Art has the power to move our imaginations and bodies, transforming the emotional and physical spaces we share. It has the power to build and transform social relations and to bring about equity and justice.
The Arte Útil archive presents a growing archive of over two hundred case studies that imagine, create and implement beneficial outcomes by producing tactics that change how we act in society.
Less than a month after Mauricio Macri's inauguration as president of Argentina in December 2015, a manual for micro-resistance was released online to guide resistance against Macri's election and policies. The manual suggests specific actions that people can perform in their everyday lives to build opposition against the new president.
Last August, as protesters marched in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed teen shot by a police officer, another group of activists began thinking about how to incorporate the creative community into the movement. The result is Manifest:Justice, a free pop-up art show taking place in Los Angeles.
Museums and art galleries are not usually the sites of feminist political protest. Yet over the past couple of years, before the lockdown, gallery visitors all over the UK had noticed a small, determined activist whose modus operandi is “Small signs, big questions, fabulous wardrobe”.
Artist Zoran Naskovski continued his project "Mandala and Cross / farewell to arms” with analysis of media representations of social processes in 2015, that resulted with a new installation: “Mandala and Cross / blackness, refugees and economic gamble”.
Rokudenashiko is on a mission to free the vagina. In her native country of Japan, the vaginal slang word “manko” is considered taboo while the penis equivalent, “chinko,” is used freely. Rokudenashiko (the pseudonym of artist Megumi Igarashi) uses her manko art to destigmatize the vagina, using it as the basis for whimsical figurines, iPhone cases, dioramas, and, in her most infamous piece, a kayak.
Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The "post-black" artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture -- and about the meaning of art itself.
A new exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that showcases activism through art and media in the San Francisco Bay Area, gets its name, Take This Hammer, from a 1963 documentary about the author James Baldwin as he went around San Francisco, talking to African-Americans about what it was like for them in the city.
"Los Palcos del Descubridor" (The Discoverer's Box Seats) was a project created by Sebastian Burga and José Aburto in 2012 that consisted of a large-scale installation on the street and a media campaign on the Internet.
The work simulated the upcoming construction of an apartment building that would replace Lima's Teatro Colón, a historical landmark.
HBVA (Honour Based Violence Awareness Network) is an international digital resource centre working to advance understanding of HBV (honour based violence) and forced marriage through research, documentation, information and training for professionals who may encounter women, girls and men at risk of these forms of abuse in order to suggest good practise in responding to their needs.
Two artists have repurposed the presidential candidate’s campaign bus in order to critique his controversial views.
In October 2015, the artists David Gleeson and Mary Mihelic purchased a Donald Trump tour bus on Craigslist.
In the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
Vince Staples mentioned Long Beach's Ramona Park approximately 80 times on his debut album Summertime '06 and even allotted the park two of its own tracks: "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 1" and "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 2." "The sun come down and guns come out, you know Ramona Park."
ODBK is an activist organization that aims to create a more equal, diverse, inclusive, transparent and democratic art world. ODBK seeks to do this by diversify and increase the number of people who understand and engage with contemporary art.
"Oda Projesi is an artist collective based in Istanbul. It is composed of three members; Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel who turned their collaboration into an art project in 2000. The project members had met in 1997 and decided to rent and share an apartment as a private studio in Galata.
Comic artist Huda Fahmy has been breaking down walls with her hilarious comic "Yes, I'm Hot in This."
In her own words, "What started as my therapeutic way of dealing with the Islamophobia and prejudice I encounter on the daily has now turned into this amazing opportunity to tell the story of the American hijabi."
Lu Yang attempts to bring the negative notion of Cancer cell into a “Kimo Kawa” object of love and/or pain and hopes to open a dialogue that brings awareness to the acceptance and tolerance of living with cancer cells.
Often in military style video games we kill without much regard for the enemy. They are faceless or stereotypical, the Nazi or evil Cold War–era Russian. They are enemies that were fought on the battlefields of great wars, or they are aliens that have no resemblance to humans save for a general humanoid form.
Troy, Michigan couldn't afford to keep its library open, so it scheduled a vote for a tax increase. A strong anti-tax group waged a dominating campaign against it. Posing as a political group, an outside advertising agency posted signs around town that said, "Vote to close Troy library Aug 2, book burning party Aug 5." We invited everyone to our Facebook page, adding Twitter, Foursquare, want ads, flyers and more to drive engagement.
A CALL TO ARTISTS:
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has created a new, nationally touring poster exhibit called All of Us or None: Responses and Resistance to Militarism. The exhibit will launch in June and is already scheduled to travel to Chicago, Greensboro, Providence, and San Francisco with many other stops anticipated. We are looking for some additional work to include in this show.
We designed a WaterWaysWalk with interactive activity suggestions linked to both a Website and a hardcopy Zine, either of which could be utilised on the walk to raise awareness about Water Sustainability.
Below is an extract from the website explaining what the focus was: