targeting graffiti and, in some cases, symbols of dissent.
"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:
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.
There are few artists more innocuous, more neutered, more universally loved and reviled than Thomas Kinkade. His soft-focus images present an idyllic vision of America and of Christianity, like Norman Rockwell without the blue-collar populism, where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, and there’s always a warm fire going in the Lincoln-Log cabin just down the trail.
Call it art, exhibited as an installation piece in the October 2014 show "Crossing Brooklyn," a collaboration of more than 100 artworks by 35 artists (or groups) who live or work in Brooklyn, presented at the Brooklyn Museum... or call it "A survey of Art from Brooklyn" as hyperallergic journalist Jillian Steinhauer wrote... it exists on the streets as a social practice, albeit using creative means for community-building.
(NEWS 8) — A day after pulling double-duty as both the host and musical guest on "Saturday Night Live," actor-writer-comedian-musician Donald Glover was garnering attention on Sunday for another reason.
Social media blew up this weekend with reactions to Glover's new music video for "This is America," released under the name of his musical alter ego, Childish Gambino.
Anthony Papa was arrested for a drug crime and with no prior offenses was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for violating New York's harsh drug laws. While in prison, Papa began to document his inner struggles via painting and ultimately earned a pardon from New York governor and has gone on to actively fight the drug war in his years since release.
Eight years after his death, the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition provides high school students from around the country an opportunity to carry on the African-American playwright’s legacy. That legacy includes Pulitzer Prizes for “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” two installments of Wilson’s 10-play series set in his hometown of Pittsburgh that examined 20th-century black life through the personal and political struggles of everyday people.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
Since Christmas Eve, some lights along the streets and in the houses of Bushwick have spelled out a number of messages quite different from the festive wishes one usually finds during the holiday season. “GENTRIFICATION IS THE NEW COLONIALISM,” “NOT 4 SALE,” and “NO EVICTION ZONE,” some read.
Digital art platform Kinfolk has launched its New York City-wide participatory exhibition Signature Series, the initiative’s largest public endeavour to date. The project places newly created augmented reality (AR) monuments by four New York artists—Pamela Council, Derrick Adams, Tourmaline and Hank Willis Thomas—into designated public spaces across the city.
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
The new Oscar-nominated documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, focuses on world-famous photographer Nan Goldin, her life, her work, and the protests she led at museums that accepted funding from the Sackler family. Their company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured and unscrupulously marketed OxyContin. We'll talk with Goldin and director Laura Poitras.
Julia Bluhm told The Huffington Post: “I’ve always just known how Photoshop can have a big effect on girls and their body image and how they feel about themselves”. So on May 2, 2012, 14-year-old Bluhm lead an anti-Photoshop protest in front of the Hearst Tower, which is home to Seventeen Magazine. Other protesters included her mother and members of the SPARK movement (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge).
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
Bernie Sanders supporters know how to bring the party! And they did it big time for the Democratic Debate in New York this week, with help from The Illuminator & the NYC Light Brigade. They installed an interactive video game featuring Bernie jumping over obstacles and WINNING!
I've decided to post about a recent experience, considerable an "action" in its nature, and how it felt, which was comparable to solicitation rather than activism. However, there was a sense for consciousness-raising regardless of any tangible outcome.
Street harassment is one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against. Comments from “You’d look good on me” to groping, flashing and assault are a daily, global reality for women and LGBTQ individuals. But it is rarely reported, and it’s culturally accepted as ‘the price you pay’ for being a woman or for being gay.
Stephanie H. Shih is a Brooklyn-based ceramist who explores Asian American identity through clay interpretations of grocery items. The ceramicist has created life-size painted clay Sriracha bottles, Pocky cartons, soy sauce gallons, and instant ramen as part of a series Shih conceived in 2018 called Oriental Grocery, to explore nostalgic foods of the Chinese American diaspora.
At ‘Arcadia Earth,’ Dazzle Illuminates Danger
Using augmented reality, virtual reality and installations of light and art, the creators of this pop-up exhibition hope to inspire action on climate change.
By Laurel Graeber
Oct. 23, 2019
The creators of “Arcadia Earth” want to awaken your conscience. But they also plan to make that guilt trip extraordinarily fun.
"The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) is a small, informal group of people who are unconditionally opposed to the installation and use of video surveillance cameras in public places.
The Brooklyn Paper
March 26, 2012
BY ELI ROSENBERG
Occupy Wall Street wants to occupy your wall space.
A collective of poster printers in Gowanus is attempting to help reignite the social movement’s flames for a May 1 “General Strike,” with a handful of new pin-ups it hopes will be as arresting as the image of a ballerina atop a bull that kicked off the whole protest in September.
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.
The installation consists on providing postcards to gallery visitors that they can use to mail their Elected Officials to advocate for gun control. The front of the postcard shows the photograph “Mommy, what is this?” (2018), which is the hand of Ileana's son, Lucca, holding a toy bullet while making the peace sign. The back of the postcard contains a short letter with the phrase “No more children should die from gun violence.