"Make a Wave" is a song sung by Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas for Disney's Friends for Change, a charity group formed by Disney for their "Friends for Change" campaign. The song was written by Scott Krippayne and Jeff Peabody, the same team that penned Jordin Sparks' song "This Is My Now" for American Idol. "Make a Wave" was introduced and performed at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Text by Seth Cohen
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On Friday night, as U.S. television screens burned with images of peaceful protests turning violent, Nike released a new socially conscious ad calling on Americans to do something quite different than the brand’s usual call to “Just Do It.” Instead, one of the nation’s leading athletic apparel companies called on individuals to not turn their back on the painful issue of racism in the United States.
Yesterday, I procrastinated my way to watching the Savage X Fenty Show, and I was left in complete awe of Rihanna. She truly is a powerhouse, but on top of that, all her brands; Fenty Beauty, Savage X Fenty and Fenty have intentionally left no one behind.
Despite frigid temperatures, community members gathered Sunday afternoon outside the Governor’s Mansion in St. Paul to express solidarity with the family of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died three days after being beaten during a January 7 traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee. Authorities released video of Nichols’s arrest and beating Friday evening.
In July and August 2013, O Teatrão, a Coimbra based theatre company, presented the project Arruinados, comprising three theatre performances in three abandoned spaces (‘ruins’), one in each of three cities in the Centre region of Portugal located along the Mondego River:Coimbra, Montemoro Velho, and Figueira da Foz.
The purpose of this project was the permeate stock images with more depictions of Black people. Stock images are usually easily found and utilized, showcasing people doing everyday activities or scenes. To boost representation of Black people in this particular image field, were left out, so the artist chose to recreate popular stock images with Black models to showcase representation and shed light on the lack of diversity in these photos.
Documentarian Clayton Patterson captured video of police brutality during the Tompkins Square Park riots in the summer of 1988. When District Attorney Robert Morgenthau ordered Patterson to hand over his camera and tapes as evidence, Patterson refused, citing distrust of the criminal justice system. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, but after a 10-day hunger strike, his lawyers negotiated a deal to free him.
A woman’s head is bisected by a line that splits her face into positive and negative halves. Over the image, a commanding text, stated in the second person, reads: “Your body is a battleground.”
Text by David Artavia
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An ad from Calvin Klein on Mother's Day featuring a pregnant transgender man and his trans partner has sparked a wave of backlash on social media.
Food delivery riders are taking industrial action in China over low pay and the recent detention of an unofficial labor leader. The strike comes after Xiong Yan, who headed an unofficial union formed by workers for the food delivery app Ele.me and other services, was detained in Beijing last month. His whereabouts are still unknown.
Not far from the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou, approximately 30 kilometers, lies Operndorf Afrika, a village that’s governed by art and a global exchange of culture.
In May 1992, a series of 24 billboards displaying an identical image began appearing throughout New York City. They featured a giant close-up black-and-white photograph, without text, of a rumpled bed, pillows still indented from the heads that had rested there.
Does it vex you, the environmental impact of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch? Do you hear about the transportation of 30 icebergs from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland to be displayed in London as a memento mori for our inhabitable environment and judge the project a bit of an own-goal, sustainability-wise? You would not be alone – on personal evidence, this seems a popular response.
The statistics in regards to older men marrying young girls is mind boggling and disgusting. Every day 33,000 girls are married to older men, denied their rights to education and opportunity and robbed of their childhood.
Many countries around the world find this practice normal, thankfully we do not find it normal here in the United States. More than 91 countries allow girls as young as six-years-old to be married. This is a problem.
For his latest project, Mark Manzi found himself outside of his comfort zone. For the Amsterdam-based photographer and designer, People of Japan was an attempt to break from his photography-first portfolio. “In the past, my work was very image-focused, whereas with this book I wanted to scan objects, collect receipts, record noises, add copy, and really create something visually striking,” he says.
"Ex Google employee Andrew Norman Wilson’s video Workers Leaving the Googleplex investigates the marginalized class of Google Books’ "ScanOps" workers at their international headquarters in Silicon Valley while simultaneously chronicling the complex events surrounding his own dismissal from the company."
Luke Ching Chin Wai is a conceptual artist and labour-artivist in Hong Kong. Since 2013, he has worked undercover in different low-paid jobs in the city, including as a security guard, supermarket cashier worker, and metro cleaner to learn about poor people's working conditions. He then uses these experiences to create art and push for improved labour rights.
'White Walls Say Nothing’ is the first feature-length film of its kind to explore art and activism in the streets of Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires is a complex, chaotic city. It has European style and a Latin American heart. It has oscillated between dictatorship and democracy for over a century, and its citizens have barely known political or economic stability.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
From a Universe of Trash, Recycling Art and Hope
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials,” Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker’s inspiring documentary “Waste Land.”
The video DON’T COVER UP, STEP UP is a public service announcement raising the issue of gender-based violence. In the video, a vlogger teaches her fans how to cover up bruises with makeup after she has been beaten by her husband. There is a twist in the story as the husband enters the scene at the end of the video.
Vacated reverse engineers Google Street View to highlight the changing landscape of various neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. The project finds buildings constructed in the past four years using the NYC Department of City Planning's PLUTO dataset, and it leverages Google Street View's cache to visualize absent lots just before new buildings were constructed.
This month marks ten years since the start of the Syrian Civil War, an ongoing conflict that has cruelly cut the lives of hundreds of thousands short, and irrevocably changed the course of millions more. An estimated 5.6 million have fled the country over the past decade, mostly to the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with many settling in camps they’ve since to come to call their permanent homes.
Angel Azul is an environmental documentary that follows the work of eco-sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor. Jason creates artificial coral reefs from statues he's cast from live models and installed on the ocean floor in an underwater museum off the coast of Cancún. The film explores issues that threaten the world's coral reefs which are suffering unprecedented losses.