Trickery and disguise, usually followed by revealing the truth, are often tactics used by liberal activism, like the Yes Men for example. When used by the right, however, it can have different implications. Pretending to be a CEO or billionaire in order to expose corporate greed and corruption is clearly different then pretending to be a minority. The use of disguise can manipulate and shed light on hierarchies of power.
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.
Joseline de Lima was wandering the dusty alleys of her working-class neighborhood in the capital of Togo one day last year, when a disturbing thought crossed her mind: Who would take care of her two boys if her depression worsened and she were no longer around to look after them?
Hobby Lobby is a chain of arts and crafts stores that has recently come under fire for denying its employees affordable access to contraception. Jasmine Shea redecorated many of the craft supplies in one of their stores to "troll" them by rearranging letters to spell out "pro choice" and "all women deserve birth control"
Yann Marussich is a Swiss performance artist who does avant-garde and shocking work, going further into the relationships of the human body with the environment. His work explores such themes as endurance, vulnerability, and the intersection of physicality with philosophy.
The Uganda National Contemporary Ballet (UNCB) presented a new powerful and moving production advocating for the child soldiers all over the world at the National Theatre in Kampala.
In this solo work, Gómez-Peña tests brand new material dealing with radical citizenship and what he terms “imaginary activism,” combining live art, literature, theory, and pedagogy in a wonderfully strange mix. Not one solo performance is ever the same.
The Prometheus Project is a partnership between the American Repertory Theater and Amnesty International to bring the theater arts to the service of human rights advocacy.
Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls is a non-profit music and mentoring program that empowers girls and women through music education, volunteerism, and activities that foster self-respect, leadership skills, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.
The San Francisco Mine Troupe has been staging radical political theater for over fifty years. In 1967, the Troupe toured campuses across the midwest, performing L'amant Militaire - a satirized adaptation of an old anti-war play, updated to critique US involvement in the Vietnam War.
The New Life Foundation is a Colombian organization located in Bogota, whose aim consists of offering vulnerable women alternatives to quit prostitution and rehabilitate from its surrounding dangers (crime, drug addiction, AIDS, etc.) One of its remarkable projects was based on theater as a method to overcome a past of shame and grief building a more dignant present in which they co-construct with their communities.
Yesterday morning (23 February), Led by Donkeys staged a protest in front of the Russian embassy in London, creating a large-scale public artwork in solidarity with Ukraine. The group poured litres of yellow and blue paint on each side of the carriageway on Bayswater Road. Activists then used brushes to create a Ukrainian flag that would stretch the length of the embassy.
Wafaa Bilal’s brother, Haji, was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who have lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.
In her curatorial project Making Way, Ruth Simbao brought together works that complicated the idea of globalization’s effect on African nations, especially the idea that the new phase would usher in an almost frictionless movement of labor and capital across borders. Works by artists like Athi-Patra Ruga reflected on questions of how bodies moved through settler colonialist spaces.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is joining the countrywide judicial overhaul protests planned for Thursday, March 23, and will darken the halls and galleries of the museum, closing exhibits to the public and canceling planned tours and lectures.
The only exhibit that will be open to the public, for free, is the exhibit of Israeli art from the museum’s collection, “Material Imagination: Center of Gravity,” which has been open for a year.
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
MEXICO CITY — Tens of thousands of women vanished from streets, offices and classrooms across Mexico on Monday, part of a nationwide strike to protest the violence they suffer and to demand government action against it.
The women’s absence from public spaces was intended to be a reminder that every day, 10 women in Mexico are killed — and so disappear forever, organizers said.
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (around 1503-19) was attacked at the Musée du Louvre, in Paris, today by environmental activists who threw soup over the world's most-recognised and most-viewed painting. The celebrated portrait, which has been protected by security glass for the past 70 years, was not damaged in the attack.
On a sidewalk in the Village in downtown Manhattan, an African-American woman leans on her elbows and knees, wearing only black underpants. Scrawled in black marker all over her body are the words "Ain't I a Woman?"
Across the street, another woman lies face down, sunbathing on a large sheet of tinfoil. The sentence "White Supremacy Is Terrorism" is inked across her white skin, which is turning pink under the hot sun.
AMNA NAWAZ: Since anti-government protests erupted in Iran last year, people around the world have taken to social media to show their support.
That includes an Iranian American ballerina who's tapping into her own heritage and her art, in solidarity with those pushing for more rights.
The "NewsHour"'s Julia Griffin reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
"Las sinsombrero" ("without hat") were a group of spanish women formed by the artists Maruja Mallo, Margarita Manso, Concha Méndez and the socialist activist Margarita Nelken.
Bashar al-Assad snores, his head twitching on a large white pillow. Suddenly, he wakes up. “The people want to overthrow me!” he screams, the pompom on his nightcap bouncing.
"Members of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company jumped on stage at the Noël Coward theatre to deliver another surprise anti-BP performance. Just before the second half of a BP-sponsored Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performance of Much Ado About Nothing was due to begin, the three actor-vists performed a short Shakespeare-inspired piece.
An Israeli member of the Taiji Dolphin Action Group, with a red body painting to evoke blood, is curled up on a sheet depicting the Japanese flag, during a January 30, 2014 protest against the killing of dolphins, notably in the Japanese city of Taiji, held outside the building housing the Japanese Embassy, Tel Aviv. Similar rallies outside Japanese consulates and embassies were expected to take place worldwide.